In this article
Kooky
Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.
About Kooky and Shaka →Investors accounted for 35.6 per cent of the new home loans funded by Australian banks in the June quarter, according to the quarterly statistics on authorised deposit-taking institutions that the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority released on 17 September 2026. A year earlier the share was 34.1 per cent, as reported by the trade publication The Adviser from the same data.
The rise looks odd beside the other official figure for the same three months. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported in August that the number of new investor loan commitments fell 8.6 per cent nationally in the June quarter, and 10.1 per cent in Queensland. Both can be true, and the gap between them says something useful about how to read investor lending in a year when the tax rules and the cash rate both moved.
APRA quarterly authorised deposit-taking institution statistics, June quarter 2026, released 17 September 2026. National figures for banks, credit unions and building societies.
What APRA published
APRA supervises the banks, credit unions and building societies that take deposits, known collectively as authorised deposit-taking institutions. Each quarter it publishes what they report about their property lending. The June quarter edition shows residential mortgage credit outstanding of $2,558.5 billion, 7.0 per cent more than a year earlier.
Within that total, loans to investors made up 31.2 per cent and loans to owner-occupiers 66.7 per cent. The Adviser's report puts the investor share a year earlier at 30.5 per cent. The stock of loans changes slowly, because it includes every mortgage written over the past three decades that has not yet been repaid, so a move of 0.7 of a percentage point in a year is a sign of sustained investor borrowing over the period.
Related readForeign buyers and non-resident landlords: what federal figures showThe flow of new lending is the more sensitive measure. Institutions funded $200.5 billion of new residential loans in the quarter, 6.8 per cent more than in the same quarter of 2025. Owner-occupiers took 61.9 per cent of that, down from 63.6 per cent a year earlier, and investors 35.6 per cent.
| Measure | Investors | Owner-occupiers |
|---|---|---|
| New loans funded in the quarter | 35.6% | 61.9% |
| Same measure a year earlier | 34.1% | 63.6% |
| All loans outstanding | 31.2% | 66.7% |
APRA, June quarter 2026; year-earlier shares as reported by The Adviser from the same publication. The shares do not add to 100 per cent because a small remainder falls outside the two groups.
Why the share rose while loan numbers fell
Three differences between the two sources explain most of the apparent conflict.
The first is the comparison period. The ABS headline compares the June quarter with the March quarter, three months earlier. The APRA shares quoted above compare the June quarter with the same quarter of 2025. On the ABS's own annual comparison, the number of investor loans in the June quarter was still 2.8 per cent higher than a year before, and their value 8.1 per cent higher, while the number of owner-occupier loans was 1.6 per cent lower. Measured over a year, investors did gain ground on owner-occupiers. Measured over a quarter, they lost it.
The second is what is counted. The ABS records a loan when the lender commits to it, and it leaves out refinancing. APRA records loans when its institutions fund them, on its own reporting definitions. The dollar totals are different in scale, $97.6 billion of commitments on the ABS measure against $200.5 billion funded on APRA's, and the two series are not built to be compared dollar for dollar.
The third is timing. A commitment comes before settlement, and funding happens at settlement. Loans that investors committed to in the strong March quarter, when the ABS recorded annual growth of 19.4 per cent in investor loan numbers, were still being funded in April, May and June. The APRA figure for the June quarter therefore carries some of the momentum from before the Federal Budget of 12 May.
Related readForeign buyers of Queensland homes: approval, duty and land tax surchargeRead together, the two releases suggest that investors entered the June quarter at a high share of lending and left it in retreat. The Adviser's summary of the APRA data made the same point from the other direction, describing an investor pipeline that was cooling as the stock of investor credit kept rising.
Interest-only loans and other signs of loan quality
APRA's figures also show how the loans were structured. Interest-only loans, on which the borrower pays no principal for a set period, made up 23.5 per cent of new lending in the quarter. Investors are the main users of interest-only terms, because the interest on an investment loan is a deductible expense and the principal is not.
Loans approved outside a lender's normal serviceability policy, known as serviceability exceptions, accounted for 5.8 per cent of new lending. Loans with a loan-to-valuation ratio of 80 per cent or more, meaning a deposit of 20 per cent or less, made up 16.7 per cent of all residential credit outstanding.
Against those indicators, the measures of distress improved slightly. Non-performing loans were 1.01 per cent of residential credit, down from 1.04 per cent a year earlier, and loans between 30 and 89 days overdue were 0.54 per cent. The institutions' total capital ratio stood at 20.5 per cent. The picture is of a banking system lending more to investors, on somewhat looser terms at the margin, without a rise in the share of borrowers falling behind.
APRA's figures cover banks, not every lender
The statistics are reported by authorised deposit-taking institutions. Loans written by non-bank lenders are outside them, and so are outside the investor shares quoted here. APRA does not publish these figures by state.
The limit already applying to highly indebted borrowers
The June quarter was the first full quarter in which a new prudential limit applied to all of it. Since 1 February 2026, APRA has capped the share of new mortgages a bank may write to borrowers whose total debt is six times their income or more at 20 per cent of its new lending, as reported by the trade publication Australian Broker in March.
Related readGross and net rental yield: how Queensland investors measure a returnThe limit is set at the level of the bank, not the borrower, so no individual application is refused by APRA. In practice, the same report said, some banks were restricting high debt-to-income lending well before they approached the cap. It quoted a mortgage broker, Alex Veljancevski of Eventus Financial, describing investors who passed a bank's own serviceability test and still could not proceed because their debt exceeded six or seven times their income.
Investors with several properties are the borrowers most exposed to a debt-to-income limit, since each additional loan adds to the debt side without adding much to the income side until rents are counted. The report noted that non-bank lenders are not covered by the cap, which is one reason the APRA shares, limited as they are to deposit-taking institutions, may understate total investor borrowing.
What it means for investors in Queensland
APRA does not break its figures down by state, so the Queensland reading has to be assembled from other sources published before this release. The ABS put the fall in the number of new investor loans in the state at 10.1 per cent for the June quarter, with the average new investor loan at $713,000 in June. An industry survey released on 11 September by the Property Investment Professionals of Australia found that 37.1 per cent of investors who had sold a property in the past year had sold in Queensland, more than in any other state.
Set beside those figures, the national APRA share describes the market Queensland investors were borrowing in. Three features stand out for someone applying for an investment loan in the state.
Related readInvestors now account for more than 40% of Brisbane home lendingLenders remain willing to write investor loans: more than a third of new bank home lending went to investors in the quarter. The terms are being watched: interest-only lending at 23.5 per cent of new loans and exceptions at 5.8 per cent are the kind of indicators a prudential regulator follows when deciding whether further limits are needed, although APRA announced no new measure with this release. And the debt-to-income cap bites hardest on investors building a portfolio in a state where the average investor loan has reached $713,000, because a borrower reaches six times income sooner as loan sizes rise.
None of this is a guide to any one application. Each lender sets its own policy inside APRA's limits, and those policies have changed several times since the Budget.
A release that now comes without commentary
One change is to the publication itself. APRA says that, starting with this quarter, the highlights for its quarterly statistics consist of charts and summary tables without written commentary or insights, to bring the banking release into line with its publications for other regulated industries.
For readers, that means the regulator no longer offers its own interpretation alongside the numbers. The figures in this article are taken from the tables and from APRA's media release of 17 September; the comparisons with the ABS data are this magazine's, not the regulator's.
The next releases
APRA will publish the September quarter edition in December 2026. Before then, the ABS is due to release its September quarter Lending Indicators on 11 November, which will show whether the fall in new investor commitments in Queensland continued through July, August and September.
By the September quarter, most loans being funded will have been committed after the Budget, so the two series should move closer together. If investor commitments kept falling, the investor share of bank lending in the next APRA release would be expected to turn down as well; if they steadied, the share may hold near its June level. Which of those happens is a matter for the data.
Kooky, from Shaka
Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.
