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Payment timeline tool: find the cash gap between builder payments and loan drawdowns

From Modular Living Australia — the independent knowledge base Last updated: 8 Oct 2026

Enter each payment in your build contract and the amount your lender will release at the same point. The tool totals both week by week and shows whether, when and by how much your payments run ahead of the loan. It uses only the figures you enter.

A construction loan does not hand over a lump sum. It releases money in stages, and every stage is defined by physical work completed on the site — slab, frame, lock-up, fit-out, practical completion.^[1][2] That structure exists because the lender's security is the land, and the value of the land rises as the building rises on it.

Factory-built housing inverts the sequence. A substantial share of the contract value is created inside a factory, on premises the lender has no security over, weeks or months before anything appears on your block. The payment schedule follows the factory; the drawdown schedule follows the site. Between those two schedules there can be a period where you owe money that the loan will not yet release.

This tool maps one against the other. It has no view on what your numbers should be — it asks you for them, and shows you the shape of the result.

Map your schedule §

Enter each payment point from your build contract, and next to it the amount your lender has confirmed it will release at that point. Leave a drawdown cell at zero where the lender releases nothing. Amounts in Australian dollars; weeks counted from contract signing.

The "Load standard stage names" button fills in stage descriptions only. It enters no amounts and no weeks, because those come from your contract and your lender, not from this page. The lender stage names it loads are the ones published by lenders themselves.^[1][2]

Why the mismatch happens §

Lenders publish their drawdown structures. The Commonwealth Bank describes a construction loan as releasing funds across typically five to six stages — slab at roughly 15–20% of funds, frame at roughly 20%, lock-up at roughly 20%, then fit-out — with each stage defined by work completed on the site.^[1] Westpac's published example runs foundations and slab, frame, lockup, fitout, then practical completion, again described entirely in terms of what has been built on the block.^[2]

Read those lists against a modular contract and the problem is visible immediately. There is no stage called "modules complete in factory". There is no stage called "delivery". On a volumetric build, the slab may be the only item on the site when a large share of the contract value has already been manufactured and invoiced.

The consequence is not that finance is impossible. It is that the gap has to be bridged by something — your own savings, a deposit released earlier, an equity drawdown against another property, or a lender that has adapted its product. Lender treatment of modular builds varies between institutions,^[3] so this is a question to settle before signing a build contract rather than after.

What sits in the gap §

Money paid for work in a factory buys something you cannot see, cannot inspect casually, and do not have possession of. Three things are worth establishing in writing before the first factory-stage payment.

What the payment secures

Ask what you own once the payment is made, and what happens to partially built modules if the contract ends. The answer depends on the contract terms and, in some cases, on where the modules physically sit. This is a question for a lawyer, not a builder, and it is worth the fee at the point of contract rather than at the point of dispute.

Whether statutory warranty attaches to it

Coverage of the factory stage is not uniform. The Queensland regulator states that the home warranty scheme may apply to prefabricated or flatpack homes, but only for on-site residential construction work including installation — it does not cover off-site manufacturing.^[4] Where that is the position, the period during which you have paid the most and can see the least is also the period least covered.

Positions in the other states and territories are not covered by the sources compiled here. Confirm the treatment with your state building regulator.

What the deposit cap is in your state

Residential building contracts are subject to statutory deposit limits, and the limit and the way it is calculated differ between jurisdictions. This site does not publish a figure for any state, because the sources found do not agree with one another and an incorrect number here would be worse than none. Confirm the current cap with the consumer protection or building authority in your state before paying a deposit, particularly if the amount requested looks large relative to the contract.

What this tool does not do §

It does not calculate interest. Construction loans are commonly interest-only on drawn funds during the build, which means the interest cost depends on when money is drawn, not only how much. That is outside what this page computes.

It does not include site costs, variations or fees. The shortfall it shows is the shortfall on the figures you entered, and a real project has items that are not in a payment schedule at all.

It does not predict what a lender will agree to. The drawdown column is for amounts a lender has confirmed, not amounts you hope for. If you have not had that conversation yet, the shortfall figure this page produces is a planning estimate and nothing more.

Nothing entered on this page is stored or transmitted. Reloading clears every figure.

References §