New Zealand mortgage & home-finance calculators
Calculators built for the way New Zealand lending works: table-loan repayments you can run weekly, fortnightly or monthly, the Reserve Bank's loan-to-value and debt-to-income limits, and the deposit rules that decide how much you can borrow. Every figure is in New Zealand dollars, and the statutory settings are dated so you can see when they were last checked.
What makes a New Zealand mortgage different
New Zealand has the most explicit lending limits of any market on this site. Three separate caps apply, and the binding one is whichever you hit first.
There are debt-to-income limits set by the central bank, expressed as a multiple. The Reserve Bank restricts most lending above six times income for owner-occupiers and seven times for investors. This is a hard multiple rather than an affordability judgement, so a borrower with low outgoings and a high income can still be refused for exceeding the multiple.
Loan-to-value restrictions sit alongside it. Most owner-occupier lending is capped at 80% LVR, with investors held to a lower limit. Lenders have a small allowance for exceptions, which is why some borrowers get past it and most do not.
Your bank tests you at a rate well above the one you will pay. Banks apply their own serviceability test rate, typically several points above the current offer, and that figure is set by the bank rather than by regulation. It usually binds before either of the two caps above.
So three limits apply: the DTI multiple, the LVR cap, and the bank's test rate. On the same income and deposit they frequently produce different answers, and the amount you can borrow is the lowest of the three. Fiscalgrove computes all three rather than one, because a calculator that returns only the highest is telling you something you cannot act on.
There is no stamp duty
This surprises buyers from Australia and the UK. New Zealand levies no stamp duty or transfer tax on residential purchase, so the upfront cost is the deposit, legal fees and building reports rather than a tax bill running into tens of thousands.
What does apply is the bright-line test, which taxes gains on residential property sold within a defined period of purchase, with exclusions for a main home. It is a disposal rule rather than a purchase cost, so it affects when you sell rather than what you pay to buy.
Fixed terms are short, and revolving credit is common
Most New Zealand borrowers fix for one to three years, often splitting the loan across two or three different fixed terms so that not all of it reprices at once. That splitting is standard practice here and unusual elsewhere.
Fixed-rate loans typically allow a limited extra repayment each year, often around 5% of the balance, with a break fee above that. Revolving credit facilities work like an offset and are widely used, which is why the overpayment question in New Zealand is usually about the allowance rather than about whether to overpay.
KiwiSaver, and the first-home withdrawal
KiwiSaver is a retirement savings scheme, and a first-home buyer can withdraw most of their balance towards a deposit subject to membership and residence conditions. For many first buyers it is the deposit, which makes the withdrawal rules part of the affordability question rather than a separate topic.
What the rate follows
Floating rates follow the Reserve Bank's Official Cash Rate. Short fixes are priced off wholesale swap rates and move on expectations, which is why fixed rates often shift before an OCR announcement rather than after it.
Where the calculators fit
The borrowing power calculator computes all three limits and returns the binding one, with the other two shown so you can see which constrained you. The repayment calculator supports weekly and fortnightly schedules, which are common here. The KiwiSaver calculator handles the first-home withdrawal, and the extra repayment calculator applies the annual allowance before the break fee.
Every figure is computed from the underlying formula rather than repeated from another site, and each Reserve Bank limit carries the date it was last checked against the primary source.