Changes to our criteria*

We’ve improved our Residential stress rate.

From Thursday 17 July 2025, we’re giving our customers the flexibility to borrow more and reduced the stress rate used for all Residential lending to 6.75% (or product rate +1% if higher).

This includes First Time Buyer applications, helping more customer onto, and up the property ladder.

For more information, visit our Affordability page.

Previous changes to our criteria*

4 April 2025 – We’ve made changes to our lending criteria

We’ve made improvements to our Buy to Let lending criteria.

From Friday 4 April, we’ve reduced the Interest Cover Ratio (ICR) applied to our Buy to Let applications by up to 1%. Please see the table below

Application Type	Less than 5 year fixed product	5 year or more fixed product
Re-mortgages with no additional borrowing (excluding residential to BTL / Let to Buy)	Higher of 4.75% or product rate +1%	Higher of 4.75% or product rate +1%
All other application types (including residential to BTL / Let to Buy)	Higher of 5.50% or product rate +2%	Higher of 4.75% or product rate +1%

We’ve also removed our minimum income requirement for Buy to Let applications.

See our Buy to Let Employment criteria page for more information.

We’ve made changes to our New Build and Shared Ownership lending criteria

From Friday 21 February, we increased our maximum loan to value for Residential New Build houses and bungalows from 90% to 95%.

We’ve also increased our maximum loan to value for Shared Ownership houses and bungalow purchases from 90% to 95% of the customer share.

See our criteria for New Builds and Shared Ownership for full details.

To see the product information for these new LTV brackets, visit our Products page.
From Thursday 13 February 2025, we’ve increased our maximum loan to income (LTI) multiple for New Build properties.

Now, if an employed customer earning above £75,000pa is purchasing a New Build property up to 90% LTV, they could benefit from a maximum LTI of 5.50 times income.

Supporting more customers purchasing energy efficient properties, that will have lower running costs.

We’re also reducing the income threshold for our maximum LTI of 5.50 times income to £75,000 from £100,000 for our mainstream Residential lending.

For more information on these improvements, please visit our Affordability page.
From Tuesday 7 January, we’ve made the following improvements to our Concessionary Purchase criteria.

We’re introducing a new Concessionary Purchase option of a minimum 5% discount of the market value with a minimum 5% deposit. This applies to both applicants purchasing from an immediate family member or a sitting tenant purchasing from their landlord.

For the full details, including different policy scenarios, visit our Concessionary Purchase page.

*Please check the criteria pages for up to date information