State of Broking 2026, Part 1 of 4: 17% of Brokers Settled No Home Loans Last Year. 18% Settled $25m or More

The broker channel settled $495.55 billion of residential lending in 2025 and the average reported broker settled $20.55 million. Both numbers are true, and the second one hides the most useful finding in the MFAA’s new report: the workforce is spread across a remarkably wide range of activity, and it is reorganising itself around bigger offices.

A record year, on average

The MFAA released the State of Mortgage & Finance Broking Report 2026, its first annual benchmark of the industry, on 25 September 2026. The Broker Times attended the launch briefing. The report covers the 2025 calendar year and draws principally on data from nine participating aggregators, analysed by Comparator, a Cotality business. The MFAA’s public summary of the report is here.

The headline numbers are strong. The reported broker population rose 9.1% to 24,116. Residential settlements rose 23.5% to $495.55 billion, an increase of about $94.34 billion. Average residential settlement value per reported broker rose from about $18.15 million to $20.55 million, up 13.2%.

The MFAA itself warns against reading too much into that last figure. The report says per-broker measures “should not be interpreted as standalone measures of broker productivity”, because they are also driven by loan sizes, property values, refinancing activity and lending mix. That caution matters more than usual here, because the report also publishes the distribution behind the average.

The barbell underneath

Within an eight-aggregator sample, the report groups brokers by the total value of residential loans they settled in 2025. Two bands stand out, one at each end.

Add those lower bands together and, on our arithmetic, 40.7% of brokers in the sample settled less than $2 million in residential lending or none at all. At the other end, 34.3% settled $10 million or more. That is not a bell curve around $20 million. It is two large groups with a thinner middle.

For a broker trying to benchmark, the practical point is simple: the $20.55 million average is pulled up by the top band. A broker settling $12 million is comfortably inside the top third of the sample, even though they are below the mean.

Who might be in the 17%

The report does not say who these brokers are, and it would be a mistake to assume they are inactive. The settlement bands measure residential lending only. Several groups could plausibly appear there:

• Commercial and asset finance specialists. The same report counts 11,785 brokers writing commercial, business or asset finance in the matched sample. Someone writing only equipment finance would show as zero in a residential table.
• New entrants. With the population up 2,011 in a year, some brokers will have joined late in 2025, and residential settlements take time.
• Part-time, transitioning or support-heavy roles where a registered broker is not the settling writer.

Those are possibilities, not findings. The report is explicit that the distribution “should not be interpreted as a whole-of-market distribution”. But if you run a business with authorised representatives, the question worth asking is which of those groups your own zero-settlement brokers fall into, and whether each one has a plan.

The move into multi-broker offices

The second structural shift is where brokers work. Across a seven-aggregator sample, the share of classified brokers operating as sole operators fell from 47.1% to 43.2%, while the share in offices with two or more brokers rose from 52.9% to 56.8%.

The number of sole operators was broadly unchanged. Growth came almost entirely from multi-broker offices, where broker numbers rose 17.0%. The report is careful about the cause, noting that the data does not identify whether this reflects new broker recruitment, consolidation of existing sole operators into larger businesses, or other changes in business structure.

Read alongside the barbell, it suggests a plausible picture: new brokers are more likely to start inside an existing office than alone. That is a hypothesis to test against your own aggregator’s data, not a conclusion the report draws.

More brokers working under someone else’s licence

The licensing mix moved in the same direction. Credit representatives increased their share of reported brokers from 67.1% to 69.2% in 2025, while Australian credit licence holders fell from 32.9% to 30.8%. The data covers seven participating data providers.

More brokers working as credit representatives means more brokers relying on a licensee for compliance frameworks, and more licensees supervising larger teams. How those responsibilities are split is set by the licence, the authorisation and your licensee’s own policies. If your team has grown, check with your licensee or aggregator what supervision and monitoring is expected, rather than assuming last year’s arrangement still fits.

MFAA chief executive Anja Pannek framed the broader challenge in the report’s CEO’s report:

“Sustainable business models, workforce renewal, effective new-entrant pathways and succession planning will remain important to the profession’s long-term strength.”Anja Pannek, Chief Executive Officer, Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia, CEO’s report, State of Mortgage & Finance Broking Report 2026

What to do with this

Sources: Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia (MFAA), State of Mortgage & Finance Broking Report 2026, published 25 September 2026, for all report figures and for quotations from the CEO’s report; MFAA media release, “A home loan facilitated through a mortgage broker every 38 seconds”, 25 September 2026 (PDF); MFAA news, “New report captures the growing role of brokers across Australia”. Figures are credited to the MFAA State of Mortgage & Finance Broking Report 2026. Calculations marked as ours are The Broker Times’ arithmetic on the report’s published figures. The full report is available to MFAA members via the Member Portal.