Mortgage affordability
calculator: see how
much 57 UK lenders
could lend you.

UK mortgage affordability is the maximum amount a lender will let you borrow, based on your income, monthly outgoings, and the lender’s own stress test of what you could still pay if interest rates went up. It’s the “how much can I borrow” figure that drives every mortgage decision — and crucially, it varies by lender. The same applicant can be offered £240,000 by one bank and £310,000 by another on identical inputs.

The two main levers are the income multiple (typically 4 to 4.5 times annual income, up to 5x or 5.5x for higher earners) and the stress rate the lender applies to test whether you could still afford the payment if rates rose. Different lenders apply different rules to bonus income, overtime, commission, self-employment profits, and pension contributions — and those rule differences can produce a wide spread between lenders.

Beyond the income side, lenders also assess your committed expenditure (loans, credit-card debt, school fees, child maintenance), your credit history, and the property itself. A handful of factors — probation period employment, a foreign-currency salary, a flat above commercial premises, a recent CCJ — narrow your lender pool dramatically. We’ve built dedicated tools so you can see who accepts your situation in those edge cases.

The point of running our calculator before applying is simple: every full mortgage application leaves a hard credit search. Applying to a lender that would have declined you anyway costs a small ding on your credit file — and three or four of those compound. We check the lender criteria and affordability calculations without ever touching your credit file, so you can focus your application on lenders whose published criteria appear to fit your details.

As a rough rule of thumb, expect 4 to 4.5 times your annual gross income on a standard residential mortgage with a 10-15% deposit. Higher earners and clients with larger deposits often access 5x to 5.5x. Joint applicants combine incomes, which usually multiplies up rather than averages.

Quick reference at standard 4.5x multiple, single applicant:

Real-world figures depend heavily on your outgoings, deposit, credit profile, and whether you have bonus or commission income. The calculator runs your own figures through each lender’s affordability calculation, giving you an estimate for each lender based on your circumstances.

For each of 57 UK lenders, we run your inputs (income, employment type, deposit, outgoings, credit profile, property type) through that lender’s affordability calculation — its own published API or calculator where available, otherwise our model of its published criteria. You see a per-lender maximum borrowing figure, a flag for any lender that explicitly declines your situation, and a side-by-side comparison.

Checking all 57 lenders in our calculator — including specialists (Kensington, Pepper, Bluestone, Precise, Vida, Together, etc.) — is completely free, and buy-to-let is covered too across 21 specialist BTL lenders.

We’re an independent information tool, not an FCA-authorised broker. The calculator estimates which lenders’ criteria fit your details and how much they could lend; your broker remains the right person to confirm and apply. See how it works for the detail on how each calculation is built.