Australia’s property price caps under the Home Guarantee Scheme are reset at the start of each financial year. The thresholds that took effect on 1 July 2024, published by Housing Australia, are the numbers that every first‑home buyer, single‑parent applicant and broker must rebuild their search around. The update arrived while the Reserve Bank of Australia held the cash rate at 4.35 per cent, dwelling values were still rising in most capitals, and lenders were applying a hard 3‑percentage‑point serviceability buffer that pushes assessment rates toward 9.50 per cent per annum. A property price cap is not a guide‑price; it is the purchase‑price ceiling beyond which a 5 per cent deposit loses its government‑backed LMI waiver. In metropolitan Sydney the new cap stands at $900,000. That ceiling yields a maximum loan of $855,000 at 95 per cent LVR, a figure that must then survive a servicing test calculated at roughly 9.49 per cent p.a. on a 30‑year principal‑and‑interest term. The arithmetic leaves many dual‑income households short of the required gross income even before lenders apply their own debt‑to‑income overlays. Outside the capitals the caps are lower, but so are market prices in many regions, and the Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee uses those rest‑of‑state figures while imposing stricter geographic eligibility. This examination lays out the 2024‑25 caps state by state, shows how they intersect with lender credit policy, and provides the exact sums that determine whether an application succeeds or fails at the desktop.
2024‑25 Property Price Caps at a Glance
The caps below apply to the First Home Guarantee (FHBG) and the Family Home Guarantee (FHG). The Regional First Home Buyer Guarantee (RFHBG) uses the rest‑of‑state caps but only for postcodes that Housing Australia classifies as regional – capital cities and large regional centres such as Newcastle, Wollongong and the Gold Coast are excluded from RFHBG even though they sit inside the “capital city & regional centre” tier for FHBG.
| State / Territory | Capital city & regional centre cap | Rest of state cap |
|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | $900,000 | $750,000 |
| Victoria | $800,000 | $650,000 |
| Queensland | $700,000 | $550,000 |
| Western Australia | $600,000 | $450,000 |
| South Australia | $600,000 | $450,000 |
| Tasmania |