A mortgage for every stage of independent life.
Buying, remortgaging, raising capital or building a portfolio — assessed on how you actually earn, with whole-of-market choice.
Start from the situation, not the product
Mortgage products are named after transactions rather than problems, which makes the list below harder to navigate than it needs to be. In practice almost everyone arrives in one of four situations: buying a first home, moving, re-pricing a mortgage you already have, or raising money against a property.
Those map to first-time buyer, home mover, remortgage and capital raising respectively. The rest of the pages here are variations that apply when something about the property, the structure or the timing is unusual.
What changes for a contractor
Not the products — those are the same ones available to everyone. What changes is which lender will read your income properly, and that single variable decides more about your outcome than the choice of product does.
A lender working from the minimised profit on your tax return can cap your borrowing well below what a lender annualising your gross day rate would offer, on identical circumstances. So the useful order of operations is: establish which lenders assess you accurately, then optimise the product and the rate among those. Doing it the other way round means shopping for deals you were never going to be offered.
Where investment lending differs
If you are buying to let rather than to live in, the assessment flips. Buy-to-let lending rests mainly on the rent the property generates rather than on your personal income — which is why it is frequently the easier mortgage for a contractor to obtain.
Most lenders still want a minimum personal income, but as a threshold to clear rather than a multiplier that sets the loan. The binding constraint is the rental stress test instead, which you can model on the buy-to-let stress test calculator.