The rate went down while the repayment doubled.

4.60% is still lower than the 4.75% of September 2011

The Reserve Bank raised the cash rate to 4.6% on 30 Sep 2026. In September 2011 it was 4.75%. So borrowing money is cheaper now than it was fifteen years ago, at least as far as the Reserve Bank is concerned.

Here is what happened to the loan itself over those fifteen years.

The average new home loan for someone buying a place to live in went from $357,277 to $730,720. That is 105 per cent more.

Paying that off over 30 years, at the rate people actually negotiate rather than the advertised one, went from $2,384 a month to $4,764 a month. Almost exactly double.

The dashed gold line on the chart is the test. It takes the same interest rate in every quarter and applies it to a loan frozen at its 2011 size. It ends at $2,329 a month, which is roughly where it started. The interest rate is not what doubled the repayment. The size of the loan is.

Before anyone says it: yes, these are the dollars of their own day, and prices rose 48 per cent over the same years. In 2011 money the repayment goes from $2,384 to $3,229, so it is a rise of about a third rather than a doubling. That is still the largest change in the cost of buying a home in the series, and it leaves the gold line exactly where it is, because both ends of that line are in the same dollars.

Three things worth knowing before you argue with the rest of it. This is the average new loan written each quarter, and the ABS series excludes refinancing, so it is what buyers are signing up to rather than the average mortgage already being paid off. I have used the discounted rate, around 6.8 per cent, rather than the advertised standard variable rate, which is nearly two points higher. And the loan is the average across the whole country, so a Sydney reader should expect their own number to be well above it.

The chart also stops at Jun 2026, so the rise announced on 30 Sep 2026 is not in it yet.