'Salary: competitive' in a mortgage broker job description

Put the number in the ad. In six months of Australian broker ads, the ones under a recruitment agency’s name showed a figure 81% of the time, against 56% for the ones the hiring business placed itself. A line that says “Salary: competitive” sits on the same Seek page as an ad that answers the first question.

The bottom line: A broker reads your ad next to ads that already show the pay, and on broker roles the ones recruiters place show it far more often than the ones employers place themselves. FinTalent’s advice is to put the base, the commission or bonus structure and a year-one figure a broker can believe in the ad, and keep the mechanics for the interview.

What follows is our count of the ads, plus what one candidate, two principals and an adviser raised with Joe about the pay line, checked against the emails and call transcripts, with names and firms left out.

What do mortgage broker job ads say about pay?

We froze the 991 broking and finance ads our job-ad database caught between late February and August 2026, almost all of them from Seek, with lender and fintech roles included. 282 were broker roles. Nearly two in five of those named no salary, which our guide to hiring a mortgage broker counts in full. Of the 108 broker ads that named none, 29 called the pay competitive, and 21 of those mentioned a commission or bonus as well.

Split the broker ads by who placed them and the gap is wide. Of 47 ads under a recruitment agency’s name, 38 named a figure, or 81%. Of 207 placed by the hiring business itself, 115 did, or 56%. The other 28 carried a franchise brand and sit outside both counts.

One caveat belongs next to those numbers. We sorted agency from employer by the advertiser’s name, which is a name test rather than a check of every listing, so a few ads will sit on the wrong side of it. The same gap shows across the whole set of 991, which what your split is really buying counts. Ads that lean on culture are less likely again to name the pay, and that one has its own guide, the culture gate.

The pattern is not special to broking. In November 2023, 46% of recruiter-posted ads on Seek included salary information against 13% of corporate enterprise postings, SBS reported from Seek’s data. Broker ads already show pay more often than job ads in general, going by Indeed’s Hiring Lab, which put the share of Australian job postings showing pay at 37% at the end of 2024.

A broker scrolling Seek sees your “competitive” beside agency ads that show a figure four times in five. On broker roles, the ad without a number is usually the employer’s own.

What does a broker do with “competitive”?

They ask, if they get as far as asking. Earlier this year one candidate sent Joe his questions the day before a call about a role. “Remuneration breakdown base/bonus” sat on the list between a question about the laptop and phone and a line reading “Commercial Mortgage Finance”, with parking at the bottom. For a candidate it is a working question, as ordinary as the commute.

The ad decides whether that call happens at all. On Seek, ads with a visible salary draw 36% more applications on average, and up to 83% more when the figure is above the market average, according to Seek’s hiring advice. Seek’s candidate research, run by the research firm Nature, found 72% of candidates are frustrated when the salary is missing.

A broker can also find out what “competitive” means without you. Since 7 December 2022, employees and future employees have had a workplace right to share their pay and to ask others about theirs, and pay secrecy terms generally cannot be enforced, per the Fair Work Ombudsman. A phone call to someone at the brokerage down the road settles it.

The broker making that call has options. Brokers arranged a record 81.6% of new home loans in the June 2026 quarter, according to the MFAA, and the broker population grew 9.1% in calendar 2025 to 24,116, Australian Broker reported from the MFAA’s State of Mortgage and Finance Broking report. The broker worth hiring is weighing your seat against others, which is the point of hiring is a sales process.

For the candidate, a missing number is a question pushed to the first call, and for some it is the reason they never book one.

Why do principals leave the number out?

For reasons that make sense from the principal’s chair. On one search this year, an adviser to the business, copied in on the thread, asked whether an incentive was part of the offer, because “some will ask”. The principal set the base range, confirmed an incentive on top, and asked for the accrual details to be explained during the interview and to “leave that out of the ad”. Earlier in the same thread he had reworked the pay line into a range “so that we have flexibility to adjust”.

That instinct is fair on the detail. Accrual rules, thresholds and clawback terms need a conversation, and they read badly as a paragraph on Seek. Whether an incentive exists at all is different. Next to an ad that says “base plus bonus”, a base with nothing after it reads as base only.

Leaving pay out is still the majority habit across Australian employers. In a Robert Half survey of Australian hiring managers reported by the ACS in August 2026, 51% of organisations said they do not include salary in their ads, and nearly 70% said they had lost a candidate because pay expectations did not line up after it was left out.

The opposite problem is real too. A principal running commission-only seats told Joe on a discovery call that when they advertise a high on-target figure, bank staff weighing the move “kind of freak out or they don’t believe it”, and “they scare themselves out of it”. A big number with nothing behind it reads like a promise nobody can check.

The reasons we hear are room to move and a structure too fiddly for Seek, and neither needs the number gone. The principal above kept his room to move with a range, and the structure can go in plain words, as the next two sections set out.

How do you write an OTE figure a broker will believe?

Show the working. An on-target figure on its own is a claim. The same figure with the base, the split, the settlement volume it assumes and when trail starts to add up is a sum a broker can check against their own book.

Our broker earnings calculator runs that sum for any volume and split, so a principal can test the figure before it goes in the ad. If the business has a broker who started in the last few years, what they wrote in their first year is the most honest assumption available. How upfront and trail stack up is covered in what broking roles really pay.

The maths matters most to a lender thinking about a first commission-only seat, because they are swapping a salary they know for a figure they cannot verify. If leads come with the seat, say how many and from where. What that promise should state is set out in the broker job promise that rarely has a number.

A believable OTE is a range with its assumptions attached, meaning the volume, the split and the leads behind it. A broker can check each of those against their own book before they apply.

What should the pay section of a mortgage broker job description include?

Five lines, each one answering something the broker is already checking.

The last line is where the principal above was right. Experienced brokers raise clawback and trail with us when they weigh an offer, and our piece on who wears the clawback covers both. They belong in the conversation and the contract, with a line in the ad saying they are coming.

The rest of the brief, the week, the team and who the broker answers to, sits around these five lines. If an ad has already run once without landing, why broker job ads aren’t landing works through the rest of it.

Where should the number come from?

From the market, not from what the last broker was on. Our salary guide puts the base for a broker with two to five years at $85-110k nationally and a senior broker at $110-140k, with city bands for each. The median advertised package across 130 direct-employer broker ads in the Market Index was $110,000, and broker packages are often quoted on target including commission, so read that as a package rather than a base.

The salary benchmarker checks a base figure against the band for the role and the city. If the number still is not settled, settle it before the ad is written. Joe runs every FinTalent mortgage broker search himself and will talk the number through with you.