Which Mortgage Lenders Accept CCJs?

A County Court Judgment is a court order confirming that you owe a creditor money you have not repaid. It stays on your credit file for six years from the date of the judgment, and during that time most mainstream lenders treat it as a serious warning sign. That does not mean a mortgage is out of reach. A meaningful part of the UK mortgage market exists specifically to lend to people with judgments on their file.

The honest answer to whether you can get a mortgage with a CCJ is that it depends on three things: how old the judgment is, how large it was, and whether it has been satisfied. A small, satisfied CCJ registered four years ago is a very different proposition from a large judgment registered last month. Lenders read those details before they read anything else.

We are an information website, not a broker or a lender. Nothing here is financial advice, and no lender can be guaranteed to accept any application. What we can do is explain how the market is organised, so the criteria patterns you encounter make sense when you or an FCA-regulated broker start comparing options.

The UK mortgage market splits into three broad segments for adverse credit, and each treats CCJs differently.

High street banks rely heavily on automated credit scoring. A CCJ registered within the last six years will usually cause an automatic score failure, regardless of your income or deposit. Some high street lenders will tolerate a single old, small, satisfied judgment, but their published criteria rarely spell this out, and the scoring model makes the final call.

Building societies sit in the middle. Many of the smaller and regional societies underwrite applications manually, which means a human being reads your file and weighs the story behind the judgment. A society may accept a satisfied CCJ over two or three years old where a bank would decline, particularly if the rest of your conduct is clean.

Specialist and near-prime lenders are intermediary-only firms whose entire business model is adverse credit. They publish explicit CCJ criteria, often expressed as a maximum number of judgments within a set period, or a maximum combined value. Some will consider judgments registered within the last twelve months; most price their products in tiers, so the older and smaller your CCJ, the closer your terms sit to the mainstream.

Lender criteria for CCJs follow recognisable patterns across the market. The table below describes how the three segments typically respond to different CCJ profiles. It describes common patterns rather than the rules of any single lender, and criteria change frequently. A whole-of-market broker can check live criteria on the day you apply.

A satisfied CCJ is a judgment you have paid in full, with the payment recorded at the Registry Trust. Satisfaction matters a great deal to lenders, because it shows the debt was resolved rather than abandoned. Several segments of the market draw a hard line here: building societies that consider CCJs often require satisfaction as a condition, and some specialist products price satisfied judgments more favourably than unsatisfied ones.

If you paid the debt within one calendar month of the judgment, you can apply to have the CCJ removed from the register entirely, which is worth doing before any mortgage application. If you paid later, you can still obtain a certificate of satisfaction from the court for a small fee, and you should make sure the satisfaction shows on all three credit reference agencies, since lenders may check any of them.

Unsatisfied judgments are not an absolute bar. A minority of specialist lenders will accept unsatisfied CCJs below a value cap, sometimes ignoring small judgments from communications or utility providers altogether. Expect a larger deposit requirement and higher pricing in exchange.

Age is the single most powerful variable. Lenders commonly set their criteria around registration-date thresholds at twelve months, twenty-four months and thirty-six months. Each anniversary you pass moves you into a wider pool of willing lenders and usually a cheaper pricing tier. A judgment registered more than three years ago, especially when satisfied, takes many borrowers back within reach of near-prime terms.

Value matters in a different way. Many lenders ignore CCJs below a small threshold, often a few hundred pounds, particularly where the creditor was a mobile phone or utility company. Above that, criteria tend to use combined value caps across all judgments registered in the last two or three years. A single CCJ of several thousand pounds narrows your options more than two small ones, because it suggests a more serious repayment failure.

The number of judgments counts too. One CCJ with otherwise clean conduct is a story most specialists will listen to. Multiple judgments across several years point to an ongoing pattern, and the pool of willing lenders shrinks accordingly.

Deposit requirements with a CCJ scale with the severity of the judgment. As a general market pattern, borrowers with older satisfied judgments can find products at 90 or even 95 percent loan to value through specialist and near-prime lenders, while recent or unsatisfied judgments usually push the requirement to a 15 to 25 percent deposit.

A larger deposit does two jobs. It reduces the loan to value, which moves you into criteria bands where more lenders operate, and it signals financial recovery since the judgment. If you sit between the standard thresholds, even a few thousand pounds more deposit can change which products you qualify for.

Applying directly to lenders one by one is the most damaging way to shop around with a CCJ, because each full application leaves a hard search on your file and a string of declines makes the next lender warier. The established route looks different.