Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee: Closed Since 1 October 2025

What replaced the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee?

The two open streams of the 5% Deposit Scheme. Regional buyers now apply as first home buyers, or as single parents and legal guardians.

Housing Australia's notice said the regional guarantee "will be replaced by the First Home Guarantee", the law's name for the first home buyer stream. Since 1 October 2025 both open streams have unlimited places and no income cap, so the Explanatory Statement calls a separate regional stream "redundant". Nothing was merged: the regional stream closed.

• First home buyers: a 5% deposit and a guarantee of up to 15%, so you borrow up to 95% of the value (aloan-to-value ratio, or LVR, of 95%) without lenders mortgage insurance (LMI). See the 5% Deposit Scheme.
• Single parents and single legal guardians: a 2% deposit, a guarantee of up to 18%, an LVR of up to 98%, and no need to be a first home buyer. In law this is the Family Home Guarantee.

How do the old regional rules compare with now?

The regional-only rules are gone: the 12-month residency test, the separate pool of places and the income cap. Deposit and LVR rules for first home buyers are unchanged.

Does any regional rule survive?

Not as an eligibility rule. The law keeps its definition of a regional area only so Housing Australia can report regional uptake. What still depends on location is the price cap. A regional buyer can now buy anywhere, including a capital city.

What are the price caps in regional areas?

It depends on the area. In NSW the cap is $1,500,000 in Sydney and the six regional centres, and $800,000 everywhere else, as at 29 September 2026.

Jervis Bay Territory and Norfolk Island have one cap of $550,000. Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands have one cap of $400,000.

The nine regional centres

• NSW: Central Coast (around Gosford), Coffs Harbour-Grafton, Illawarra (around Wollongong), Mid North Coast (around Port Macquarie), Newcastle and Lake Macquarie, and Richmond-Tweed (around Lismore and Tweed Heads).
• VIC: Geelong.
• QLD: Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast.

Each is an ABS Statistical Area Level 4 (SA4), so the boundary decides the cap, not the town name. The Central Coast, Coffs Harbour-Grafton, Mid North Coast and Richmond-Tweed moved to the higher cap on 1 July 2026. Some pages still miss them.

Both the price and the lender's valuation must be at or under the cap. A suburb with two postcodes can fall under two caps, so check yours in the Postcode Search Tool on the property price caps page (firsthomebuyers.gov.au). For your state's cap beside an LMI estimate, use the NSW LMI calculator, VIC LMI calculator or QLD LMI calculator.

What if you already have a Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee?

It continues. The 2025 change applies only to guarantees issued on or after 1 October 2025, so nothing in it cancels or converts yours (Investment Mandate section 44).

The test is Housing Australia's approval, not a lender's: a guarantee it approved before 1 October 2025 counts as issued before that day, even if the loan was signed later.

When the guarantee ends

• Your scheduled loan balance falls to 80% or less of the property's value.
• You sell the home or repay the loan.
• You borrow more against it.
• You stop living in it without an exemption, or rent it out.
• You refinance to a lender that is not a Participating Lender.

The Investment Mandate allows a guaranteed loan to move to another Participating Lender, but no public document we read says how a refinanced regional guarantee is treated, so ask your lender first. If a guarantee ends while your LVR is above 80%, the scheme guides say your lender may charge LMI.

Over the cap? What LMI costs in regional NSW

Over the cap, the scheme is not available, so a deposit under 20% means LMI. On a $850,000 home in regional NSW outside the regional centres, $50,000 over the cap, a 5% deposit means LMI of about $33,900.

With a $42,500 deposit the loan is $807,500, a 95% LVR. Figures lenders publish put LMI at $23,800 to $42,500, with no NSW duty on top. A 10% deposit cuts the typical figure to about $15,300. At $800,000, an eligible first home buyer could use the scheme and skip about $31,900 of LMI.

Estimates built from 27 LMI figures lenders publish, checked 29 September 2026. Not a quote from any lender or insurer. Method: how LMI is calculated.

Check your own figure with our LMI calculator, or compare every route in how to avoid LMI.

Timeline of the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee

• 1 October 2022: starts, with 10,000 places a year and the 12-month residency rule.
• 1 July 2023: opens to permanent residents, people with no property in 10 years, and friends or family buying together.
• 2024-25: 9,986 of its 10,000 places are used.
• 24 August 2025: Housing Australia announces the closure.
• 1 October 2025: closed to new guarantees.
• 1 July 2026: four more NSW regional centres move to the $1,500,000 cap, and Darwin's cap rises to $750,000.

Across all its streams, the scheme had supported over 99,000 Australians living in regional areas since January 2020 (Housing Australia, 30 March 2026).

Sources