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Kooky
Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.
About Kooky and Shaka →The average new home loan taken out by a Queensland owner-occupier reached $751,000 in June 2026, according to the Lending Indicators release published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Friday 14 August. It is the highest figure the series has recorded for the state, $10,000 above the March reading and $88,000 above June 2025. The national average moved the other way over the quarter, slipping to $731,000.
The comparison site Canstar, which published its reading of the release on Monday 17 August, counts Queensland among four jurisdictions where the average owner-occupier loan set a record. In the two largest states the average fell. The result is that a Queenslander buying a home to live in now borrows $20,000 more than the average Australian, and $87,000 more than the average Victorian.
ABS Lending Indicators, June quarter 2026, released 14 August 2026; annual change as calculated by Canstar, 17 August 2026.
Where Queensland sits among the states
Only New South Wales has a larger average owner-occupier loan than Queensland. Western Australia, where the average rose by $100,000 in a year, is closing in from below. The table sets out the eight jurisdictions as Canstar drew them from the ABS release.
| State or territory | Average loan | Change on March | Change on June 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | $842,000 | -$19,000 | +$27,000 |
| Queensland | $751,000 | +$10,000 | +$88,000 |
| Western Australia | $720,000 | +$17,000 | +$100,000 |
| South Australia | $672,000 | +$7,000 | +$74,000 |
| Australian Capital Territory | $666,000 | -$1,000 | +$31,000 |
| Victoria | $664,000 | -$11,000 | +$25,000 |
| Northern Territory | $545,000 | +$7,000 | +$61,000 |
| Tasmania | $516,000 | -$5,000 | +$33,000 |
ABS Lending Indicators, June quarter 2026, as tabulated by Canstar on 17 August 2026. Australia: $731,000, down $4,000 on March and up $53,000 on June 2025.
The pattern in the last column is the one to notice. The three states where prices rose fastest over the past few years, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia, each added $74,000 or more to the average loan in twelve months. New South Wales and Victoria added less than a third of Queensland's increase. The ABS series begins in its current form with a national average of $409,000 in June 2016; ten years later the national figure is $731,000 and Queensland has moved from below the national average to well above it.
Related readRefinancing a home loan: the steps, the costs and the lender's checksWhat an average loan does and does not say
An average loan is not a price and it is not what a typical household owes. It is the total value of new loans committed in the period divided by their number, and three things move it.
The first is the price of the homes being bought. Queensland's median house price rose strongly through 2025 and into this year, and a dearer home needs a larger loan.
The second is the deposit. The Australian Government's 5% Deposit Scheme was widened on 1 October 2025, and a buyer who puts down 5 per cent borrows far more against the same home than one who puts down 20 per cent. More low-deposit buyers lift the average without any change in prices.
The third is who is still buying. When rates rise, the borrowers who drop out first are those at the limit of what a lender will approve. If the buyers who remain have higher incomes and are purchasing dearer homes, the average loan rises even as the number of loans falls. That is a plausible reading of a quarter in which the Queensland average rose while Cotality's index showed Brisbane home values beginning to slip by July.
The ABS release does not say which of the three did most of the work, and the honest position is that all of them contributed.
Fewer loans, larger loans
Across Australia the number of new owner-occupier loan commitments fell 3.3 per cent in the June quarter to 81,626, and their value fell 1.9 per cent to $60.5 billion. Against the same quarter of 2025 the number was 1.6 per cent lower while the value was 6.0 per cent higher, which is the national version of the Queensland story: fewer borrowers, each borrowing more.
Related readJune minutes: mortgage payments are up, but lighter than last timeMish Tan, the head of finance statistics at the ABS, said in the release that lending fell across all borrower types in the quarter and returned to levels similar to a year earlier. Investors led the fall, with the number of investor loans down 8.6 per cent nationally and 10.1 per cent in Queensland. First home buyers held up better: Canstar's table shows 5,646 first home buyer loans in Queensland, about 1 per cent fewer than in the March quarter, against a national fall of about 3 per cent.
Canstar's data insights director, Sally Tindall, summed up the quarter as a market that had hit the brakes, pointing to a $5.4 billion drop in the value of new lending to $97.6 billion.
The quarter covers April, May and June. In those three months the Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate for the third time in 2026 and the Federal Budget announced changes to the tax treatment of investment property, so the figures are the first official measure of borrowing on the other side of both.
Refinancing eased, mostly inside the same bank
The release also counts loans that were refinanced, and it separates two kinds. An external refinance moves the loan to a different lender. An internal refinance stays with the same lender on new terms, which is what happens when a borrower asks for a better rate and is moved to a different product, or restructures the loan.
In the June quarter owner-occupiers completed 66,449 external refinances worth $41.9 billion, 0.9 per cent fewer than in the March quarter. Internal refinances fell much more sharply, by 7.4 per cent to 43,848, worth $24.8 billion. Added together, that is 110,297 owner-occupier loans refinanced in three months, six in ten of them by switching lender.
Related readSuncorp Bank tells 1.2 million customers their banking moves to ANZABS Lending Indicators, June quarter 2026. External refinancing fell 0.9% on the March quarter; internal refinancing fell 7.4%.
The ABS does not publish refinancing by state in its summary tables, so there is no Queensland count. The national figures still say something about how borrowers behaved as rates rose. Switching lender held almost steady. Renegotiating with the existing lender, which had been running hot, dropped back. One explanation is that many borrowers had already asked for a better rate earlier in the year, after the first increases, and had less to gain from asking again.
For a Queensland household the arithmetic of switching has grown with the loan. On a debt of $751,000, each quarter of a percentage point in the interest rate is worth roughly $1,900 a year in interest at the start of the loan, so the gap between a competitive rate and an uncompetitive one is a larger sum than it was when the average loan was $663,000.
Why the figure matters to borrowers and lenders
For a buyer, the average is a marker of what the market now takes for granted. A household that needs $751,000 from a lender must show income and spending that support repayments on that amount at current rates, with a margin on top that lenders are required to test for. In a year of rising rates the amount a given income can borrow has fallen, which is one reason the number of loans is down.
The size of that margin is set by the banking regulator. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority confirmed in May that banks must keep testing new loans at 3 percentage points above the rate on offer. As an illustration, a 30-year principal-and-interest loan of $751,000 at 6 per cent costs $4,503 a month, and the same loan tested at 9 per cent costs $6,043 a month, $1,540 more. The borrower is never charged the higher figure, but must show an income that could carry it.
For lenders, larger loans against falling prices change the risk. A loan written at the peak with a small deposit leaves little equity if values drift lower. The banks' own reports this month describe arrears that are rising from a low base and a large majority of customers ahead on their repayments, so the concern is about a minority of recent, highly geared borrowers, not about the book as a whole.
For those who already own, the figure is mostly a reminder of scale. Queensland borrowers who took loans two or three years ago did so when the state average was far lower, and their repayments have been driven by the cash rate, not by this number.
The September quarter comes next
The ABS has scheduled the September quarter release of Lending Indicators for 11 November 2026. It will cover July, August and September, the first full quarter after the Budget, and will show whether Queensland's average loan kept rising once Brisbane values began to fall.
Before then, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority is due to publish its June quarter statistics on banks' property lending in September, which add what the ABS does not measure: how many of the loans behind these averages were written with small deposits, and how many existing loans have fallen behind.
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.
