Most flat owners have no idea that their lease can stop them getting a mortgage. Your fixed rate ends, you go to remortgage, and the new lender says no. Your income is fine and your credit is fine, but your lease isn’t.
The Two Things Every Lender Checks
Nearly every regulated UK mortgage lender publishes its criteria in the UK Finance Lenders’ Handbook. The 2026 version covers the top 147 lenders, who between them represent 98% of all residential mortgages, and every one of them looks at two things in your lease: how many years you have left, and how much ground rent you pay and how it changes over time.
Test One: Lease Length
Whenever anyone applies for a mortgage on your flat, whether that’s a buyer or you remortgaging, the lender’s underwriter pulls the title from HM Land Registry and checks the years left against their own criteria. Those vary a lot, but the typical cut-off is between 70 and 85 years.
You might think that with 85 years or more you’ll be fine, but lenders also look at how long the lease will have left at the end of the mortgage. If a lender wants 50 years remaining at the end of a 30-year mortgage, your lease needs at least 80 years today.
Across all 147 lenders, a clear pattern shows up around the 90-year mark:
A shorter lease typically means fewer mortgages
The mortgage term matters too. As house prices rise, people take longer mortgages to afford them, and a longer term needs a longer lease behind it.
A Garden Flat in North London
A couple in North London called us recently. They had a lovely garden flat with 82.7 years on the lease, and about a year earlier they had decided to try to sell it without extending. They found a buyer, and a few months in the buyer’s mortgage was declined without anyone being told why. They found a second buyer and got the same outcome. Only when their solicitors chased the lenders did they learn the reason, which was the number of years left on the lease.
By the time they called us they had spent a year trying to sell, the lease had got shorter and the premium had gone up. On paper, nearly half of lenders would still lend at 82 years, but only on a mortgage term of 30 years or less. It was an expensive flat, and most of the buyers who could afford it needed 35 years or more.
The Milestones Worth Knowing
At 150 years, a lease is treated as a virtual freehold, so from a valuation point of view your flat is no different to a freehold. At 130 years, the lease length has no measurable effect on how long it takes to sell (a 200-year lease and a 130-year lease sell in the same time). At 80 years, marriage value kicks in and extending gets significantly more expensive. At 50 years, most mainstream lenders won’t lend, and the same applies if less than 50 years would be left at the end of the mortgage.
The lease lengths that matter
- 150 yearsVirtual freehold. No different to a freehold on value.
- 130 yearsNo measurable effect on how long it takes to sell.
- 80 yearsMarriage value kicks in. About half of lenders still lend, on a 30-year term at most.
- 50 yearsMost mainstream lenders won’t lend, today or at the end of the mortgage.
That means a flat with 76 years left will likely be limited to mortgages of less than 25 years. Shorter terms mean higher monthly payments, so fewer buyers are interested, even though the flat is mortgageable on paper.
Test Two: Ground Rent
Ground rent catches people out because it sits in a clause most people have never properly read. Lenders run two checks on it.
The Amount
The lender compares your annual ground rent to the value of your flat. Most draw the line at 0.1%, so a flat worth £200,000 can carry up to £200 a year and a flat worth £400,000 up to £400. Some lenders go as high as 0.2%, but 0.1% is the baseline.
Ground rent check 1: the amount
- Step 1Annual ground rentWhat you pay the freeholder each year.
- Step 2Value of your flatWhat the lender thinks it’s worth.
- Step 3CompareMost lenders draw the line at 0.1%. Some go to 0.2%.
What 0.1% allows
- £200,000 flatUp to £200 a year
- £300,000 flatUp to £300 a year
- £400,000 flatUp to £400 a year
How It Changes Over Time
As with lease length, lenders care about the ground rent today and through the life of the mortgage. For an increasing ground rent to be acceptable to most lenders, it has to pass both tests: it must stay under 0.1% of the flat’s value over the mortgage term, and it must not double more often than every 20 to 25 years.
A ground rent of £150 on a £300,000 flat that goes up by £50 every 25 years would be fine for nearly all lenders, because it passes both. A ground rent of £100 that doubles every 10 years (£100, then £200, £400 and £800) may be acceptable today but won’t be in the future. Ground rents linked to an index, such as RPI inflation or house prices, need a much more detailed review, because it’s hard to predict what they will be in the future.
A £100 ground rent that doubles every 10 years
We see this most with flats built relatively recently and with leases that were extended informally. Some leaseholders took a cheaper informal deal to save money and got the extra years, but the ground rent went up with it, say from a fixed £200 to one that doubles or tracks an index. To remortgage, they then have to go back to the freeholder and extend again, formally, to get rid of the ground rent. There’s more on this in formal vs informal lease extensions and the ground rent reforms.
All of this is about ground rent only. Lenders look at service charges too, but that’s a separate topic.
Your Options When Both Tests Apply
Your flat has to pass both tests, so failing one has the same effect as failing both.
If you’re selling, extending the lease is your only real option, because you can’t control what your buyer’s lender decides. A formal extension adds 90 years on top of your current lease and takes the ground rent to zero.
If you’re buying, you can’t force the seller to extend, but you can ask them to start the process. Most lenders will want the extension completed before you complete the purchase, so you could be waiting 6 to 9 months or longer. If lease length is the problem, applying for a mortgage with a shorter term may help.
If you’re remortgaging, extending is again the best option, for the same 90 years and zero ground rent.
Check Your Lease Before a Lender Does
Whichever position you’re in, it’s worth knowing which test your lease might fail before anyone applies for a mortgage on it. Almost everyone we speak to finds out when the flat is already on the market and the broker rings to say the lender has declined, and then it happens again with the next buyer, as it did for the couple in North London. The other call we get is from people who have spent decades in their flat on an interest-only mortgage that is about to end. They may still owe hundreds of thousands of pounds, and with the lease that short, most lenders may not lend to them. We have conversations like these nearly every week.
If you want to know where your lease stands, request your free lease report. We’ll run it against the published criteria of all 147 lenders and send you a personalised report. If it helps, you can then book a free call with our team to talk through your options. It’s not a sales call.
