Methodology

Every figure on this site comes from a source we can point to:

• Lenders’ open data feeds. Australian lenders publish their product and rate data through public, standardised open data feeds under the Consumer Data Right. We pull those feeds directly, every day, for every lender we track, so the figures on the board are the lenders’ own published numbers rather than estimates.
• The Reserve Bank’s own tables. The cash rate series on the rate history page comes from the RBA’s published statistical tables, not from news reports about them.

Product names, features and links come from each lender’s own published material. Where we don’t hold something, we show a dash. We never invent a number to fill a gap.

Rows are ranked by advertised rate, lowest first. The advertised rate is the headline interest rate a lender publishes for the loan, and the figure the board shows and sorts on.

Every row also carries a comparison rate, which folds the loan’s known fees into a single number so two loans can be compared like for like. It is there on every row to check, but the advertised rate is what sets the order. When we say a product is the cheapest we track, we mean it has the lowest advertised rate on the board.

We currently track 195 owner-occupier home loan products from 31 lenders, and 194 investor home loan products from 31 lenders. You can switch between the two markets on the leaderboard. We say “the lenders we track” rather than “every Australian lender”: the board covers the lenders whose published data we can read and verify, and it grows as we add more.

• Advertised and comparison rates are the lenders’ own published figures.
• Where we don’t hold a field, it shows as a dash rather than a guess. In Max LVR, a dash means we don’t hold that loan’s limit, not that the lender doesn’t publish one.
• When a lender stops taking new home loan applications, we take it off the board and the charts, and keep the readings we already hold. Now: Suncorp, which stopped taking them on 7 Oct 2026. Its page says why.

Corrected 29 October 2026: this page said a dash in Max LVR meant the lender doesn’t publish a limit. We checked every variable owner-occupier loan showing a dash on 28 October 2026 against the lender’s own Open Banking product data, and each one has a published limit. The board now shows that limit where one figure applies to the advertised rate.

The data is synced daily, and each figure carries the date we last read it. The board reflects the most recent successful sync, so if something looks stale, the date will tell you.

The daily sync adds a fresh reading for every product we track. A change is recorded when an owner-occupier product’s advertised rate differs from the previous reading we hold. The change log covers the last 30 days.

A change’s date is the day we first observed the new value, not necessarily the day the lender repriced. A lender can move a rate between two of our readings, so the change is dated from the day we saw it.

Where our readings for a product are close together, that date is firm. Where our history is sparse, the previous reading we hold can be months old, and the real change lies somewhere between the two dates. Every row shows the date the previous value was last seen, so you can see how tightly it is bracketed. The full log is on the rate changes page.

After a Reserve Bank cash rate decision, the rate changes page shows which of the 31 lenders we track have changed a variable rate in their published data since, by how much, and from when. It switches on only when the cash rate target in the RBA’s own series changes within 7 days after a scheduled decision, and it always describes the most recent change. If a later scheduled decision leaves the cash rate target unchanged, the tracker says so and keeps following the most recent change.

For each lender, the baseline is the last reading we hold on or before the day of the decision. Only variable rates are compared; fixed rates are left out. The comparison covers the owner-occupier, principal-and-interest variable rates we track; investor rates and loans we don’t track are not part of it. If a lender’s last reading on or before the decision day is more than 7 days before the decision, it is listed as “no current reading” rather than guessed. A lender we started tracking after the decision is listed as added after the decision, because there is no earlier reading to compare against.

A product counts as moved when its latest advertised rate differs from its baseline. The date shown is the first reading after the decision that differs, which is the day the new rate first appeared in the lender’s feed and can be after the day the lender changed it. A rate that moved and then came back to its baseline counts as unchanged.

“Not yet” means every variable rate we compare still equals its baseline, on a reading as recent as the newest one we hold for any lender. A lender whose latest reading is older than that is listed as “no current reading” instead, because we can’t say it hasn’t moved.

The tracker records what appears in lenders’ published data, not announcements. A lender can announce a change before it takes effect; the tracker shows it once it appears in the lender’s feed.

If a number looks wrong, tell us at hello@ratesboard.com.au. We will check it against the source and fix it.