Is your offset account actually offsetting?
In July 2026 the corporate regulator, ASIC, published a review of how eight banks run mortgage offset accounts. It found accounts that were never opened, never linked, or linked late, and more than $55 million already paid back to customers. The harm is hidden: your repayment stays the same while the loan quietly charges you interest the offset was meant to save.
What ASIC found inside the banks
ASIC reviewed eight banks covering more than 70% of Australia's $2.5 trillion home loan market, including data on 204,000 individual home loans. It found weaknesses in how every one of them set up, monitored and managed offset accounts. Some banks could not even tell whether a customer had asked for an offset in the first place.
ASIC Chair Sarah Court put it plainly: "When offset accounts don't operate correctly, the harm can be hidden. Loan repayments stay the same, while customers unknowingly pay more interest and take longer to repay their loan."
How the offsets failed
The most common failure is the quietest one: the account exists, your money sits in it, and it does nothing, because it was never linked to the loan. In some cases failures went undetected until ASIC started asking questions.
What a quietly broken offset costs
Move the sliders to your own numbers. The big figure is the extra interest your loan would charge while the money in your offset is not being counted against the balance. Because interest is calculated daily, every day the link is broken costs you: your offset balance, times your rate, divided by 365.
A broken offset does not change your repayment, so nothing on your statement looks wrong. The damage shows up as a slower-falling balance and a longer loan, which is exactly why ASIC called the harm hidden. You are doubly hit: you lose the promised interest savings and the use of that money elsewhere.
Three checks to run on your own offset tonight
ASIC's advice to every offset holder is simple, and it starts in your banking app. If the answer to any of these is unclear, raise it with your bank in writing.
1. It exists
Confirm the offset account was actually opened. In 22% of the failures banks identified, it never was.
2. It is linked
Confirm it is linked to the correct home loan. This was the single biggest failure: opened, funded, and connected to nothing.
3. It is saving you interest
Check the monthly interest charged against your balance and rate. Use the statement checker below to see the exact number to look for.
Check last month's numbers
Rates and repayments keep changing, so do not try to reconstruct a six month statement. One clean month is enough: a broken offset shows up in a single month. Take the last full month from your banking app, ideally one without lump sums or redraws, and type the exact figures, cents and all.
Complete steps 1 and 3 and the verdict appears here.
On most loan accounts the only debit you see is the monthly repayment. There is no interest line, so nothing ever looks wrong. Your repayment is not the interest: the repayment is what you pay, and the interest is what the bank takes out of it before the rest reduces your balance. See how one repayment splits into interest and principal. If your app does show a monthly "Interest" debit, you can compare that entry straight against the step 3 figures.
Balances move daily, so your real figure will sit near an estimate, not exactly on it. One month is enough; there is no need to reconstruct a six month statement across two or three rate changes. Pick a month without redraws or lump sums, count every payment into the loan as part of the repayment, and remember any bank fees charged to the loan sit inside the revealed figure too. If the verdict lands red, contact your bank in writing, ask it to confirm the offset link, and ask it to refund the difference.
Watch the moments of change. ASIC found offsets most often break at the seams: settlement, refinancing, or switching loan products. Some changes require you to ask the bank to re-link the offset. If you have refinanced recently, run the three checks again.
The real lesson: do not leave it in the bank's hands
It would be easy to read ASIC's review as "get an offset and keep it linked". That is not the lesson. Parking your savings in an offset and letting the repayments run on the bank's schedule is not a strategy. It is trusting the bank to look after your side of the loan, and the review shows exactly how that ends: promised savings not delivered, failures sitting undetected for years, and the customer the last to know.
FastPay is built the other way around. Bank products, including the offset, are tools inside a plan you control. We review how your accounts are structured, direct where your money sits and when it moves so it works against the balance, and verify the results against the bank's own numbers instead of assuming them. The checks above are part of that discipline, not the whole of it.
The bank supplies the products. The strategy, and the checking, stay with you. FastPay makes sure of both.
A working offset is the start, not the strategy.
A free FastPay assessment checks how your loan is structured and shows how many years and how much interest the right setup could save, on the income you have now.
Your mortgage charges interest every single day
The daily calculation is why a broken offset costs you from day one.
Sources: ASIC media release 26-173MR and Report 837 Offsets, out of mind (July 2026); ASIC's Moneysmart guide to offset accounts. Compensation, market and failure-type figures are ASIC's, covering the eight banks it reviewed. Calculator results are indicative only. They assume the full balance shown sat in the offset for the whole period and would otherwise have fully offset the loan, using simple interest: balance × annual rate ÷ 365 × days. Actual loss depends on your loan terms, moving balances and how your lender compounds interest. The statement checker works on a single month and assumes the balances you enter and the current rate applied for the whole month; your lender calculates on actual daily balances, so the real charge will sit near, not exactly on, the estimate. The revealed interest figure includes any bank fees charged to the loan account, and redraws or lump sums during the month will distort it. Oculus FastPay is not a lender or a broker and does not provide financial product advice.