Defence member lending.
Defence pay does not read like ordinary income, and most lenders assess it badly. Allowances get shaded or ignored. Posting cycles get treated as instability rather than a normal feature of a career. Entitlement schemes get misunderstood by people who have never worked with them. The result is that two lenders can look at the same member and arrive at borrowing numbers that differ by a margin large enough to change what you can buy. That is the problem we solve. We know which lenders read Defence income properly, and we know how the entitlement schemes sit alongside a loan.
- DHOAS, HPAS & HPSEA
- Defence pay structures
- ADF friendly lenders
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Tell us your scenario and we will come back with real options.
Book a call Model borrowing powerNo cost to you for standard residential lending. We are paid by the lender once your loan settles.
70+ lenders
One application, whole panel
Same week answers
Pre assessment in days
Written comparisons
Numbers, not sales talk
Australia wide
Remote friendly process
The numbers
- Typical loan size
- $400k to $1.1m
- Deposit range
- 5% to 20%
- ADF income types
- Base pay, allowances, entitlements
- Posting flexibility
- Built into structure
- Lender panel
- 70+ lenders
- Our fee to you
- $0
we are paid by the lender on settlement
Figures are indicative guides based on current lender policy across our panel and are not an offer of credit. Your own loan size, rate and structure depend on your income, deposit, credit history and the property.
What we do
Vairo Finance Brokers are accredited brokers with Australian Military Bank, a DHOAS home loan provider. As a current or former ADF member eligible for the Defence Home Ownership Assistance Scheme, you can combine your DHOAS monthly subsidy with disciplined loan structuring to pay down your defence home loan sooner and build long-term equity as well as other government schemes such as HPAS, HPSEA, HGS and the first home owners grant. We help you understand how your subsidy interacts with lender policy, repayment structures and offset accounts so the benefit compounds rather than disappearing into fees or short-term incentives. Whether you are purchasing your first home, investing or refinancing, we make sure your DHOAS entitlement is working as part of a wider plan, not treated as a one-off discount.
How Defence pay gets assessed
This is the part that decides your borrowing capacity, and it is the part that varies most between lenders. Your base salary is straightforward. Everything after that is where lenders diverge. Service allowance, uniform allowance, separation and field allowances, and the various posting related components are all treated differently depending on whose credit policy is reading them. Some lenders take an allowance at full value. Some apply a discount. Some treat it as non recurring and effectively ignore it. There is no universal right answer, which is exactly why the choice of lender matters. Matching your particular pay composition to the lender whose policy reads it most favourably is most of the work, and it is invisible to you if you only ever talk to one bank.
The entitlement schemes
There are three schemes that come up constantly, and they do different jobs. Members regularly access more than one. DHOAS. The Defence Home Ownership Assistance Scheme pays a monthly subsidy toward your home loan for as long as you hold a qualifying loan and meet the scheme conditions. It is ongoing cash flow support rather than help with your deposit, and it comes with a significant catch that most members hear about too late: the subsidy is only payable on a loan with a provider on the approved panel, which is a short list. What DHOAS is and how it actually works. HPAS. The Home Purchase Assistance Scheme is a contribution toward the costs of buying your first home, and the posting location rule catches a lot of people out. HPAS explained for ADF first home buyers. HPSEA. The Home Purchase or Sale Expenses Allowance covers expenses when a posting means you are buying or selling. What HPSEA is and when it applies.
What we do not do
We do not determine your DHOAS eligibility or entitlement, and we will not tell you that you qualify. DHOAS is administered by the Department of Veterans' Affairs. Qualifying service, service credit, your tier and your subsidy certificate are all DVA's to determine. Anyone in the finance industry telling you otherwise is guessing with your money. For anything to do with DHOAS eligibility, go to dhoas.gov.au or call DVA on 1300 434 627. What we do is the loan. Which lender, what structure, how a subsidy fits the rest of your position, and whether the approved panel is the right trade in your particular case. We will run that comparison and show you both numbers.
How the numbers usually look
Most Defence member loans we write sit between $400,000 and $1.1 million, with deposits between five and twenty percent. That is a range, not a rule. It is here so you have a sense of whether we work on scenarios like yours, which we almost certainly do. Worth knowing: there are deposit pathways available to Defence members that reduce or remove lenders mortgage insurance, and they are not always the ones you would expect. If your deposit is the constraint rather than your income, say so early, because that changes the shape of the conversation entirely.
Common questions
Defence member lending questions, answered.
The questions clients ask us most about defence member lending, answered the way a credit assessor reads your file.
All FAQs
