One income. Many ways the system mislabels it.
Whatever the payroll architecture behind your contract, there is a lender that assesses it correctly. Find your situation below.
Why the label matters so much
Every category below describes the same underlying thing — someone whose income does not arrive as a monthly payslip. What differs is which figure a lender should be reading, and getting that wrong is what produces the disappointing quotes contractors are used to.
A company director should often be assessed on salary plus a share of retained profit, not just what they draw. A CIS subcontractor should be read on gross posted income before the 20% deduction, not the net figure. An umbrella worker should be read on gross contract value rather than post-deduction take-home. Same person, same work, materially different answers.
The pattern underneath all of them
High-street affordability processes were built around employment, so they default to the most conservative number they can find in your paperwork. For a tax-efficient contractor that number is almost always the smallest and least representative one.
The lenders worth applying to use contract-based underwriting instead — reading the contract in front of you and annualising the day rate rather than looking backwards at minimised accounts. Knowing which lenders do that, for your particular income shape, is most of the work.
If your category is not listed
The categories are conveniences rather than boundaries. Plenty of people sit across two — a director who also does CIS work, or a locum with both NHS and private income — and the right approach is usually to assess each strand on the basis that suits it and find a lender comfortable combining them.
If none of the pages below describes you exactly, the question to bring is simply how you are paid. That, and a copy of the contract, is enough to establish which lenders should be looking at your case. The document checklist sets out what to gather.