The right lender, not just a familiar name.

Why we do not publish lender criteria

You will notice the pages below describe how each lender approaches contractor cases without quoting income multiples, minimum day rates or trading-history requirements. That is deliberate. Those specifics are the lender's own, they are revised frequently, and figures republished on third-party sites are routinely out of date within weeks.

Quoting a number we cannot stand behind would make the pages look more useful while making them less reliable. What we do instead is check the live position against your actual case before submitting it — which is the only version of that information worth having.

What placement actually involves

Choosing a lender is not picking the lowest rate from a table. It is matching your specific income structure to the underwriting that reads it correctly, then finding the best pricing available among the lenders that will actually lend to you.

Do it the other way round — chase the headline rate first — and you risk a full application, a hard credit search and a decline from a lender that was never going to assess you properly. That footprint then follows you to the next application. What whole of market means covers why breadth matters here more than it does for a salaried borrower.

High street or specialist?

Both, depending on the case. Several mainstream banks have well-established contractor routes through intermediaries, and where your case fits, they compete on price with anything else in the market — there is no contractor surcharge.

Specialist lenders come into play when criteria rather than pricing are the obstacle: limited trading history, complex or mixed income, or a structure the high street cannot categorise. They can price higher, which is a trade worth making only when a mainstream lender genuinely would not lend what you need. That comparison is what we run before recommending anything.