First home
Everything about the first one is negotiable except the deposit.
What the deposit actually has to be, what KiwiSaver and Kāinga Ora change, what the cashback costs you later, and which of the numbers you are being quoted are the real ones.
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The deposit
Twenty percent is the price of the good rate, not the price of entry.
The special rates lenders advertise are generally quoted for borrowers with 20% equity. On 10 September 2026 one lender published a standard one-year rate, and a special for borrowers under 80% LVR sixty basis points below it. Same lender, same product, same week. The difference was the deposit.
You can borrow with less than 20%. It costs more, and it costs more in ways that are not always on the front page — a different rate card, a low-equity margin or fee, and a narrower set of lenders willing to look at the file at all.
The two schemes
The rules that move your deposit are written by the government.
Which means they are public, they change, and the only honest way to publish them is to restate them in plain English with the source sitting next to them.
KiwiSaver
The first-home withdrawal has conditions, and they are the kind you find out about late.
The withdrawal carries conditions on how long you have been a member, your residency, whether the property will be your primary residence, and a minimum that has to stay in the account. Each one of those has a threshold attached, and each threshold is set by rule rather than by your provider.
Source: Inland Revenue and your KiwiSaver provider —ird.govt.nz/kiwisaver.
Kāinga Ora First Home Loan
There is a 5% deposit scheme, and the rules around it are moving.
The Kāinga Ora First Home Loan lets eligible buyers borrow with a 5% deposit through participating lenders. Income caps sit at $95,000 for a single buyer and $150,000 for a couple, and more than 33,000 households have used the scheme since 2003.
On 6 September 2026 National announced it would lift the income cap to $300,000, which it expects to roughly double the size of the scheme, at a cost of $4–6 million a year. That is an election policy announcement, not law.
Sources: Kāinga Ora —kaingaora.govt.nz; announcement reported by the NZ Herald, 6 September 2026.
The part nobody says out loud
A thinner deposit arrives into a rising rate cycle.
The OCR has risen twice since July and the market has priced one more move in December (RBNZ). A 5% deposit is the thinnest equity buffer available, and it goes to the buyers with the least room to absorb a repricing. That is not an argument for or against the scheme. It is the shape of it.
Australia removed the income test and the place cap from its First Home Guarantee on 1 October 2025. In the six months that followed, properties priced below the scheme's caps and properties above them did not move together.
Cotality, via Australian Broker — Australia's First Home Guarantee, first six months after 1 October 2025.
Cashback
The cash on settlement has a minimum stay attached.
Most first-home cashback offers carry a condition that you keep the mortgage with that lender for a minimum period. Leave inside it and some or all of the cash is repayable. The period is set in your loan agreement.
ANZ
3 yrs
pro-rata not stated
ASB
3 yrs
repayable pro-rata
Kiwibank
4 yrs
banking relationship maintained
Read from each lender's current published cashback terms, 11 September 2026. Other lenders set their own period. We publish one only once we have read it. Full detail: cashback and clawback →
Why it matters more on a first home than on anything else
The first three or four years is exactly when life changes: a job somewhere else, a second income, a baby, a bigger house. The cash is real and it is genuinely useful. The leash is real too, and only one of those two is on the front of the brochure.
The offer
A first-home rate and an advertised rate are not the same number.
The rate on a comparison table is a carded rate. What a lender will actually write depends on your deposit, your income, your account conduct and, frankly, whether anyone asked.
First-home buyers are the group least likely to know that asking is a thing, and the group with the least standing to do it. So here is the benchmark, published, dated and free: every lender's carded rates, updated nightly, including the small lenders most comparison sites leave off.
Questions
The things people actually ask.
I am a year away from buying. Is it too early to be reading this?
No. Twelve to eighteen months is a normal run-up to a first home, and most of what decides the number you end up on — the deposit, which lender will look at you, whether a scheme applies — is settled long before anyone quotes you a rate. Nothing here needs you to be ready today.
What does this cost me?
Nothing, and there is no paid version. Mortgage advisers in New Zealand are generally paid a commission by the lender when a loan settles, not by you. If a fee ever applied to your situation, the adviser has to tell you before doing any work. We are paid a share of the adviser’s commission if a loan settles, and by nobody else.
Is this financial advice?
No. This site publishes factual information about lenders’ published rates, fees and offers, and does arithmetic on numbers you enter. Advice — a recommendation or an opinion about a particular product for your situation — requires a Financial Advice Provider licence. We do not hold one. The licensed adviser we hand you to does, and they will give you their disclosure information before advising you.
What is clawback?
The cash a lender pays you on settlement comes with a minimum period attached. Leave inside it and some or all of that cash is repayable. ANZ runs three years, ASB three and repayable pro-rata, Kiwibank four. Other lenders set their own period in your loan agreement, and we publish one only once we have read it in that lender’s current terms.
Where do your rates come from?
Each lender’s own published rate pages, read nightly and stamped with the time they were read. We publish carded rates, which are the advertised ones. What a lender will actually write is often better, and that gap is the most useful thing to know before you walk in. We also list the smaller lenders most comparison sites leave off.
How accurate are your numbers?
The rates are read from each lender’s own published material. Everything else is arithmetic on the figures you enter, with the method stated next to the result. What we cannot know: the rate a lender will actually write for you, your exact fees, and anything about your circumstances you have not told us. Where we cannot know something, the page says so rather than estimating around it.
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