VIC Government Home Loan Schemes & Grants

Accessing Government Grants & Guarantee Schemes in Victoria

Several government home loan schemes and grants help eligible Victorians buy a home with a 2–5% deposit or $10,000 grant as Melbourne’s median house price approaches $1 million. Options include Government guarantee schemes that eliminate Lenders Mortgage Insurance and state incentives like Victoria’s First Home Owner Grant, accessible through approved lenders for first home buyers.

Book a free consultation

Overview of Victorian & Federal Government Home Loan Schemes

First Home Guarantee

This Australian Government 5% Deposit Scheme allows buyers to purchase their first home with just a 5% deposit, a quarter of the usual 20%, while avoiding Lenders Mortgage Insurance (LMI) entirely. It’s designed to help first-time buyers enter Melbourne and Victorian markets sooner and at a lower overall cost.

Regional Victoria Price Caps Under the First Home Guarantee

As of October 2025, the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee was folded into the First Home Guarantee; regional buyers now use the same 5% deposit, no-LMI pathway as everyone else, just against a different price cap (see eligibility below for the exact figures).

Help to Buy: A Different Kind of Support

Help to Buy is a shared equity scheme where the government contributes up to 30% for established homes or 40% for new builds. This reduces your total loan amount and ongoing repayments, subject to specific income caps.

Family Home Guarantee

The Family Home Guarantee lets eligible single parents or legal guardians buy with as little as a 2% deposit and no Lenders Mortgage Insurance – whether that’s an existing home, an off-the-plan purchase, land, or a house and land package.

What First Home Owner Grants Can I Access?

All Australian states – including Victoria – offer first home loan grants and most pair them with their own duty concessions on top. Unlike the federal government home loan schemes, which reduce your deposit and remove Lenders Mortgage Insurance, this support works differently: it directly cuts what you pay, through a cash grant or reduced duty instead of changing how your loan itself is structured.

This grant provides a one-off payment of $10,000 to eligible first-home buyers who buy or build a new residential property. Victoria’s version of the grant sits alongside separate State Revenue Office support, including stamp duty concessions for first home buyers, so the grant is rarely the only support available on a given purchase.

Victoria charges no land transfer duty at all on a first home purchase up to $600,000. Between $600,001 and $750,000, a sliding concession reduces what’s owed without eliminating it completely.

Above $750,000, standard duty applies with no first-home-specific relief. A separate concession currently applies to eligible off-the-plan apartments, units and townhouses too, so check your specific contract terms before assuming the standard scale is what you’ll pay.

What is Our Government Scheme & Grant Application Process?

Step 1: Understanding Your Goals and What You Qualify For

We start with a clear picture of where you’re at financially and what you’re hoping to buy, then work through which federal guarantee schemes and Victorian grants you’re actually eligible for.

Step 2: Lining You Up With the Right Scheme, Grant and Lender

Not every lender processes every scheme, and the eligibility rules don’t leave much room for guesswork. We match you with a lender who’s approved for what you qualify for, so nothing you’re entitled to gets missed along the way.

Step 3: Setting Out Your Options Clearly

With eligible lenders identified, we lay out exactly what’s on the table, rate, features, and how each one treats your particular scheme or grant, so that you can choose from a clear comparison.

Step 4: Managing the Paperwork Through to Settlement

We handle your pre-approval, formal approval, and any scheme or grant paperwork on your behalf, keeping everything moving and lodged correctly, right through until settlement.

Meet Our Excellent Team

There’s real money on the table with the right grant or scheme, but the eligibility rules can be a maze. Our Melbourne team helps you work out what you qualify for and how to claim it.

Meet Our Team

How We Simplify Government Grants & Scheme Approval in Victoria

Working with Mortgage Broker Melbourne puts a handful of advantages on your side as you move through the property market:

– Every recommendation we make is built around what suits you, never what’s easiest for a bank to sell.

– We know Melbourne’s lenders, its market conditions, and the schemes on offer well enough to put you a step ahead from the outset.

– None of that expertise costs you anything extra to access.

– We compare across a broader set of lenders while still making sure you can claim every scheme or grant you’re eligible for.

– Support doesn’t end at settlement; we keep checking that your loan stays competitive well after the paperwork’s done.

Required by Law to Act in Your Best Interests

While banks prioritize their own products, mortgage brokers are bound by law under the NCCP Act to act exclusively in your best interests. For government schemes, this means we actively identify every Victorian grant or deposit guarantee you qualify for—rather than relying on a lender to point it out.

25+ Years of Melbourne Market Knowledge

Government schemes and grants change their rules more often than home loan products do, and we’ve tracked those changes across Melbourne and Victoria for the better part of 26 years. That history means we’re rarely caught out by an eligibility detail a lender’s own frontline staff might miss.

How Our Service Costs You Nothing

We don’t charge you a broker fee. The lender you choose pays us a standard commission after settlement, so our advice costs you nothing out of pocket (bank and government fees still apply). Under Australian law, we are legally bound to put your best interests first.

Ongoing Support Beyond Settlement

Settlement isn’t the finish line for us. We’re there for all of it. Once the contract is signed, we’ll keep checking in every year afterwards to make sure your loan still stacks up against what’s available. If a better option comes along, we’ll help you move to it.

More Lenders Means More Access to the Schemes You Qualify For

A single bank can only ever offer its own range, whether or not that range happens to include what you’re eligible for. We work a broader panel specifically so that doesn’t become your problem: we’ll find you a competitive loan while making sure every scheme and grant you qualify for gets claimed, not quietly missed because your bank never mentioned it.

Loan Calculators

Knowing what you can borrow helps you make the most of any grant you qualify for. Our free calculators let you estimate repayments and check your borrowing power based on Melbourne property values.

View our Loan Calculators

What our clients say

Absolutely recommend everyone to go to Mortgage Broker Melbourne! I had very limited time to get a mortgage and buy a house and Anne and Eddy helped me so much. I cannot thank them enough! They are very informative, supportive and deeply care for people. They made my dream come true during a very short and difficult moments. Thank you Anne and Eddy!

Ngan Pham

With Simon as my mortgage broker, I knew everything would be taken care of from start to finish. He was always just a phone call away whenever I needed him (day or night - even weekends!) and made me feel like a VVIP client throughout the whole process. He knows there’s no one else I’ll be calling when I’m ready to purchase my next property.

Steph

Everything was kept simple and easy, with the team presenting us with a few options that we could pick from, with the relative benefits layed out clearly. The borrowing amount estimate was accurate, and was what the bank ultimately offered. And the team filled out all the difficult forms after a simple questionnaire.

Rory Speirs

I had no previous experience with mortgages or home loans when I was looking to buy my first home, but Kristen at Mortgage Broker Melbourne made the process easy and straightforward. They were friendly and flexible, they provided me with a range of good option for home loans, and they helped me secure the property I wanted in a very prompt timeframe. If I ever have to refinance or take out a new home loan, it will definitely be with MBM.

Jacob Z

Edward Burke and Rachel Dare were fantastic, from start to finish they were efficient, available for any questions that I had and their professionalism and communication enabled me to get a great result. I couldn't recommend them highly enough.

Nat

Frequently Asked Questions

Victorian home buyers can apply for the Australian Government 5% Deposit Scheme through a participating lender, whether that’s under the First Home Guarantee, the Family Home Guarantee for eligible single parents, or the regional pathway, which uses the same scheme assessed against a location-specific price cap instead of running as its own separate program. If you are using a mortgage broker, they can make this application on your behalf.

There are. Government home loan schemes, including the First Home Guarantee and Family Home Guarantee, along with regional-specific price caps for eligible purchasers, reduce your deposit to 2–5% and remove Lenders Mortgage Insurance. Grants work differently: the VIC First Home Owner Grant is a one-off cash payment of $10,000 toward a new property purchase, rather than a deposit or insurance benefit.

Yes, combining them is common. The two aren’t designed to compete with each other on the same purchase. Where people usually trip up is treating the applications as one process: a guarantee scheme goes through your lender, while the grant is a separate lodgement with the State Revenue Office, and missing that sequencing can delay settlement. A broker handling both keeps them moving on the same timeline instead of one holding up the other.

A 5% deposit is all that’s required under the First Home Guarantee, whether you’re buying in inner Melbourne, the growth corridors, or regional Victoria. That’s a quarter of the standard 20% deposit, and because the government stands as guarantor rather than you paying for insurance, Lenders Mortgage Insurance doesn’t apply.

Yes, provided you no longer own or hold an interest in any property at the time you apply. This is the key difference from the First Home Guarantee, which requires you to have never owned property at all. The Family Home Guarantee only cares about your ownership status now, not your history.

There’s no buffer here, and no partial benefit if you go over. If your contract price finishes even a dollar above the cap for your area, the purchase loses access to the scheme entirely; there’s no sliding scale or grace amount to fall back on.
This matters more than it might seem at auction or in a private negotiation. Chasing a property right up to the ceiling, without leaving room for a higher-than-expected final price or a late change to the contract, is how buyers end up pricing themselves out of the scheme at exactly the moment they’re relying on it to avoid a much larger deposit. Building in a genuine margin below the cap, rather than treating it as a target to hit, is the safer way to approach it.

New builds and off-the-plan purchases only. The First Home Owner Grant doesn’t extend to established homes, no matter how much renovation work is planned. Buying something already built, even substantially rebuilt, sits outside what the grant was designed to fund

No. It closed to new participants in September 2025. If you’re only starting to look at shared equity now, Help to Buy is the current federal pathway; existing Homebuyer Fund participants simply continue under their original agreement.

Your eligibility will depend on the requirements of each scheme or grant, but most assess factors such as:

First home buyer status – whether you’ve owned a home in Australia before, and when;
Citizenship and age – you must be an Australian citizen or permanent resident  aged 18 or over;
Occupancy – whether you’re planning to live in the property yourself, not use it as a rental;
Income limits – your household income must sit under whichever cap applies to that scheme;
Property price caps – the property price must fall under the relevant cap for your area.

Worried about missing out because of limited spots? You don’t need to be. Since October 2025, the Australian Government 5% Deposit Scheme hasn’t run on any yearly quota, running tally or waitlist, and the Victorian First Home Owner Grant works the same way. Whether you qualify is what will secure your place, not how quickly you apply or how many other buyers got there first.

Income doesn’t factor in either. Housing Australia has removed income caps from the 5% Deposit Scheme entirely, so what you or your household earn has no bearing on your eligibility. The figure that actually matters now is the price of the property itself: up to $950,000 for a purchase in Melbourne or the Greater Geelong regional centre, and up to $650,000 anywhere else in the state. The Victorian First Home Owner Grant runs its own separate cap, set at $750,000 for a new build, an off-the-plan purchase, or a brand-new home.

Have a question on Government Home Loan Schemes & Grants? Reach out to our Team