Published 2026-07-11 · Visa Mortgage Guide

The Visa Mortgage Lottery: how the same buyer gets wildly different answers

The finding: ask ten UK mortgage lenders the same question — "how much deposit does a visa holder without settled status need for a £300,000 home?" — and the answers range from £15,000 to £90,000, a £75,000 swing (and one lender won't lend at all). Nothing about the buyer changes across that range. Same income, same visa, same property, same day. The only variable is which lender picks up the phone.

That £75,000 swing is the entire finding of this piece. Everything below is the data behind it.

The deposit lottery

We ran a single hypothetical buyer — a visa holder without indefinite leave to remain, purchasing a £300,000 property — against each lender's maximum published loan-to-value (LTV) for that status. The deposit required is simply the percentage of £300,000 the lender won't lend.

| Lender | Max LTV without ILR | Deposit needed on £300,000 | |---|---|---| | Halifax (via its routes) | 95% | £15,000 | | Perenna | 95% | £15,000 | | Barclays | 90% | £30,000 | | Santander | 90% | £30,000 | | Accord | 90% | £30,000 | | HSBC | 85% | £45,000 | | Nationwide | 85% | £45,000 | | NatWest | 75% | £75,000 | | Kensington | 70% (exception route only) | £90,000 | | Aldermore | — | Effectively unavailable without settled status |

Read that table as a straight line, not a cluster of similar numbers. The buyer who happens to ask Halifax or Perenna needs £15,000. The buyer who happens to ask Kensington needs £90,000 — six times more, for the identical purchase. NatWest sits at a flat 75% cap with no route above it on a sole application, which alone puts £60,000 more deposit between it and the two 95% lenders. Barclays' 90% is corroborated by broker reporting rather than a source we could independently verify on Barclays' own pages, so treat it as directionally right but confirm it case-by-case. Kensington's 70% is an exception-underwriting route, not standard policy, and Aldermore's stated position is that a work visa alone — without settled status — isn't accepted at all.

The practical implication: a buyer who saves against the wrong lender's assumptions can spend a year saving £45,000 more than they needed to, or conversely believe they're £30,000 short of a purchase they could complete today at a different lender. The deposit target isn't a market fact. It's a lender-specific policy choice, and most buyers never find out it varies until they're already deep into saving toward one number.

The acceptance lottery

The deposit-size gap only applies to lenders who'll consider the case at all. Widen the lens to the full panel we track — 92 lenders — and a second gap opens up before LTV even enters the conversation:

• 71 of 92 will consider a foreign national without settled status, at some LTV and under some conditions.
• 15 of 92 refer the case for individual underwriting rather than lending against a published policy — the outcome depends on the specific underwriter, not a table.
• 4 of 92 won't lend to a foreign national without settled status under any circumstances.
• 2 of 92 have a position we couldn't establish with confidence from published criteria.

That means roughly one in five lenders on the panel (the 15 "refer" plus the 4 "won't" cases) either can't be assessed from criteria at all or rule the buyer out entirely — invisible to a buyer who only checks rates, since a declined or referred application rarely shows up until an application is already in. Approaching the market at random, rather than starting with the subset of lenders who actively want this business, is itself a source of wasted time and failed applications.

The income lottery

The third gap sits inside income assessment, and it's arguably the sharpest of the three because it applies after a buyer has already cleared the deposit and acceptance hurdles. The same overseas salary, converted to the same sterling figure, is treated completely differently lender to lender:

• NatWest counts foreign income at 100%, with no haircut applied for it being non-UK-sourced.
• Nationwide, Perenna and Aldermore don't count overseas income at all — it's excluded from the affordability assessment entirely, regardless of amount or currency.
• Halifax and Santander apply a 20–25% haircut to foreign income, but only on specific currencies — not a blanket discount across all overseas earnings.

For a buyer with, say, £60,000 of income earned overseas, that's the difference between the full £60,000 counting toward affordability at one lender and £0 of it counting at another — a swing large enough on its own to move someone from "can afford this property" to "can't," independent of deposit or LTV entirely.

Why it happens

There's no industry standard for pricing the risk of lending to someone without settled immigration status. Each lender is independently answering the same underlying question — what happens to this loan if the borrower's right to remain in the UK doesn't get renewed, or their earning capacity is disrupted by a visa condition — and arriving at a different risk model. Some lenders manage that risk through the LTV cap (lend less against the property so there's more equity buffer). Some manage it through income thresholds (only take borrowers whose income comfortably clears the loan regardless of what happens next). Some manage it through visa-time rules (only lend if enough of the visa term is left to plausibly outlast the mortgage's early years). Because these are three separate levers, and lenders each pull them to different degrees, the combinations multiply rather than converge.

If anything, that spread is widening rather than narrowing. 2025–26 saw a number of lenders actively ease their foreign-national criteria — new LTV tiers, lower income minimums, wider visa-type acceptance — as building societies in particular moved to compete for this business. That's good news for buyers in aggregate, but because the easing hasn't been uniform, it has stretched the gap between the most and least accommodating lenders further apart, not closed it.

What it means for buyers

The single highest-leverage thing a visa-holder buyer can do is check lender criteria before setting a savings target — not after. A buyer who assumes "the market" needs 25% down, because that's what the first lender they asked required, may be saving two or three times more than necessary. A buyer who assumes 5% is achievable everywhere may be heading for repeated declines. Both mistakes are avoidable with the same fix: check first.

Run your own numbers through the eligibility checker, model deposit scenarios with the deposit calculator, and if part of your income is earned overseas, see how it's likely to be treated with the foreign income calculator. For the full, lender-by-lender breakdown behind the table above, see the LTV league table, and for the complete walkthrough of how visa status, income and residency interact across the market, see the visa mortgage handbook.

Methodology

This analysis is based on our own review of published intermediary lending criteria for ten named major lenders (Halifax, Perenna, Barclays, Santander, Accord, HSBC, Nationwide, NatWest, Kensington, Aldermore) and a wider 92-lender panel, verified July 2026. Deposit figures assume a £300,000 purchase and each lender's maximum published LTV for a foreign national without indefinite leave to remain; they are illustrative of relative positioning, not a quote for any individual case. Lending criteria in this market change frequently — the figures above are indicative and dated to July 2026, and should be reconfirmed directly with the lender or a whole-of-market broker before relying on them.

Journalists and researchers may cite this analysis with attribution to Visa Mortgage Guide (visamortgageguide.co.uk).

This is information, not financial advice. Verified 11 July 2026 against published intermediary criteria; figures change and should always be reconfirmed with the lender or a whole-of-market broker before you rely on them.