1.45 Million Aussies Are in Mortgage Stress. Here's How to Tell If You're One of Them

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30 April 2026

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A Roy Morgan report released this week put a number on something most brokers have been seeing in their inbox for months. As of March 2026, 1,447,000 Australian mortgage holders are considered "at risk" of mortgage stress. That's 26.8% of everyone with a home loan in this country, and it's projected to climb to over 1.66 million by June if the RBA goes ahead with the two more rate hikes the market is now pricing in.

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If those numbers are right, almost one in three mortgage holders will be feeling genuine pressure on their household budget by the middle of winter. So how do you actually know whether you're in that group, and what should you do if you are?

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What "mortgage stress" actually means

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The term gets thrown around loosely, but it has a specific definition. Mortgage stress is generally measured one of two ways.

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The income based measure says you're stressed if more than 30% of your pre tax household income is going to your home loan repayments. The cashflow based measure (which Roy Morgan uses) factors in your actual budget, including all your other living costs, and looks at whether you can comfortably service the loan after everything else is paid for.

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Both measures are useful, but the cashflow version is closer to how it actually feels day to day. You can be technically under the 30% threshold and still feel like you're drowning if your other costs (energy, groceries, school fees, insurance) have moved hard.

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A separate category, "extremely at risk", currently captures around 1,020,000 Australians. These are households where the mortgage is consuming so much of the budget that even minor unexpected expenses become a problem.

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The signs you might be in stress

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Worth checking these against your own situation honestly.

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You're using credit to fund living expenses. If the credit card balance is creeping up not because you're spending more, but because the regular bills are absorbing all the cash, that's a meaningful signal.

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You have no genuine buffer. Not "money in offset that I'd hate to touch", but actual surplus cash that could absorb a $3,000 surprise (a car repair, an insurance excess, a vet bill) without you having to borrow.

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You've stopped salary sacrificing or cut your super contributions. This is one of the first things people quietly drop when the budget gets tight, and it's a strong indicator that the household cashflow has shifted.

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You're rolling balances or making minimum repayments on other debt. If the home loan is being prioritised at the expense of everything else, that's manageable short term but rarely sustainable.

You're delaying dental, medical, or essential household repairs. Putting off necessary spending because the cash isn't there is a clear sign the budget needs work.

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If two or more of these are happening, you're probably in or close to stress, regardless of what the 30% calculation says.

What to actually do about it

The honest answer is that there's no single fix, but there's almost always something to be done. Here's the sequence we tend to work through with clients in this position.

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Get clarity on the actual numbers. Before you can fix anything, you need to know exactly what's coming in and going out, and what the loan looks like today. Most people doing this exercise for the first time are surprised by where the money's actually going.

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Review the rate. This is the single biggest lever for most borrowers. If you haven't checked your rate against the current market in 12 to 18 months, there's a strong chance you're paying more than you need to. We've seen plenty of refinances this year save clients $300 to $600 per month on standard owner occupier loans, which immediately removes a lot of pressure from the budget.

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Consider extending the loan term. Pushing a 22 year remaining loan back out to 30 years lowers the minimum monthly repayment significantly. You'll pay more interest over the long run, but if cashflow is the immediate problem, this is a tool worth knowing about. You can always make extra repayments later when things ease.

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Look at switching to interest only temporarily. For investment loans this is often appropriate anyway. For owner occupier loans it's a more limited option, but in genuine hardship situations some lenders will allow a temporary switch to interest only to reduce repayments while you stabilise.

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Talk to your lender directly about hardship provisions. Every Australian lender has a hardship team and a formal process for varying loan terms in genuine financial difficulty. Using these provisions does not affect your credit file in the way many people assume. It's a legitimate option that exists specifically for situations like this.

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Consolidate other debt into the home loan. If you've got credit card or personal loan debt at much higher rates, rolling it into the home loan can dramatically reduce monthly outgoings. The trade off is that you're now paying that debt off over a much longer term, so it only makes sense alongside a proper plan to pay it down faster than the minimum.

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The bigger point

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Mortgage stress is solvable for most people, but it gets harder to fix the longer it's left. The clients we help most effectively are usually the ones who reached out when things first started to feel tight, not when they were already missing repayments.

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If you're worried about how the next few months might go, get in touch with the Claremont team for a free, confidential review. We'll work through your numbers honestly and let you know what your options are. If there's nothing to do, we'll tell you that. If there's something worth doing, we'll show you exactly what it looks like.