Getting a Mortgage with a 600 Credit Score

Often, yes. A 600 on Experian sits in the Poor band, which runs from 561 to 720, but it is moving in the right direction, and files at this level get approved regularly through specialist lenders, flexible building societies and occasionally near prime ranges that sit just below the high street.

Remember that the 600 itself is never the deciding factor, because lenders score applications internally from your raw credit report, income, deposit and loan size rather than from any consumer number. A 600 built on issues that are now three years old, with clean recent conduct, can pass criteria that a higher score with fresher problems would fail. We write as an information site, not a broker or lender, and nothing here is advice; an FCA regulated broker is the right source for a personal recommendation.

A 600 is the clearest demonstration we know of why the agency matters. On Experian's 0 to 999 scale it is Poor. On Equifax's 0 to 1,000 scale it sits in the Good band. And on TransUnion's compact 0 to 710 scale, 600 lands at the very top of Fair, within a handful of points of the Good band, which begins at around 604. The same number spans three verdicts across three scales.

A 600 on Experian most often belongs to a file in late recovery. The typical ingredients are adverse events now two to four years old, such as a satisfied default or an old CCJ, a stretch of missed payments that ended well over a year ago, and current accounts that have run cleanly since. The score lags the behaviour, because scoring models reward sustained clean history slowly.

The other common route to 600 is a fundamentally clean but underpowered file: short credit history, low account diversity, a recent address move not yet reflected on the electoral roll, or utilisation creeping above half of available limits. These files have no adverse events at all, and for them 600 is a data problem rather than a behaviour problem, often fixable within months.

At 600 the realistic market widens compared with lower bands. Specialist adverse credit lenders remain the core option where defaults or CCJs are still under two years old, but building societies with manual underwriting become genuinely interested in files whose issues are older, and near prime products start to appear. The high street is usually still a stretch unless your underlying file is clean and the score is simply lagging.

Deposit expectations at this level typically run from 10 to 20 percent. Borrowers with issues over two years old and satisfied can find options around 10 to 15 percent; anything registered within the last year pushes requirements towards 20 percent and narrows the lender list. Affordability rules are standard, generally around 4 to 4.5 times income, and a strong, stable income does real work at this level because internal scorecards weigh it alongside the credit data.

Experian's Fair band starts at 721, and from 600 that is a realistic 6 to 18 month target depending on what is holding you down. If the drag is administrative, meaning utilisation, electoral roll gaps or report errors, fixing those can deliver a large share of the distance within two or three reporting cycles.

If the drag is ageing adverse data, the calendar does the heavy lifting, and your job is not to interrupt it: every payment on time, no new credit applications in the run up to a mortgage, balances trending down, and old well run accounts left open. Watch for the moment your last default passes three years old, because that threshold changes lender criteria as well as your score. Our timeline planner exists precisely to surface those dates.

Pull all three statutory reports first, because at 600 the difference between a recovering adverse file and a thin clean file completely changes your strategy, and only the reports can tell you which you have. Then run our eligibility checker for an honest read on which lender tier fits your profile today, and our timeline planner if any of your issues are still under three years old. For how the whole scoring system fits together, our full credit score guide covers the three agencies, their bands and what lenders do with the data.

An FCA regulated whole of market broker is the right partner for the application itself. At 600 your file may qualify for more than you expect, and a broker can test that against real criteria without speculative hard searches.