The strange death of Australia’s standard variable mortgage rate
RBA Table F5 is a monthly dataset of indicator lending rates. In plain English, that means it reports the headline rates lenders advertise across products such as small business lending, housing loans and credit cards. Within the mortgage series, two terms matter. A standard variable rate is the lender’s published benchmark variable rate before discounts. A discounted variable rate is the lower advertised rate offered after a discount is applied. The gap between the two is measured in percentage points, not per cent.
The most interesting fact in the latest data is not simply that mortgage rates are high. It is that the so-called standard rate is becoming less informative. In July 2026, banks’ standard variable rate for owner-occupier housing loans was 8.77%, while the discounted variable rate was 6.80%. That is a gap of 1.97 percentage points. For investors, the standard variable rate was 9.35% and the discounted rate 7.13%, a gap of 2.22 percentage points.
That is a structural shift in how Australian mortgage pricing works. When the discounted owner-occupier series appears in June 2004, the standard variable rate was 7.07% and the discounted rate 6.59%. The gap was just 0.48 percentage points. In other words, the owner-occupier discount gap has increased more than fourfold over two decades.
Why does this matter? Because competition increasingly seems to be happening through discounts off a headline price, rather than through movement in the headline price itself. That makes mortgage pricing less transparent for households, because the published “standard” rate may no longer be the rate that matters most in practice. It also matters for policy watchers. If the reference rate is becoming more fictional, then the way monetary policy flows through to borrowers is more complicated than a quick glance at the headline mortgage rate would suggest.
For a Benchmark audience, that is the real story in F5: not just that borrowing is expensive, but that the pricing architecture of the mortgage market has changed.