One Doc Home Loan When Your Profits Sit Inside the Company
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One Doc Home Loan · Company Director · Retained Profits
One Doc Home Loan When Your Profits Sit Inside the Company
Your company earns well, your accountant keeps your wage modest, and a standard home loan assessment only sees the wage. This guide covers how a one doc home loan reads retained company profits, what the declaration is allowed to capture, and why the accountant letter decides the file.
Quick Answer
A one doc home loan lets a company director declare income that includes profit retained in the company, supported by an accountant letter rather than full tax returns and financials. It suits directors whose income is real but undrawn, with the declaration tested against each lender's one doc policy.
Two Ways Money Reaches You From Your Company
There are two ways income reaches you from a trading company: the wage and distributions you actually pay yourself, and the profit that stays behind in the Pty Ltd. A bank's standard home loan assessment is built almost entirely around the first. Your accountant, for sound tax reasons, has often optimised your affairs around the second.
That split is the whole problem. The company may have traded strongly for years, but if the wage on your personal return is modest, the standard servicing calculation treats you as a modest earner. The retained profits sitting in the company are your money in every commercial sense, you control the entity, yet they sit outside the income line the assessor is permitted to use.
A one doc home loan approaches the same file from the other direction. Instead of reconstructing your income from personal returns, the lender starts with a signed income declaration and works through the supporting evidence behind it. The director's wage versus distributions question stops being two disconnected documents and becomes one declared figure that has to hold together.
Set side by side, the two routes read the very same director's income in different ways, and that contrast is the whole reason the structure exists. The table below is illustrative of how each line is treated; the exact policy varies by lender.
What the One Doc Declaration Actually Covers
The declaration covers the income you certify you earn from the business, including profit you have chosen to leave in the company rather than pay to yourself. In plain terms, the declaration covers what the tax return has not caught up with: stronger recent trading, profit retained for working capital, and drawings you deliberately kept low.
This is self-certification within lender policy, varies by lender, not a blank cheque. Each lender sets its own rules on what may be declared, how the figure must reconcile with the company's position, and what evidence sits behind it. The one doc home loan glossary entry covers the structure itself, and our document teardown walks through what each item in the pack proves.
Two anchors hold the declared figure up. First, it has to be defensible: company profit is taxed and recorded, and how it later reaches you as wages or dividends carries its own tax treatment, which is your accountant's territory and set out by the Australian Taxation Office. Second, the accountant letter does the heavy lifting. A short confirmation from the person who prepares the company's accounts carries more weight with an assessor than anything you could supply yourself.
How the Lender Reads a Director's File
The first thing an assessor tests in a director's file is consistency: whether the declared income, the company's trading story, and the conduct on existing debts all describe the same business. In practice the assessor is not recalculating your tax position; they are deciding whether the declaration is credible against everything else in front of them.
Loan size is then shaped by LVR and the servicing buffer. One doc policies typically cap loan-to-value ratios more conservatively than full doc lending, varies by lender, and the declared income is tested with the same buffers applied to any self-employed file. If you also carry investment property debt, the liability side gets its own read, which we unpack in our guide to one doc loans with investment property debt.
Where the File Works
- Consistent trading history behind the declared figure
- Wage plus retained profit tells one coherent income story
- Accountant willing to confirm the position in writing
- Existing facilities clean and easily explained
Where the File Stalls
- Declared income out of step with what the company earns
- Accountant unable or unwilling to support the figure
- Profits committed elsewhere, so cash to service is thin
- New entity with little history behind the retained profits
None of the stall items is automatically fatal. They are the points where a file slows down, gets requeried, or needs restructuring before it can proceed, and each one is easier to fix before lodgement than after.
Getting the File Ready as a Director
Preparing a one doc file as a director is mostly a sequencing exercise: brief your accountant early, settle the declared figure together, and let the letter follow the accounts rather than the other way around. Near 30 June the sequencing matters even more, because the company's year-end position and the figure you declare should come out of the same conversation with your accountant, not two separate ones.
In practice the cleanest first step is a short policy conversation before anything is signed, since the right lender depends on your entity history, the declared figure, and the property itself. You can check eligibility in a few minutes to see whether the structure fits. Directors whose money sits in a development or property entity will find the wider lending context in the Property Lending Hub, and the Business Owners Hub collects the rest of our self-employed lending guides.
A one doc home loan exists for exactly the file most company directors have: a business that earns well, a personal return that understates it, and profit parked in the Pty Ltd. The declaration captures the income your tax planning has deliberately left in the company, the lender tests it against policy, and the accountant letter is the document that makes the whole position credible. Get the accountant involved first and the rest of the file tends to follow.
Key takeaway: If your income is real but undrawn, declare what the business actually earns and let your accountant's letter carry the file.Frequently Asked Questions
A company director can get a home loan using retained company profits through a one doc structure, where the signed declaration captures income that stays in the company rather than only the wage on the personal return. The figure has to reconcile with the company's actual trading and be supported by your accountant. Our one doc document teardown walks through what each item in the pack proves.
A one doc home loan is a self-employed home loan assessed on a single signed income declaration, usually supported by an accountant letter, instead of full tax returns and financials. It is self-certification within lender policy, varies by lender, rather than a no-questions product. The one doc home loan glossary entry has the short version.
Lenders count company profits toward a director's home loan income where their policy allows it, and a one doc declaration is the cleanest route for profit you have not yet paid out to yourself. The declared figure is still tested through the lender's servicing assessment with the usual buffers, and the treatment varies by lender.
The accountant letter for a one doc home loan needs to confirm that the declared income is consistent with the company's position, signed by the person who actually prepares the accounts. Most lenders have preferred wording, so the letter is usually drafted after the broker confirms policy fit. The one doc home loan page covers where the letter sits in the wider pack.
A one doc home loan typically prices above a comparable full doc loan because the lender carries more verification risk, and the gap varies by lender, loan size and LVR. For many directors the trade-off is access rather than price, since the full doc route understates their income in the first place. Pricing firms up once the file is assessed against actual policy.
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