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Insights · Refinance

Refinance cashbacks — basically gone, and that's fine.

The cashback war that ran a few years back has well and truly cooled. There's bugger-all left in market worth chasing, and where an offer does surface it rarely pairs with a rate sharp enough to come out ahead. So the rate has to carry the case on its own — which is cleaner. Here's how we think about it.

Reviewed · Adam King — 30 years in finance, Sunshine Coast

What a cashback actually is

First, the lay of the land: refinance cashbacks have largely dried up. They're no longer the common, live offer they were a couple of years ago, so treat anything below as the exception rather than something you'll routinely find on the table. A refinance cashback is a one-off payment from the lender to you, paid into a nominated account a few weeks after settlement. At the peak of the cashback war a few years back, lenders were paying meaningful headline figures and a long list of them were in the game. Where an offer still exists today it's typically conditional on a minimum loan size, an LVR cap, and being a refinance from a different lender — not an internal switch. The lender gets a new customer and the customer's cash gets a one-off boost. On the surface, it looks like free money. It usually isn't free, because the lender offering the cashback has built its price for it somewhere — usually in the headline rate, sometimes in the package fee, occasionally in a slightly less generous offset or redraw setup. The cashback war was unusual in that lenders were genuinely paying away margin to win share during a period of high refinance volumes. The market has since rebalanced hard. The lenders that did pay them have largely pulled them, and the handful still advertising one rarely pair it with a rate sharp enough to come out ahead. So the real work now is on rate plus fees over five years — and where a genuine cashback does surface, modelling whether it actually covers the rate gap over that horizon.

The 2026 cashback landscape

  • Lenders still in market

    Few

    Down sharply from the peak of the cashback war — most have pulled them

  • Carries the case now

    Rate

    With offers thin, the headline rate plus fees does the work

  • The cashback, if you leave early

    Repayable

    Where an offer survives, the cashback is typically repayable if you refinance away inside its window

  • The horizon that matters

    5 yrs

    Any offer is modelled against the no-cashback options over five years

How thin the market has become

The honest answer to 'who's still offering a cashback?' in 2026 is: barely anyone worth the trip. The lenders that ran them through the cashback war have largely withdrawn them, and the majors that did pay a refinance cashback have mostly stepped back. What's left is a short, shifting list — the kind of thing that's there one month and gone the next — and the rate attached rarely sits sharp enough to beat a cleaner no-cashback option over the life of the loan. The specialist non-bank lenders never leaned on cashbacks heavily anyway; they prefer to compete on rate and service. That's now the whole market's posture. The practical upshot is that you should plan a refinance as if there is no cashback, because most of the time there isn't one — and if there is, it's a small bonus to be modelled, not a reason to move. If an offer does exist, the conditions are worth understanding because they're where the value leaks away. They typically attach a minimum loan size, an LVR cap, owner-occupied preference (investment loans get less or nothing), and — most importantly — a repayment condition: the cashback is repayable if you refinance away or repay the loan in full inside a set window, commonly one to two years from settlement. That repayment condition is the constraint that traps borrowers who chase cashbacks year after year.

If a genuine offer does surface — how we handle it

We don't publish a live cashback table here, because the offers change month to month and a printed grid would be out of date almost immediately — and because, frankly, there's so little in market that a table would mostly be empty. When something genuine does appear, we pull the lender's current written offer — cashback amount, minimum loan, LVR cap and, critically, the repayment window — and confirm every condition before it ever gets recommended. The repayment condition is what traps people. Where a cashback exists it's almost always repayable if you refinance away or pay the loan out in full inside a set window — commonly one to two years from settlement. Refinance in month 23 of a 24-month window and you hand the full cashback back, often after you've already spent it. So a cashback only ever makes sense once its repayment window is checked against how long you realistically expect to hold the loan — and even then, only if the rate behind it stacks up. Most of the time it doesn't, which is exactly why the rate has to carry the case on its own.

Practical implication

Cashback minus rate-gap-over-five-years. That's the number.

On a $600K loan, a 0.25% higher rate costs $1,500 a year. Over five years, that's $7,500 — and it's bigger if you account for the slower paydown of principal. A $3,000 cashback on a 0.25% higher rate gives back its lead in two years. Modelled correctly, the cashback doesn't win.

Modelling the real value — the five-year test

Every refinance should be modelled over a five-year horizon, not over the first month. The reason is that the lender knows you're sensitive to the headline numbers in the first year — the cashback paid up front, the introductory rate, the package fee waived for year one — and they're happy for those to look generous. What earns the lender margin is the rate in years two through five, the package fee not waived in year two onward, and the slightly less generous offset arrangement that costs you small amounts month by month. The right comparison is: Lender A's total cost over five years (cashback received, less interest paid, less fees) versus Lender B's total cost over the same five years. Sometimes the cashback offer wins. Sometimes the no-cashback offer with a sharper rate wins by $4,000 to $8,000 over the period. The right answer depends entirely on the rate gap and your loan size. We model this for every refinance file. The output is a one-page comparison: three lenders, all-in costs over five years, with the cashback netted off. The page makes the answer obvious. The borrower can disagree with the recommendation, but they're disagreeing with the maths, not with the headline.

When a cashback — if one exists — genuinely wins

Offers are thin right now, but if a genuine one does surface, these are the narrow scenarios where taking it is the right move rather than the wrong one.

  • Small loan (under $400K): the dollar value of the cashback is large relative to the rate gap. A $3K cashback on a $300K loan covers a 0.30% rate gap for over three years.
  • Short refinance horizon (clear plan to repay or sell within 24–36 months): you take the cashback, hold the loan briefly, then close out. The cashback's repayment window and your plans align.
  • Genuinely competitive rate with the cashback included: occasionally a lender bundles a cashback with their sharpest pricing. That's the rare case where you genuinely get both. We watch for it.
  • Stamp duty or settlement costs to fund: the cashback can cover settlement expenses on the refinance itself — discharge fees, lender's mortgage discharge, government registration. Tidy net effect.

The serial refinancer trap

We see a recurring pattern. A borrower refinances for a $3K cashback, holds the loan for 12 months, refinances again to another $3K cashback at a different lender, holds 12 months, refinances again. Three cashbacks across three years, $9K in the bank. The borrower thinks they've gamed the system. The maths is more nuanced. First, every refinance carries the repayment risk — if your timing slips, you can owe back a $3K cashback you've already spent. Second, frequent refinancing leaves a trail of credit enquiries that some lenders read negatively. Third, and most often missed, each of those three loans was probably written at a rate above the market sharpest, because the cashback-offering lenders price for the cashback they pay. The cumulative loss on rate across three loans of 12 months each, on a $600K balance, can easily exceed the $9K of cashbacks. The sharper play is a one-off refinance to the best all-in rate plus cashback combination, hold the loan for the full repayment window, and review again at month 24. That's two refinances over four years — far cleaner — and the all-in outcome is consistently better than chasing every offer that drops.

From the practice

I've seen $9K of cashbacks cost a borrower $14K in lost rate margin.

Three refinances, three cashbacks, three loans at rates a quarter-point above where a non-cashback lender would have priced them. That's the headline trap of cashback hunting. The cashback is real cash. The rate gap is real interest. They're both real money, and the cashback usually loses the race over five years on a typical loan size.

Questions you might have

The honest answers.

Real numbers · honest answers

Is the cashback worth more than a *sharper* rate?

Twenty-minute call. We pull your current loan, model three refinance options including cashbacks, and put the five-year all-in cost on a single page. You see the answer; you make the call.

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General information only — not personal credit advice. Figures are indicative and subject to confirmation against current lender pricing and policy.