How much does the average Australian parent give toward a house deposit?

The average parental deposit gift was $74,040 in 2025 (Mozo Bank of Mum and Dad Report 2025), up from around $70,000 in 2021. An earlier Digital Finance Analytics estimate put average total assistance around $88,000 in 2018.

What percentage of first home buyers get help from their parents?

It depends on the definition: 17% relied on parental help for their deposit in 2025 (Finder, up from 11% in 2022), while broader estimates counting any family assistance - cash, guarantees, or living rent-free - have run as high as 60%.

Is the Bank of Mum and Dad really one of Australia's biggest lenders?

By scale, plausibly yes: analyst estimates of parental property lending range from roughly $20 billion to $35 billion outstanding, which would rank among the top ten mortgage lenders. The precise ranking varies by estimate and none of it is officially measured.

Is Bank of Mum and Dad money usually a gift or a loan?

Increasingly a gift: 75% of helping parents expected no repayment in 2025, up from 33% in 2021 (Mozo). Legally, parent-to-child money is presumed to be a gift unless a written loan agreement says otherwise.

Australia · 8 min read · Laddered Editorial · 22 Jul 2026

Bank of Mum and Dad Statistics: How Big Is It in Australia? (2026)

How many first home buyers get parental help, how much parents actually give, and whether the 'top ten lender' claim stacks up — every figure sourced, with the estimates flagged as estimates.

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This article is general information only and is not legal, financial, tax, or property advice. Consider advice from a qualified professional for your circumstances.

The numbers at a glance

The "Bank of Mum and Dad" — parents helping their kids buy property — is talked about constantly and measured badly. This page collects the credible Australian numbers in one place, each with its source and year, and flags which are surveys, which are official statistics, and which are analyst estimates. Cite anything here with a link to its original source (listed throughout and at the end).

17% of first home buyers relied on help from parents to save their deposit in 2025 — up from 11% in 2022 (Finder First Home Buyer Report 2025, survey of 1,006 buyers).
The average parental deposit gift was $74,040 in 2025 (Mozo Bank of Mum and Dad Report 2025).
75% of helping parents expect no repayment — up from 33% in 2021. The bank of mum and dad has largely become the *gift* of mum and dad (Mozo, 2025 vs 2021).
Total lending estimates range from roughly $20 billion to $35 billion, enough that analysts have ranked it among Australia's top ten mortgage lenders (Digital Finance Analytics, 2018–2021 — estimates, see below).
$120 billion in wealth was transferred in Australia in 2018 (inheritances plus gifts) — more than double 2002, and projected to reach around $500 billion a year within 25 years (Productivity Commission, Wealth Transfers and their Economic Effects, 2021).
Sydney buyers need about 7.7 years to save a 20% deposit on an entry-level house (Domain First Home Buyer Report, 2026).

Is it really a "top ten lender"? What the estimates actually say

The most quoted BOMAD claim is a ranking: Australia's ninth (or fifth, or tenth) biggest mortgage lender. Treat the precision as decoration. The underlying numbers are analyst estimates from household surveys, and they vary widely with year and method:

Digital Finance Analytics put total outstanding parental lending at more than $20 billion in 2018, with an average contribution around $88,000 — enough for a top-ten ranking.
A widely syndicated ~2021 DFA estimate of ~$35 billion underpins the "ninth biggest lender" claim.
One academic estimate of *all* parental property assistance in 2019 ran as high as $92 billion — though the primary source is hard to verify and the definition is much broader.

The honest one-line version: parental help with housing runs to tens of billions of dollars a year in Australia — comfortably the scale of a major lender — and nobody measures it precisely, because families don't report it to anyone.

How many first home buyers get help?

Here the numbers diverge because the questions differ:

Asked whether they relied on parental help for their deposit, 17% of 2025 first home buyers said yes — up from 11% in 2022. Finder extrapolates that to almost 20,000 assisted buyers a year (against an official backdrop of ~32,000 new owner-occupier first home buyer loans in the December 2025 quarter alone, per the ABS).
Counting any form of family assistance — cash, guarantees, living rent-free with parents — older DFA estimates ran as high as ~60% of first home buyers in 2021.
Peer-reviewed work using HILDA data found parental cash transfers coinciding with a first home purchase roughly doubled to 15% of buyers between the early 2000s and late 2010s (*Review of Economics of the Household*, 2024).
AHURI analysis finds the subtler channel matters too: living with parents while saving (rather than renting) raises the likelihood of moving into ownership by around 40%.

So: somewhere between one in six (narrow definition) and more than half (broad definition) of Australian first home buyers get family help, and every serious measure agrees the share is rising.

What the help does

The Finder 2025 survey also measured the after-effects: buyers with parental help finished their purchase with 41% more savings left over than unassisted buyers, and 40% of unassisted buyers took five or more years to save their deposit versus 29% of assisted buyers.

The why is not mysterious. Domain's 2026 First Home Buyer Report puts the time to save a 20% entry-house deposit at about 7.7 years in Sydney (entry price: $1.15 million) and around five years nationally — with entry prices up ~15% in a single year. Deposits are outrunning savings rates; parents are the bridge.

Gift, loan — or undocumented something

The trend inside the trend, from Mozo's reports: in 2021, 33% of helping parents expected no repayment. By 2025 that was 75%. Three quarters of parental "lending" is now really gifting — and 3% of parents fund the help from credit cards or personal loans of their own.

What no survey credibly measures is how much of the remaining loan money is actually documented. The legal default is worth knowing: money from parent to child is *presumed to be a gift* (the presumption of advancement) unless there's written evidence of a loan — which is why an undocumented family loan so often becomes, legally, a gift at the worst possible moment. If your family's help is meant to be a loan, here's what the written agreement needs to say; if you haven't decided what it is yet, start with the gift-vs-loan-vs-equity decision.

The bigger wave behind it

BOMAD is the leading edge of the largest wealth transfer in Australian history. The Productivity Commission's 2021 research counted $120 billion transferred in 2018 ($107b in inheritances, $13b in gifts), more than double 2002, and projected annual transfers of roughly $500 billion within 25 years — around $3.5 trillion changing hands by 2050. The distributional wrinkle: relative to what they already have, the poorest 20% receive an inheritance boost about 50 times larger than the wealthiest 20% — though in absolute dollars, wealth still flows overwhelmingly to those who already have it.

Government policy is part of the picture too: the Home Guarantee Scheme had helped 100,000 buyers into homes with deposits as low as 5% by mid-2023, and since 1 July 2023 friends and siblings can apply jointly — an official alternative (or complement) to parental help. (How friends buy together in Australia covers that path.)

Using these figures

Journalists, brokers and researchers are welcome to cite this page; please attribute figures to their original sources (linked above) and link here for the compilation. Last compiled July 2026 — figures carry the year of their underlying data, not this page's publication date, and estimate-based figures are flagged as such.

And if you're on either side of a family arrangement right now: the statistics say the money is flowing; the case files say it's mostly flowing undocumented. Whether it's a gift, a loan or a genuine co-ownership, put it in writing — and if the family ends up co-owning, Laddered keeps the contributions, shares and repayments visible to everyone for as long as the arrangement lasts.