First Home Guarantee — uncapped from 1 October 2025.

The First Home Guarantee (FHG) — the Federal scheme run through Housing Australia, and not to be confused with the state First Home Owner Grant (FHOG) cash payments discussed further down — guarantees up to 15% of the value of an eligible first home for an eligible buyer. The lender treats the combined deposit plus guarantee as a 20% equivalent — so you avoid Lenders Mortgage Insurance entirely. The premium would have been somewhere between $12,000 and $28,000 indicative on a $600K loan, depending on lender and product. The guarantee makes that line item disappear. The buyer still puts in their own 5% deposit. The guarantee covers the gap between that 5% and the 20% threshold. It is not a grant — no money changes hands from the government to the buyer. It is a guarantee to the lender that allows the lender to write the loan as though it were a 20% deposit deal. From 1 October 2025 the scheme expanded substantially. The previous income caps ($125K single, $200K combined) were removed entirely; high-income earners can now access the scheme. The previous 35,000-place annual allocation was scrapped; the scheme is now uncapped. Regional and capital-city price caps were lifted at the same time — Sydney to $1.5M, Brisbane (and its regional centres including the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast) to $1M, Melbourne to $950K, Perth to $850K. The interaction with state-level first-home grants and stamp duty concessions matters more than the scheme itself for most buyers — that's where the real dollars sit.

Income and place caps are gone; price caps still apply. The cap is on purchase price, not loan amount. A $900K purchase with a 5% deposit ($45K) plus the guarantee covering the gap to 20% would result in an $855K loan, and the price (not the loan) is what's tested against the cap. The cap is the line between 'FHG works' and 'FHG doesn't reach this house'. With the 1 October 2025 cap lift, the practical effect — and this is what we see file by file on the Coast and in Brisbane — is that almost all of SE QLD's growth corridors now sit within cap. The Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast, Ipswich, Logan, Moreton Bay, even most established Brisbane suburbs are inside the $1M Brisbane regional centres cap. Inner-Brisbane apartments at the top of the market, certain Noosa-end Sunshine Coast streets, and the prestige Gold Coast strip are the residual above-cap territory. In Sydney the $1.5M cap finally aligns with the market for first home buyers in the outer ring (Western Sydney, the Central Coast, the Illawarra). In Melbourne $950K covers most of the middle ring. Perth's $850K covers the bulk of the metro. Adelaide and Hobart sit lower again — verify the current schedule before committing.

The income test is gone. What hasn't changed: applicants must be Australian citizens or permanent residents (with eligible visa holders permitted in some categories), must not have previously owned or had an interest in residential property in Australia (limited exceptions for inherited or long-divested interests), and must intend to live in the home as their principal place of residence. The property must be a residential dwelling — apartments, townhouses, houses, units. Off-the-plan and house-and-land are eligible subject to specific rules. Worth knowing about separately: the Family Home Guarantee. It is a distinct scheme — not the same thing as the First Home Guarantee, and easy to confuse. It lets an eligible single parent or legal guardian with at least one dependent buy with a 2% deposit and no LMI. Crucially, it is not first-home-buyer-only: a previous property owner who now meets the single-parent criteria can use it. Like the First Home Guarantee, from 1 October 2025 it carries no income limit and has unlimited places. If you're a single parent re-entering the market after a separation, this is the scheme to ask about, not the First Home Guarantee. From 1 October 2025, the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee was replaced by the expanded First Home Guarantee, so regional first-home buyers use the FHG cap schedule rather than a separate regional scheme.

This is where the dollars compound. Queensland's First Home Owner Grant — a $30K one-off payment for new builds and certain off-the-plan purchases under $750K, extended at the boosted rate by the 2026-27 QLD Budget — stacks on top of the FHG. From 1 May 2025 the QLD transfer-duty exemption for first home buyers on new builds is uncapped. Stamp duty concessions in NSW (FHBAS to $1M), VIC (exemption to $600K, taper to $750K), the ACT (income-tested HBCS), and SA (uncapped on new homes from 6 June 2024) also stack with the FHG. Tasmania's first home buyer waiver on established homes (≤$750K) is scheduled to close on 30 June 2026, so from 1 July 2026 a Tasmanian first home buyer leans on the First Home Owner Grant cash payment for a new build instead. A QLD first-home buyer on an eligible new build can, in principle, stack the FHG (no LMI), the $30K First Home Owner Grant, and the full stamp duty exemption — the 5% deposit plus the grant cash then cover the deposit and costs outside the loan. We're deliberately not pinning that to a single headline purchase price: land-plus-build budgets that genuinely clear the FHOG's $750K new-build threshold are tighter than they look once site costs, upgrades and holding costs are in, so the right number is whatever your actual contract and build quote come to. NSW shifts the maths again — caps and concessions sit at different thresholds — but the same stacking logic applies. The trap is timing — but it's the contract date that usually bites, not settlement. The grant tier you qualify for is generally fixed by the date you sign the contract (the QLD boosted $30K, for instance, is tied to contracts signed on or after 20 November 2023), while the FHG place is secured through the lender and the stamp duty concession has its own rules again. The three don't share a single deadline, so they have to be lined up deliberately. We've seen buyers sign before they'd locked in their finance or grant position, then find a tier or concession had moved. That's avoidable — it's the kind of stitching that needs to happen before you sign, not at settlement.

Two cases where we'd recommend a buyer not use the FHG even if eligible. First — if the buyer is genuinely close to a 20% deposit and only a few months away, sitting tight to land at 80% LVR clean might give them access to sharper rates and a wider lender panel than FHG product offers. The gap is small but it exists. Second — if the buyer is buying right at the price cap and the FHG is the only thing making the deal work, that's often a sign the budget is too tight. A 5% deposit means borrowing 95% of the purchase price. Even with no LMI, that's a heavily geared position. Repayments on a $950K loan at indicative current rates are well over $5,800 a month. If the buyer's cashflow runs to that with $200 of buffer, a rate rise of 50bp puts them under pressure quickly. The FHG removes the LMI cost; it doesn't remove the leverage. This is the conversation we have on the first call with first-home buyers. Sometimes the answer is 'go now, FHG, here's why'. Sometimes it's 'save another nine months, buy in a slightly cheaper suburb, your repayments will give you breathing room'. Both are legitimate answers — they just have to be the right one for your file.