The 80% line: what Australian lenders charge above it

Australian lenders price the same home loan in bands, by how much you owe against what the property is worth. Crossing below 80% is worth a median of 0.30 percentage points — about $1,500 a year on a $500,000 loan.

Your loan-to-value ratio falls on its own: you pay the balance down, and the property may be worth more than when you bought. The rate does not follow. Nothing on a statement changes, because nothing about the loan changed — the borrower simply stays on the band they started in.

What that means in practice: if you owe less than 80% of what your place is worth today, it is worth asking your existing lender what they charge for your current band. It is a request on the loan you already have, not an application. They can say no.

The number, and where it sits

Across 279 mainstream product lines from 55 brands, the median gap between a lender's above-80% band and its cheapest band is 0.40pp. But that full gap needs an LVR fall of roughly twenty points, because "cheapest band" means 60% or lower for 54% of them.

Almost three quarters of the money is at the 80% line. For the 258 products that also publish an 80% band, moving from above 80% down to it is worth a median 0.30pp, while the further move down to 70% or below adds only 0.10pp. The median product gives up 72% of the total at that single threshold.

Gap between the bands	Product lines
under 0.25 pp	53
0.25 – 0.49 pp	115
0.50 – 0.74 pp	68
0.75 – 0.99 pp	18
1.00 or more pp	25

Widest gaps	Lender	Product	Purpose
2.12pp	Gateway Bank	Low Rate Essentials Int Only	owner-occupied
1.29pp	Maitland Mutual Limited	Budget Home Loan	owner-occupied
1.25pp	Pepper Money	Prime Home Loan - Prime Full Doc	investment
1.25pp	Aussie Activate	Prime Home Loan - Prime Full Doc	investment
1.25pp	Mortgage Choice Ignite	Prime Home Loan - Ignite Prime Full Doc	investment
1.12pp	Gateway Bank	Premium Package I/O	owner-occupied
1.10pp	Mortgage Ezy	Propel Lo Doc	investment
1.00pp	Pepper Money	Prime Construction Loan - Prime Full Doc	investment

Several of these are one rate card under different names — Pepper Money, Aussie Activate and Mortgage Choice Ignite publish identical rows. Across the whole sample 56% of measured lines share a rate signature with another brand, which is why brand counts are not lender counts.

Method

Source: Consumer Data Right Product Reference Data, published openly by every Australian ADI under a legislated obligation. No accreditation, no scraping, no commercial relationship. Computed from today's capture, so the figures move as lenders reprice.

Variable rate lines only. A fixed rate's comparison rate embeds a reversion assumption rather than a fee, which makes it a different measurement.

Grouped by lender, product, loan purpose and repayment type, so only the LVR band differs within any comparison.

For each group: the cheapest rate published for a band above 80% LVR, against the cheapest published at or below 70%. Groups where both exist are kept.

Specialist and non-conforming products excluded by name and reported separately: 151 product lines, median 1.00pp. For those lenders LVR prices credit risk rather than tenure, and including them roughly doubles the headline.

Median reported. It is robust: brand-weighted, product-weighted, adjacent-band and loan-amount-matched variants all return the same figure.

What this is not

Not a saving anyone is owed. This is the advertised price of LVR risk on a rate card. Whether a particular borrower obtains it depends on a valuation and the lender's discretion, neither of which appears in this data.

Not comparable to the published "loyalty tax". The Reserve Bank reports a spread between average new and average outstanding variable rates, narrowed to a few basis points by late 2025. That is a balance-weighted average of rates actually paid across two portfolios; this is an advertised price difference facing one borrower, conditional on being in the higher band. Dividing one by the other would be meaningless, and this page does not.

Not invisible to that measure either. A borrower held on a stale band pays more than an equivalent new borrower, and that rate already sits inside the outstanding average. What the spread cannot do is attribute the effect, since neither side is adjusted for LVR.

Not universal. At most lenders the borrower has to ask. That is policy, not a rule — Athena markets its AcceleRATES feature as cutting the rate automatically each time a customer's LVR crosses a band. Lender repricing policy has not been audited here.

Not the whole market. Only 430 variable product lines publish enough bands on both sides of the boundary to be measurable. Products that do not band are excluded rather than counted as zero.

Products advertising two rates in one band are excluded. The gap compares the cheapest rate above 80% with the cheapest at or below 70%, which assumes both belong to the same advertised line. Where a product runs several lines they need not: Westpac's Flexi First published 6.39% and 7.24% in one investment band — an introductory rate and the ongoing rate — against a single 7.64% above 80%, and taking the cheapest of each turned a step of roughly 0.40pp into 1.25pp. Those products are dropped. It costs 76 of 357 product lines and does not move the medians reported here at all, but it removes three inflated rows from the table above.

Not 55 independent lenders. 242 of 430 measured lines (56%) share an identical rate signature with another brand — white-label lenders republish one rate card under several names.

New-business pricing. The Consumer Data Right covers products currently offered to new customers. Retention and discretionary pricing is published nowhere.

A revaluation can go against you. If the property is worth less than expected the LVR is higher, not lower, and nothing here applies.

Independent replication is welcome; the method above is the whole of it.

This is not financial advice or credit assistance, and is not a recommendation to take, keep or change any loan. No commission is received from any lender.