Overtime can genuinely help your application, when the history proves it’s part of your normal earnings, not a one-off. The lender needs to form a view on whether the extra income is likely to keep coming, and that view is built from history length, regularity and current evidence, not from your latest payslip alone.
What tends to get assessed
- Essential-service role or not, some policies treat essential-service occupations (nursing, emergency services and similar) differently on overtime
- Regular/rostered vs irregular overtime, rostered overtime that recurs on a set pattern is generally easier to evidence than ad hoc overtime
- History length, commonly assessed over 6, 12 or 24 months depending on the specific policy
- YTD vs prior year, a lender will typically compare the two to check the overtime is holding, not declining
Why there’s no single “overtime percentage”
You may see online claims that lenders “count 80% of overtime” or similar. PolicyMatch does not publish a figure like that, because it genuinely differs, by lender, by role type, and by how consistent your specific overtime history is. A generic percentage from a blog post is not a reliable substitute for checking the actual policy that applies to your circumstances.
A worked example
A nurse earning a $88,000 base salary plus roughly $14,000 a year in rostered overtime, consistent across the last two payslip cycles and the prior financial year. The essential-service occupation, the rostered (not ad hoc) nature of the overtime, and the two-year consistency are exactly the factors that make this overtime more likely to be usable under several policies, versus, say, one large one-off overtime payment with no prior history.
What to prepare
- Payslips showing the overtime pattern, not just the total
- YTD figure and prior financial-year comparison
- An employer letter confirming the overtime is expected to continue, if your employer will provide one
Next step: check your specific overtime pattern against the Scenario Lens‘s Overtime tab, then talk with KartikKumar about which policies fit.