New total loans reach $196.3 billion; risky DTIs remain at 7.3%

Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has released its Quarterly ADI Property Exposure Statistics report for 2025 Q3 (September). The report shows the housing loan books for owner-occupier and investment housing. Agile Market Intelligence has analysed and plotted the publicly available data, and calculated the growth rates to reveal the growth of investment housing credit.

Key stats you need to know

• New loans funded rose to $196.3 billion, seeing an 18.9% year-on-year change.

• Total residential loan shares declined by -1.65 points, now occupying only 61.1%. 

• The share for new investment loans rose by 1.47 points compared to last year.

Total percentage of high-risk DTIs ≥ 6x land at 7.3%

• The average interest rate has been decreasing in the past few quarters, landing at 5.6% as of September 2025.
  
  
• The percentage of high-risk DTIs has been going steady in the past few quarters, while the percentage of DTI loans less than 6x a borrower’s income is slowly increasing. 

APRA defines debt-to-income ratio (DTI) as a borrower’s credit limit across all debts to their gross income. As of September 2025, 7.3% of the total new loans have a DTI ≥ 6x and are considered high risk. Historically, the highest share of DTI ≥ 6x loans was recorded in 2021 Q4, at 27.4% of loans. APRA is implementing a 20% cap on these high exposure loans on the 1st of February next year. By contrast, the percentage of DTIs that fall between 4 and 6 times a borrower’s income is at 49.2%. There is an upward trend of loans falling within this safe zone in the past few quarters, considering that interest rates have also cooled. 

“So long as the percentage of DTI ≥ 6x remains low, lenders won’t have to worry about adhering to APRA’s new DTI loan limit. The new policy states that come February 2026, lenders can only sell 20% max of new mortgages to buyers whose debt is 6 times their income,” commented Michael Johnson, Director at Agile Market Intelligence. 

‍Residential loans occupy 61.1% of new total loans funded in September 2025

• New loans with loan-to-volume (LVR) lending (≥80%) dropped to 30.8%, down 0.25 percentage points year-on-year.

• New loans with debt-to-income (DTI) lending (≥6x) rose to 6.1%, from 5.6% September last year.  

The new loans funded in September 2025 totalled $196.3 billion, an 18.9% year-on-year change from last year. Of this total, 61.1% are shares from owner-occupied loans, while the rest (36.5%) originate from investment loans. Investment loans rose by 1.47 percentage points, while residential loans dropped by 1.65 points on a year-on-year change.

While owner-occupier lending as a share of total lending declined through September, it’s worth noting that changes to the First Home Guarantee scheme implemented in October 2025 may influence future trends, as it allows eligible first-time buyers to purchase with as little as a 5% deposit rather than the typical 20%.

“The updated scheme opens doors for buyers with less savings. Let’s see the impact in the data and whether it could shift back the balance toward owner-occupier lending in the coming months,” said Michael Johnson. 

Source: APRA Quarterly Property Exposures Statistics highlights

About the research

Statistics in this article were drawn by Agile Market Intelligence from APRA’s quarterly ADI property exposure statistics (September 2025). The dataset covers property loans across authorised deposit-taking institutions, and APRA’s highlights calculate year-on-year changes for September 2025. Agile has plotted the loans per DTI together with the going average interest rate to show the proportion of high-risk loans.

Agile Market Intelligence also conducts Broker Pulse, a monthly survey of residential and commercial mortgage lenders. It is a community-driven knowledge base of lender performance that offers transparency to the market by surfacing these collective insights from the broker community. This empowers brokers to make informed decisions and enables lenders to benchmark and improve performance.

Participating brokers receive access to a bird’s-eye view of the lender benchmarking data each month. To sign up or for more information visit www.brokerpulse.com.au.