The Adverse Credit Ladder: What 19 UK Lenders Will Consider After an IVA, CCJ or Default
See how many of 19 UK lenders will consider your case after an IVA, CCJ or default, and why the deposit decides it.
Quick Answer
Yes, a mortgage after adverse credit is possible, and how possible depends on three things: what the entry was, how old it is, and how much deposit you have. Manor Mortgages Direct's September 2026 reading of 19 residential lenders' published criteria shows the deposit changes the answer more than the credit file does.
Three years after an IVA is discharged, 8 of the 19 lenders tracked will consider the case in principle. Look at the same case by deposit and the picture changes: 7 will consider it with 25 per cent down, and 2 with 10 per cent. At six years, when the IVA leaves the credit file, 14 of 19 will consider it and the deposit matters far less.
None of this is an offer. "Will consider" means the lender's published criteria do not exclude the case, and every application is still assessed on affordability, the property and the rest of the file. The counts describe the lenders Manor Mortgages Direct tracks, not the whole market, and lenders are not named.
Reviewed by Ben Stephenson, FCA-authorised mortgage adviser (FRN 496907) · 25+ years' experience · 4.9★ on Google. Updated: 9 September 2026.
Key Points
2 of 19 lenders consider a 3-year IVA at 90% LTV
14 of 19 consider a discharged IVA at six years
Default windows run from 6 to 72 months
Table of Contents
The deposit does more damage than the IVA
Adverse credit is usually talked about as a single closed door. The published criteria say something different. The door opens on a schedule, and how far it opens depends less on what went wrong than on how much deposit sits behind the application.
Manor Mortgages Direct keeps a structured record of UK lenders' published lending criteria for case placement. For this study we read the adverse credit sections of 19 residential lenders, 68 product tiers in all, as published in their own criteria guides and criteria pages in September 2026. Lenders are not named, and the counts describe the lenders tracked rather than the whole market.
Three years after an IVA discharge, 7 of the 19 residential lenders whose published criteria Manor Mortgages Direct tracks will consider an applicant borrowing up to 75 per cent of the property value. At 90 per cent, only 2 will. Checked September 2026, from 68 residential first charge product tiers.
That is the finding that surprised us, and it is the one that matters most to somebody deciding what to do next. Three years after an IVA is discharged, the number of lenders that will consider the case is not fixed. It collapses as the loan-to-value rises, from 7 at 75 per cent to 6 at 80, 3 at 85 and 2 at 90.
The practical reading is blunt. Somebody three years past an IVA with a 25 per cent deposit has a small but real market. The same person with a 10 per cent deposit has almost none. The deposit is the half of that equation they can still change, and it is the half most people never think to change.
Deposit three years after IVA discharge | Lenders that will consider it (of 19) |
25 per cent (75% LTV) | 7 |
20 per cent (80% LTV) | 6 |
15 per cent (85% LTV) | 3 |
10 per cent (90% LTV) | 2 |
The six-year line barely moves across the same range. At six years the count runs 13, 12, 11 and 11 across the same four deposit bands, because by then the entry has left the credit file and the deposit is doing far less work. Our IVA mortgage guide walks through what a lender actually asks for at each stage.
The six-year cliff
An IVA is recorded on a credit file for six years from the date the arrangement starts, as the Insolvency Service (2026) and the credit reference agencies both confirm. Lender criteria are built around that date rather than around the borrower's behaviour since. The result is a step, not a slope.
Of the 19 residential lenders whose published criteria Manor Mortgages Direct tracks, 8 will consider an applicant three years after an IVA is discharged. At six years, when the IVA drops off the credit file, that rises to 14. Checked September 2026.
Nothing changes between years three and five. Fourteen of the nineteen lenders publish a threshold, and those thresholds cluster at three years and six years with almost nothing in between. One lender will look at a case twelve months after discharge, and it caps that tier at 70 per cent of the property value.
The other five lenders publish no IVA position at all. They are counted as silent rather than as a refusal, which is the honest treatment, because silence in a published criteria page usually means the case is decided by an underwriter rather than by a rule. It does not mean the answer is yes, and it does not mean the answer is no.
An active IVA is different. None of the 16 lenders that publish a position will consider an applicant whose IVA is still running, and none of the 17 that publish a bankruptcy position will consider an undischarged bankrupt. The remaining lenders are silent. This is the one part of the ladder where the published criteria agree almost completely.
Bankruptcy discharge thresholds follow the same cliff shape. Of the 15 lenders that publish one, two will consider a case two years after discharge, six at three years, one at five years and six at six years. The three-year and six-year marks carry almost all of the weight.
The same default is either invisible or disqualifying
Every lender counts defaults within a window. The window is where the disagreement is, and it is much wider than most borrowers assume. It is also the single most useful fact in this study for anyone with an older entry on their file.
Among the residential lenders Manor Mortgages Direct tracks, the window over which a default is counted ranges from 6 months to 72 months. Twenty-four months is the most common. Checked September 2026, from the 14 lenders that publish a window.
Measured on each lender's most flexible published tier, three lenders look back six months. Two look back twelve months. Five sit on twenty-four months, one on thirty-six, and three look back the full six years. Lenders with several tiers usually lengthen the window as the tier gets cheaper. A default registered thirty months ago is therefore either entirely invisible or the reason for a decline, depending only on which lender sees the case.
This is why two people with the same credit file get opposite answers from two brokers. One broker knows which lenders are looking at the six-month window and one does not. Our guide to old defaults covers what actually rebuilds a file once a default is out of the window.
Size matters less than people expect. Four lenders publish a value below which a default is disregarded entirely, ranging from £100 to £350. The other fifteen publish no threshold at all, so a £96 mobile phone default and a £1,400 credit card default are treated by most published criteria as the same kind of entry.
A single CCJ is not the disaster people expect
Of the 15 residential lenders that whose published criteria Manor Mortgages Direct tracks state a CCJ position, 10 will consider an applicant with at least one CCJ inside the window they look at, and 5 will consider three or more. The other 5 accept none inside their window, and that window runs from six months to six years. Checked September 2026.
The gap between "some adverse" and "no adverse" turns out to be far smaller than the gap between one lender's tolerance and another's. A borrower with one satisfied judgment is inside the published criteria of two thirds of the lenders that state a position. A borrower with three is still inside a third of them. And "none inside the window" is not "never": at two of the five, the window is six months, so a judgment from a year ago has already dropped out of it.
Defaults follow the same shape. Of the 13 lenders publishing a default position, 8 will consider at least one inside their window and 5 accept none inside it, with those five windows again running from six months to six years. On mortgage arrears the tolerance is tighter, which is the one place the published criteria are consistently harsher than on any other entry.
Credit issue and lenders publishing a position | Will consider at least one, and accept none inside their window |
CCJs (15 of 19 publish) | 10 consider, 5 accept none |
Defaults (13 of 19 publish) | 8 consider, 5 accept none |
Secured arrears (14 of 19 publish) | 10 consider, 4 accept none |
Unsecured missed payments (12 of 19 publish) | 7 consider, 5 accept none |
Active debt management plan (12 of 19 publish) | 4 consider, 8 do not |
Active IVA (16 of 19 publish) | 0 consider, 16 do not |
Where a lender's published criteria are silent on an issue, it is left out of that row rather than counted as a refusal. That is why the denominators differ from row to row. "Accept none inside their window" means the lender's most flexible published tier allows zero of that entry within the period it counts, which is anywhere from six months to six years; it does not mean the file must never have carried one.
Mortgage arrears deserve their own line. Of the 14 lenders publishing a secured arrears position, four accept none at all, six allow one missed payment, two allow two and two allow three or more. Arrears on the mortgage itself are read as a signal about the next mortgage in a way that a missed phone bill is not.
The debt management plan is not the hard stop people assume
Four of the 12 residential lenders that whose published criteria Manor Mortgages Direct tracks state a position will consider an applicant still in an active debt management plan, and a further three will consider one 12 months after it completes. Checked September 2026.
That is a smaller door than the CCJ door, but it is a door, and it is one that most borrowers in a plan assume is bricked up. The four lenders that consider an active plan typically want it to have run for a minimum period and to be up to date, and they cap the loan-to-value on that tier. Our active DMP mortgage guide sets out what those tiers look like in practice.
Seven lenders publish no position on debt management plans at all. As with the IVA question, that silence is recorded as silence. For a borrower it means the answer sits with an underwriter, which brings us to the finding that decides most of the cases we see.
Who actually reads the file
Seven of the 19 residential lenders Manor Mortgages Direct tracks underwrite manually rather than by credit score. That is usually what decides whether an explanation gets heard at all. Checked September 2026.
Ten of the 19 use credit scoring, and none of them publishes the score it requires. For an applicant with an explanation to give, a business failure, a divorce, an illness, which of the two the lender uses is often the whole outcome. It is not something a credit report can tell you, and it is not something the lender's public pages tell you either.
A manual underwriter reads the file as a story. A one-off cluster of defaults from a single bad year, all satisfied, reads very differently to a slow drip of missed payments across five years, even when the two files score the same. A scoring lender cannot make that distinction, because it never sees the story. Our note on how lenders read worst status explains which lines on the file a manual underwriter looks at first.
This also explains a pattern brokers see constantly: the applicant who was declined by a high street lender with a strong file and then placed by a smaller lender without any change in circumstances. Nothing about the applicant changed. The method of assessment did.
Method, limitations and what the study does not say
Every figure in this study, in one place, so that it can be quoted from a single table. Each row names its own denominator.
Finding, checked September 2026 | Figure (of the lenders Manor Mortgages Direct tracks) |
IVA discharged 3 years, 75% LTV | 7 of 19 will consider |
IVA discharged 3 years, 90% LTV | 2 of 19 will consider |
IVA discharged 3 years, any deposit | 8 of 19 will consider |
IVA discharged 6 years | 14 of 19 will consider |
Active IVA or undischarged bankruptcy | 0 of 16 publishing a position |
Default counting window | 6 to 72 months, 24 most common |
At least one CCJ | 10 of 15 publishing a position |
Three or more CCJs | 5 of 15 publishing a position |
Active debt management plan | 4 of 12 publishing a position |
Manual underwriting rather than credit score | 7 of 19 |
Coverage by field, so the denominators can be checked: a CCJ position is published by 15 of the 19 lenders, a default position by 13, an IVA discharge threshold by 14, a bankruptcy discharge threshold by 15, a secured arrears position by 14, an unsecured missed payment position by 12, a debt management plan position by 12, an active IVA position by 16 and an underwriting method by all 19. Where a field is silent the lender is excluded from that count, never assumed.
It is worth being precise about what these numbers are. They are a count of published criteria, read in one month, across the lenders Manor Mortgages Direct tracks for placement. They are not a survey of every UK lender, and they are not a record of what any lender actually approved.
"Will consider" means the published criteria do not exclude the case. It is not an offer and it is not a rate. Every application is still assessed on affordability, on the property and on the rest of the credit file, and a case that sits inside the criteria of seven lenders can still be declined by all seven on income alone.
Criteria change constantly, which is why every figure here carries the month it was checked and why the underlying record is re-read monthly. A figure from this page quoted a year from now should be treated as history, not as advice. The bad credit mortgage guide is kept current and is the page to read for the present position.
There is one more honest gap. Only one of the 19 lenders publishes an explicit position on a financial associate's adverse credit, the situation where a partner's file is clean and the other's is not. The other 18 are silent, so the joint application question cannot carry a strong number, and we have not invented one. Our partner with bad credit guide explains how that case is handled in practice.
How to read your own position on the ladder
If your IVA is discharged and three years old, the first number to find out is your realistic loan-to-value, because it decides whether you are choosing between two lenders or seven. A larger deposit, a cheaper property or a gifted contribution each moves you up the ladder faster than waiting does.
If your entry is a default, find the registration date and count forward. At six months you are outside three lenders' windows. At twenty-four months you are outside eight. At seventy-two months you are outside all fourteen that publish one, and inside every lender's clean-file tier.
If your file has a story behind it, the lender's assessment method matters more than its criteria. Seven manual underwriters against ten scoring lenders is the split that decides whether the story gets read, and it is not visible from the lender's public pages.
And if you are in a debt management plan, do not assume the door is shut. Four lenders publish a position that considers an active plan and three more at twelve months after completion. That is a narrow route with a loan-to-value cap, but it exists, and the remortgage with bad credit guide sets out the version of it that applies to existing homeowners.
To cite this study: Manor Mortgages Direct, "The Adverse Credit Ladder", September 2026, manormortgagesdirect.com/adverse-credit-ladder. Figures may be quoted with that attribution; lenders are anonymised and counts describe the lenders tracked.
FAQs
How many lenders will consider a mortgage three years after an IVA?
Of the 19 residential lenders whose published criteria Manor Mortgages Direct tracks, 8 will consider an applicant three years after an IVA is discharged, checked September 2026. By deposit, 7 will consider the case at 75 per cent loan-to-value and 2 at 90 per cent. "Will consider" means the published criteria do not exclude the case; every application is still assessed individually.
Does an IVA stop you getting a mortgage for six years?
Not entirely. Eight of the 19 lenders tracked publish a threshold at three years after discharge, and one at twelve months, though that tier is capped at 70 per cent loan-to-value. At six years, when the IVA leaves the credit file, 14 of 19 will consider the case. The six-year mark is a cliff rather than a slope.
How far back do lenders look at defaults?
It varies more than most borrowers expect. Among the lenders Manor Mortgages Direct tracks that publish a window, the range runs from 6 months to 72 months, with 24 months the most common. The same default can therefore be invisible to one lender and disqualifying at another.
Can you get a mortgage with a CCJ?
Yes, with many lenders. Of the 15 tracked lenders that publish a CCJ position, 10 will consider an applicant with at least one CCJ inside the window they count, and 5 will consider three or more; the other 5 accept none inside a window that runs from six months to six years. Whether the judgment is satisfied, how old it is and its value all affect which tier applies.
Can you get a mortgage while in a debt management plan?
A small number of lenders publish a position that allows it. Four of the 12 that publish a DMP position will consider an active plan, typically with a minimum running period and a loan-to-value cap, and a further three will consider a case 12 months after the plan completes. Seven lenders publish no position at all.
What does "will consider" mean in this study?
It means the lender's published criteria, as read in September 2026, do not exclude the case. It is not an offer, not a decision in principle and not a rate. Every application is assessed on affordability, the property and the full credit file, and the counts describe the lenders Manor Mortgages Direct tracks rather than the whole market.
Summary
Adverse credit closes fewer doors than people assume, and the deposit decides most of the ones that stay open. Three years after an IVA, 7 of the 19 lenders tracked will consider a 25 per cent deposit but only 2 a 10 per cent one; at six years, 14 will consider the case. Default windows run from six months to six years, and seven lenders read the file by hand. Where an individual file lands on the ladder depends on the entry, its age and the deposit, in that order of surprise and the reverse order of control.
Reviewed by Ben Stephenson, FCA-authorised mortgage adviser, CeMAP-qualified.
Manor Mortgages Direct is FCA authorised, FRN 496907, has traded for 25 years, is highly positively reviewed, 4.9 rated on Google, and has helped thousands secure the right mortgage. Bristol-based mortgage brokers, assisting clients nationwide.
Sources
Manor Mortgages Direct (2026), criteria tracker, 68 residential first charge product tiers across 19 UK lenders, checked September 2026 - https://www.manormortgagesdirect.com/adverse-credit-ladder - accessed 9 September 2026
Insolvency Service (2026), Individual Insolvency Register - https://www.gov.uk/search-bankruptcy-insolvency-register - accessed 9 September 2026
Experian (2026), consumer guides on credit reports and insolvency - https://www.experian.co.uk/consumer/guides/ - accessed 9 September 2026
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