Where the high street stops
The standard high-street mortgage application form assumes a particular shape of borrower: salaried, PAYE, two years in the job, payslips that match a P60 that matches a bank statement. If that’s you, the process is straightforward and a broker arguably adds limited value beyond convenience. If your situation has so much as one twist — limited company director, day-rate contractor, sole trader with a recent expansion, multiple income streams — the same form starts producing the wrong answer.
We see this constantly in Derby and across Derbyshire. Successful directors who pay themselves a small PAYE salary and take the rest as dividends to manage tax, declined on affordability by a lender who only counted the salary. Contractors with strong £600-a-day track records told to find a permanent job. Freelancers with multiple clients and rising income offered loans calibrated to their lowest year. None of these are unusual cases, and none of them are problems with the borrower — they’re problems with the lender choice.
How we work a self-employed case
The first conversation is largely about getting the actual numbers on the table — accounts, SA302s, dividends, retained profit, contractor day rate, future pipeline. From there we build a picture of how the strongest two or three lenders for your specific situation will calculate the loan they’ll offer.
We work with:
- Limited company directors — across lenders who take salary + dividends and lenders who take salary + retained profit. The difference can be five-figure changes in maximum loan, on identical underlying numbers.
- Sole traders and partnerships — two or three years of SA302s is the baseline, with a handful of lenders accepting one year for borrowers in the same field as their previous employment.
- Contractors — day-rate calculations where they’re available, working with lenders who genuinely understand contractor income rather than forcing it into a PAYE mould.
- CIS subcontractors — calculated on gross income for the right lenders, against deductions for the wrong ones.
- Mixed income — employed salary plus self-employed side income, or multiple self-employed streams, where one calculation rarely fits.
Adverse credit isn’t the end
The other category of “complex” case we take on is borrowers carrying historical credit issues. Defaults from years ago, CCJs settled but visible on file, missed payments during a difficult period, occasionally an IVA or debt management plan in the more distant past. The high-street answer is often a flat no based on a credit score, which is usually a more conservative read than the actual lending criteria require.
Specialist lenders price for risk rather than refuse it, and the right one will usually accept the case — sometimes at high-street pricing, sometimes at a small premium, depending on the age and severity of the adverse credit. The single most useful thing you can do is be honest about your credit history at the first conversation. We can almost always work with the truth; what we can’t do is rescue a case that fell over because an issue surfaced late in underwriting.
Local roots, sensible advice
If you’re self-employed in Derby — or anywhere in Derbyshire — and you’ve been told no, or been quoted a borrowing figure that doesn’t reflect what you actually earn, get in touch. Half an hour on the phone is usually enough to know what’s realistic and which lenders are worth a proper application.