Update, 29 September 2026: The RBA has now raised the cash rate by 0.25 points to 4.60%. Read what the rate rise means for your home loan.
The Reserve Bank hands down its next cash rate decision at 2.30pm on Tuesday 29 September, and several major lenders have already moved their fixed rates up without waiting for it. If you’re on a variable loan, nothing changes for you until a lender passes a decision through. If you were thinking about fixing, some of that window has already narrowed.
Here’s what actually happened this month, what a quarter-point rise would do to a typical repayment, and the handful of things worth checking on your own loan before the decision lands.
What’s actually happening
The cash rate is 4.35 per cent. It got there through three rises earlier this year — the most recent in May — and the Board then left it alone in June and August.
On 18 September, RBA Governor Michele Bullock told a parliamentary committee that the Board has “increased the cash rate by 75 basis points this year”, that over the past year “both headline and underlying measures of inflation were around or a little above 3½ per cent”, and that the Board would “discuss our assessment of the flow of data and how the risks are unfolding” at its next meeting (RBA, 18 September 2026).
Markets read that as a signal. As at 18 September, financial markets were pricing a rise as the most likely outcome on 29 September, with LSEG data putting it at around 95 per cent (ABC News). Market pricing moves daily and has been wrong before, so treat it as a temperature reading rather than a result.
What’s less ambiguous is what lenders did. In the week to 15 September, five lenders raised 115 fixed rates by an average of 0.27 percentage points, while two lenders trimmed ten variable rates by an average of 0.05 (Canstar’s weekly rate wrap, via MPA). Several of the major banks were among those repricing fixed products that week. Lenders don’t need to wait for the RBA to reprice fixed loans — fixed rates are priced off funding markets, which have already adjusted to what they expect. That gap between fixed and variable pricing is the practical thing to understand right now, and we’ll come back to it.
What a 0.25 point rise would actually add to your repayments
On a $600,000 loan with 25 years left to run, a 0.25 percentage point increase adds roughly $95 a month — about $1,140 a year. On $800,000 over the same term it’s around $126 a month.
Those figures hold up across the range of rates most owner-occupiers are currently paying — the dollar change barely shifts with the starting rate, because a quarter point on your balance is a quarter point on your balance. Principal and interest, no offset, no extra repayments. Your actual number depends on your balance, your term and how your lender applies the change, so treat this as an estimate and not a quote.
The more useful figure is the cumulative one. The 75 basis points already delivered this year adds roughly $280 a month to that same $600,000 loan — about $3,300 a year — if your lender passed each rise through in full. That has already happened. A lot of people are budgeting against a change that landed months ago and hasn’t been properly absorbed yet.
You can run your own numbers through our calculators rather than relying on ours.
Why fixed rates moved first, and what that means if you were thinking of fixing
Fixing a loan is not a bet you win by being early. It’s a trade: you give up the chance of a lower repayment if rates fall, in exchange for knowing what the repayment is either way.
The thing that’s changed this month is the price of that certainty. When lenders reprice fixed rates upward ahead of a decision, the premium you pay for locking in goes up. That doesn’t make fixing wrong — for a household that genuinely cannot absorb another increase, a known repayment can be worth paying for. It does mean the arithmetic is different from what it was in August.
Two things are worth knowing before you fix anything:
- Fixed loans usually come with restrictions. Extra repayments are often capped, offset accounts may not be available or may work differently, and breaking a fixed term early can carry a break cost that runs into thousands. Our refinance guide works through the trade-offs.
- Splitting is not all-or-nothing. Some borrowers fix part of the loan and leave the rest variable, which keeps some certainty and some flexibility. Whether that suits you depends on your buffer and how much of the balance you’re actually trying to protect.
We won’t tell you whether to fix. That depends on your income, your buffer, and how much a wrong guess would actually hurt — which is a conversation, not a rule.
The lending data says borrowers have already pulled back
Australian mortgage demand fell 14.1 per cent year-on-year in August, a fifth consecutive monthly decline, according to Equifax’s Consumer Market Pulse. In New South Wales the fall was steeper at 15.9 per cent. First home buyer demand dropped 20.1 per cent nationally and 22 per cent in NSW — the sharpest annual decline since 2022 (The Adviser, 16 September 2026).
Refinancing tells a different story. Switching to a different lender was almost flat year-on-year, down just 0.8 per cent, recovering from an 8.4 per cent fall in July. Refinancing with your existing lender fell 23 per cent nationally — and 28.3 per cent in NSW, the sharpest fall of any state.
That second number is the interesting one for anyone in Sydney’s south west. It suggests NSW borrowers, more than anywhere else in the country, have stopped going back to their current lender to ask for a better deal. Some of that is people switching instead. Some of it is people doing nothing at all.
Meanwhile, Roy Morgan estimated that 32.5 per cent of owner-occupier mortgage holders — about 1,786,000 people — were ‘At Risk’ of mortgage stress in July 2026, the highest reading in 18 years (Roy Morgan, 1 September 2026). That measure is based on repayments as a share of household income, so it captures pressure rather than default.
The change most refinancers still don’t know about
Here’s the most useful thing in this month’s data, and it has nothing to do with the RBA.
When you apply to refinance, lenders are expected to test whether you could still afford the loan if rates rose by three percentage points above the rate you’d actually pay. That’s APRA’s serviceability buffer. It’s why people who could comfortably afford their current repayments get knocked back when they try to move — the phenomenon usually called being stuck in “mortgage prison”.
Lenders can write loans outside that standard test, as exceptions, provided the borrower clears a list of other checks. In the June 2026 quarter they wrote $11.6 billion of them — 5.8 per cent of all new lending, the highest share on record, and up 24 per cent on the previous quarter (Canstar analysis of APRA data, 17 September 2026).
This matters if you’ve been declined before, or assumed you’d be declined and never applied. Policy on exceptions differs sharply between lenders, which is exactly the kind of difference comparing lenders across a panel is for. It isn’t a guarantee of anything — most applications still go through the standard test, and an exception has to be justified. But “I was knocked back in 2024” is no longer a good reason to assume the answer today is the same.
The same APRA data showed mortgages 90 or more days in arrears sitting at 1.01 per cent of all mortgages, above the post-2019 average of 0.93 per cent, and a record quarterly drop of $8.6 billion in offset account balances. Offsets remain near record highs overall, but households are drawing on them — which is worth knowing if yours is doing less work than it used to. We wrote about offset accounts not performing as advertised after ASIC’s findings earlier this year.
Five things worth checking before 29 September
None of these require you to make a decision this week.
- What rate are you actually paying? Not what you were offered when you took the loan out. Log in and find the current number. Existing borrowers often sit above what their own lender advertises to new customers, and the only way to find out is to look.
- What would another 0.25 points do to your monthly budget? Use the figures above as a rough guide, or run your balance through a calculator. Knowing the number is better than bracing for it.
- Is your offset doing anything? If the balance has drifted down, the interest saving has drifted down with it.
- When does your fixed term end, if you have one? Rolling off a fixed rate onto a lender’s revert rate is one of the more expensive things that can happen passively.
- Have your circumstances changed since you last applied? A higher income, a cleared credit card or a lower loan-to-value ratio can all change what’s available to you — including whether a lender will look at you at all.
If you’re weighing up a switch, our refinancing page and our refinance guide work through the costs — break fees, discharge, application, LMI — and when refinancing genuinely isn’t worth it.
If you’re in Bankstown or south west Sydney
We’re a mortgage broker in Bankstown, at Suite 9, 39 Stanley Street, and we work with homeowners across Bankstown, Yagoona, Greenacre, Punchbowl, Chester Hill, Padstow, Panania, Revesby, Georges Hall, Condell Park, Villawood and Milperra — as well as clients across Sydney and the rest of Australia by phone and online.
The NSW refinancing numbers above are the reason this is worth a conversation locally. When same-lender refinancing falls further in NSW than anywhere else in the country, it usually means fewer people are asking their bank the obvious question. Asking it costs nothing, and the answer occasionally surprises people.
We compare across a panel of more than 30 Australian lenders, which matters more in a repricing week than a quiet one, because lenders move at different speeds and in different directions. We’ll also tell you when the numbers don’t stack up and the sensible thing is to stay where you are.
Common questions
Will my repayments go up on 29 September?
Not that day. If the RBA raises the cash rate, individual lenders decide whether and when to pass it on to variable rate customers, and they usually announce a date a few weeks out. Fixed rate borrowers are unaffected until their fixed term ends.
Should I rush to refinance before the decision?
A refinance lodged now will almost certainly settle after 29 September, so it isn’t a way to get ahead of the decision. It may still be worth doing on its own merits — that depends on your rate, your balance and the switching costs, not on the calendar.
Does it cost anything to talk to a broker?
In most cases, no. For most home loans you won’t pay us a fee; we’re paid by the lender. Any fee is disclosed in writing first (see our Credit Guide). We’ll always be upfront if a situation involves any fee.
I was declined for a refinance before. Is it worth trying again?
Possibly. Lender policy on serviceability exceptions has loosened considerably — such loans hit a record 5.8 per cent of new lending in the June 2026 quarter — and policy varies a lot between lenders. A previous decline from one lender says little about what another would do today.
Talk to a broker about your loan before the decision lands. No-obligation initial chat — get in touch and a broker will usually call you back within one business day, or call 02 8708 7240. For most home loans you won’t pay us a fee; we’re paid by the lender. Any fee is disclosed in writing first (see our Credit Guide).
Click Financial Services is a trading name of A & M Group Pty Ltd. Australian Credit Licence 390820 · MFAA member 320936 · AFCA member 25029. This article is general information about credit and our credit assistance services, current as at 20 September 2026. It is not personal financial advice and does not take your objectives or circumstances into account. Repayment figures are estimates only.
