Australian mortgage broker statistics: loans up 17%, brokers up 9%.

Australia had 24,116 mortgage brokers at the end of 2025, up 9.1%, and they settled 838,815 home loans, up 17.2%, according to the MFAA’s first State of Mortgage and Finance Broking Report. The average broker wrote more loans than a year earlier. For a brokerage planning its next hire, that makes support and credit capacity as pressing as another writer.

The bottom line: The MFAA’s 2025 numbers have output growing faster than broker headcount, and the growth landing in offices with more than one broker. FinTalent reads that as a capacity question before a headcount one. Work out whether your queue is waiting on a writer or on you, then hire for that seat.

The report came out in late September. It covers calendar 2025, not the financial year, and draws on data from nine aggregators, analysed by Cotality. The full document sits in the MFAA member portal, so the figures here come from the MFAA’s own release and the press coverage from the launch, in Mortgage Professional Australia and Australian Broker.

The biggest figure in the coverage is settlement value, up 23.5% to $495.55 billion. We have used loans instead. Value rises when the average loan gets bigger, and a bigger loan adds no extra file to anyone’s desk. Count the loans and the gap between output and headcount is still there, 17.2% against 9.1%.

How many mortgage brokers are there in Australia?

There were 24,116 at the end of 2025 on the MFAA’s count, up from 22,105 a year earlier. That is one broker for every 904 Australian adults, against one for every 969 in 2024. Broker numbers grew in every state and territory.

The workforce is getting slightly younger too. The report has the 18 to 25 age group rising and the 50-and-over group falling. We wrote up the intake behind it earlier this year in where new brokers come from, and every new broker needs someone to teach them.

Demand kept pace. Brokers wrote a record 81.6% of new residential home loans in the June 2026 quarter, $139.08 billion of lending, up from 77.6% a year earlier. More brokers per head does not make a patch crowded, because density counts where brokers live rather than where they compete, which is why broker density makes a poor opportunity signal. Our own read of the networks and what they mean for hiring is in the market report.

The population is growing, it is getting younger, and the channel’s share of lending is still climbing. More brokers has not meant less work for each of them.

Why did loans grow faster than brokers?

Divide the MFAA’s totals and the average broker wrote about 35 home loans in 2025, up from about 32 in 2024, and settled about $20.5 million, up from about $18.2 million. That is our arithmetic rather than the report’s, and it is an average that counts every part-timer alongside every top writer. Read it for direction, and the direction is more files per broker.

The average loan grew as well, from about $560,000 to about $591,000, which is why value rose faster than the loan count. Applications rose 18.4% to 911,150 across the eight aggregators that could be matched year on year, roughly in line with settlements, so the work arriving at the front of the pipeline grew as fast as the work leaving it. Commercial ran the same way, with commercial broker numbers up 6.3% to 11,785 and the commercial, business and asset finance lending they settled up 27.4% to $52.3 billion.

Pay followed the volume. Median gross upfront revenue per broker rose 16% to $126,941, and median trail revenue rose 18.7% to $77,894. Clawbacks rose with them. The median gross clawback per broker went up 16.5% to $11,442, the first time the industry has measured it, and that figure is a median of aggregator-level numbers from five aggregators rather than of individual brokers. The MFAA ties the rise to refinance competition, which makes who wears the clawback a contract term to settle before an offer goes out.

However the report counts it, output per broker went up in 2025. More loans, more applications, more revenue and more clawbacks landed on each desk.

The growth went to offices with more than one broker

Brokers working in multi-broker offices rose 17% in 2025, while sole-operator numbers were broadly flat. Multi-broker offices went from 52.9% to 56.8% of classified brokers. The MFAA’s chief executive, Anja Pannek, called it the slowest yet most consistent trend the industry has seen in a long time.

Pannek also said a sole operator no longer means someone working alone. “The reality in our industry is that a single broker can have 20 support staff,” the chief executive said at the launch. Speaking to Australian Broker, Pannek said part-time, in-and-out broking will get harder, because “you need support around you to be successful.”

We made the same case for solo brokers in the first hire that makes or breaks you, support before production. The 2025 numbers are the growth-stage version. The brokers being added are going into businesses with more than one writer, and those businesses run on the people behind the writers.

Growth in 2025 went to multi-broker offices, and the peak body is now saying a broker needs support around them. The structure question belongs to the principal of a growing office as much as to the solo broker.

How many support staff does a broker need per $100 million settled?

No industry body publishes a ratio. The most specific public figure comes from Christian Stevens at Flint, who told Mortgage Professional Australia in April that every $100 million in settlements needs “roughly three to four highly capable team members behind the scenes, depending on the type of clients, loan sizes and complexity.” Flint’s own team in Nepal runs to more than 70 people across credit, loan processing, compliance, operations and more.

Put that against the 2025 average and $100 million is roughly five brokers’ worth of settlements. On Stevens’ estimate, five writers at the national average want three or four capable people behind them. It is one brokerage’s rule of thumb, from a business with a large offshore team, so use it as a sense check rather than a standard. Whether that capacity sits onshore or offshore is its own decision, covered in offshore loan processing against a local hire.

The ratio is rough, and it is public. Count your own settlements and back office against it before you decide the next seat is a writer.

Should your next hire be a broker or a credit analyst?

It depends where the queue is. Two principals we have spoken to had their queues in different places, and both landed on the analyst seat first.

The first still writes large volume and described themselves as time poor. The plan had always been to add brokers, until they worked out what a broker hire cost them. “Hiring a broker doesn’t help me. It takes more time away from me because I’m the one training them.” The answer they landed on was a credit analyst trained in how the business does things. “Bring me 10 brokers. I’ve got the credit analyst training them, not me.” They were just as clear that a switched-on broker who could plug and play would still get a yes.

The second takes the first call with each client and hands the file across to the team. Their list of client scenarios had stacked up to three times what the business normally gets through in a week, “this massive bottleneck for us” in the principal’s words, and the ask was plain. “We just need the team.” Earlier in the same call they had put the hiring plan at two or three more analysts.

The first queue sat at the principal’s desk and the second sat with the team, and neither principal went looking for another writer to clear it. Another broker is the right hire when the waiting work is clients nobody has room to see, provided someone other than the principal can train them. When the waiting work is files to assess and new starters to teach, the hire is judgement, meaning a credit analyst or a senior processor who forms a view before the file reaches you. Our guide Are you the constraint sets out a one-week test for telling a capacity queue from a judgement queue.

The MFAA figures lean toward the judgement queue. The broker population is getting younger, each broker is writing more, and the growth sits in offices where somebody has to teach the new starters. If that somebody is the principal, every broker hired lands another trainee on the same desk.

The bands for both seats, by city, are in the salary guide. FinTalent recruits credit analysts and brokers for brokerages, and Joe runs every search himself.

Both principals could say exactly where their work was waiting before they chose the seat. A week of logging where your own work waits will show which queue you have.

Is the broker population still growing in 2026?

The 9.1% is a 2025 number. The latest read of ASIC’s register points the other way at the top of the market, for one quarter at least. Padua WealthData’s analysis found individual credit reps at the ten largest licensee groups fell by a net 106, or 0.6%, between 1 April and 1 July 2026, with resignations outpacing appointments. Business-registered reps at the same groups rose by 36, and the named moves between groups ran to single digits.

One quarter is not a trend, and the ten largest groups are not the whole market. It does not support the idea that last year’s growth has left a pool of experienced writers waiting to move. The age data points younger, and an experienced broker still needs a reason to leave a book and a set of referrers behind. The questions worth asking before a move are in switching brokerages.

Headcount grew in 2025 and softened at the top of the market in the June quarter of 2026. Neither figure makes an experienced broker easy to hire.

What do the numbers mean if you are the broker being hired?

Read the same report from the other desk. A median upfront revenue of $126,941 per broker is a median, and it includes brokers with years of clients and referrers behind them, so it is a poor guide to year one. Run your own volume and split through the broker earnings calculator instead.

The report shows the channel moving to offices with more than one broker, and the MFAA’s chief executive expects part-time, in-and-out broking to get harder. Before you take a seat, ask who processes your files, who assesses them, and how many other brokers share that person. A seat with nobody behind it asks you to be the processor, the analyst and the writer at once, on more files than a broker carried a year ago.