Your CCJ Is a Year Old. Which Lenders Will Look at You Now?
- Aug 3
- 16 min read
See how the lender market splits into tiers once a judgment passes its first birthday, and which tier fits you.
Quick Answer
With a CCJ registered twelve to twenty four months ago, several lenders can still consider you, but they sit in different tiers. Mainstream lenders typically say no inside their three year window. Specialist and near prime ranges published in July 2026 reach roughly eighty five to ninety five percent loan to value.
The tier you land on matters more in this band than almost anything you can do to your file. Two lenders reading the identical application can give genuinely different answers, because one measures adverse credit in months and the other measures it in whole years. Neither is being unreasonable. They are simply running different grids.
That makes lender selection the main variable, not deposit size and not how sorry you sound in the explanation letter. Deposit still matters, but it moves you between rungs on a ladder rather than through a door. Understanding which ladder you are on is the useful work in this band.
Reviewed by Ben Stephenson, FCA authorised (FRN 496907) · 25+ years' experience · 4.9★ on Google. Updated: 31 July 2026.
Who Is This Guide For
Best for a first time buyer with one judgment from 2024, a remortgager whose CCJ turned eighteen months old, and a couple where only one partner has a judgment, who all need to know which tier of lender fits today.
Key Points
Published criteria reach 95% LTV, not the rumoured 15% deposit
Tier gap costs roughly half a point at 18 months
Satisfying at 18 months buys the 24 month tier
Table of Contents
The Deposit Figure You Just Read for a One Year Old CCJ Is Out of Date
If you have spent an evening reading about this, you have met the table saying a CCJ aged one to two years means a deposit of fifteen to twenty percent from mainly specialist lenders. It is still being republished: one widely read consumer guide carrying that wording was updated as recently as July 2026.
It does not match what lenders were publishing in the same month.
A specialist lender's mid tier, in a guide marked correct as of 31 July 2026, accepts one CCJ registered in the last twenty four months within stated value caps, and publishes loan to value bands running 65, 80, 85, 90 and 95 percent. That is a five percent deposit at the top of the band, not fifteen. A second lender's range gated at six months since registration reaches ninety percent, and a third, gated at twelve months, caps at eighty five.
So the honest published range for a single judgment in this band is roughly eighty five to ninety five percent loan to value, depending on the lender and the size of the judgment.
Read that last clause again. The deposit is not usually the gate. The value cap is. A tier allowing one judgment in twenty four months often attaches a maximum written as something like a thousand pounds inside twelve months, and a judgment above that fails whatever you put down.
The second thing you have probably read is that this band means a rate of roughly six to eight percent. That looks like a 2023 figure copied forward, since published entry pricing for tiers written for one judgment in twenty four months sat below the bottom of that range in July 2026.
The market is not easy, it is tiered, and most advice circulating about this band describes a market that has moved. If you want the wider landscape first, our bad credit mortgage overview sets the scene.
Why the Lender Market Splits Into Tiers at Twelve Months
The useful split is not high street versus specialist. It is automated scorecard versus published criteria grid versus human underwriter, and at twelve months post judgment those three behave very differently on the same file.
The first is the mainstream scorecard. The decision runs on an internal credit score you cannot see, with the adverse rules sitting on top as a knock out rather than a grid. One mutual's criteria, effective 16 July 2026, allow a maximum of one CCJ or default satisfied in the last three years, no greater than five hundred pounds, and state plainly that unsatisfied judgments are not acceptable. At sixteen months with a thousand pound judgment that is a no, and deposit does not change it.
The second is the published criteria grid, where the lender does not accept or refuse you so much as place you on a rung. One lender publishes five tiers, each with its own CCJ allowance and rate card. Another names its ranges after the month gate itself.
This tier has grown the most and it is where most twelve to twenty four month cases land. Our near prime mortgages page covers the rungs just above the adverse ranges, where many readers of this article end up a year from now.
The third is deep adverse. These lenders accept multiple, recent and unsatisfied judgments, and manage the risk by cutting loan to value rather than by declining. One published tier allows three CCJs in twenty four months but stops at eighty percent, where the four tiers above it reach ninety five.
A fourth behaviour refuses to sit on the ladder at all: the manual underwriting mutual, with no scorecard cliff and a real underwriter reading the file and the explanation. Building societies accounted for around seventy two percent of UK mortgage balance growth in the six months to September 2024, per The Intermediary (2025) and Financial Reporter (2024).
Do not read the specialist tier as a soft touch. At least one states in every tier section that all products remain subject to its own internal credit scoring, so meeting the published criteria is a necessary condition rather than a decision.
Thirteen Months and Twenty Three Months Do Not Always Land in the Same Bucket
Lenders write recency in two dialects, and both appear in documents published within three weeks of each other.
The first is months since registration: zero in twenty four, one in twenty four with a value cap, none in the last six. The second is whole years since registration: one CCJ in the last three years, total value under five hundred pounds, all judgments satisfied. One lender uses both in a single document, running its adverse ranges on a month grid and its near prime ranges on gates of twenty four, thirty six and seventy two months, which are three year and six year rules written in months.
Now the part most articles get wrong. Inside any one lender's grid, thirteen months and twenty three months usually land in the same bucket, because both sit inside twenty four months and outside twelve. Saying otherwise would be inventing a distinction. They diverge for three checkable reasons instead.
The first is the value cap moving at the twelve month line even when the count does not. Take a two thousand pound judgment against a tier permitting one thousand pounds inside twelve months or two and a half thousand inside twenty four. At eleven months it breaches the tier. At thirteen months, unchanged in every other respect, it passes.
The second is that this band is a plateau followed by a cliff at twenty four months. In one published guide, crossing that line moves a case from an adverse range capped at eighty five percent into a near prime range reaching ninety, with pricing to match. At twenty three months you are on the lip of it. At thirteen you are not.
The third is that lenders do not all measure on the same date. One measures at application. Another can consider judgments registered for more than six months at the point of mortgage offer, so a borrower at twenty three months may cross the gate during the application itself.
There is also an absence worth naming. Lenders writing in whole years cannot see the difference between thirteen and twenty three months at all, because for them the decisive variables are value and satisfaction rather than age. Waiting for the judgment to age optimises for something they do not measure.
Deposit Is the Rung, Not the Door, Between Twelve and Twenty Four Months
In this band, loan to value is the lever the lender pulls, not the one you pull. Adverse lenders manage credit risk by capping the maximum loan to value as severity and recency increase, rather than by refusing outright. Financial Reporter (2026) describes loan to value as a key risk control mechanism in this part of the market, with appetite, limits and pricing varying with the status of the debt.
That reframes what your deposit is doing. It does not buy you a better lender. It determines which rung of a given lender's ladder you can stand on, and each additional five percent is a candidate for moving you one rung.
Two qualifications keep this honest. Above ninety percent loan to value the criteria change character rather than tighten gently, and one lender doubles its required clean period from thirty six months to seventy two above that line. A larger deposit also does not rescue you from a mainstream lender whose window you are inside, because that is a knock out and not a price.
Deposit you can put down | What that typically opens up with a twelve to twenty four month judgment |
5 percent | The top published band of at least one specialist grid written for a single judgment inside twenty four months, subject to value caps and the lender's own credit scoring. Thin, and not offered across the tier. |
10 percent | Where the adverse ranges and the more generous near prime gates overlap. Several published grids for this band stop at or just above this point. |
15 to 20 percent | Comfortable for the adverse ranges and usually the cheapest rungs available to them. Also where deeper tiers built for multiple judgments top out. |
25 percent or more | The lowest priced rungs of every grid, and the most room to absorb a valuation coming in under offer. Still does not open a mainstream lender inside its window. |
If your deposit is close to one of those lines, it is worth knowing before you commit, because two or three thousand pounds can be the difference between rungs.
Satisfied or Unsatisfied at Eighteen Months
Here is the cleanest proof that the market genuinely tiers. Satisfaction is a hard pass or fail gate at one tier, a matter of underwriter discretion at another, and absent from the criteria at a third.
At the mainstream and mutual end, July 2026 documents say things like all CCJs must be satisfied at the time of application, and we cannot accept unsatisfied CCJs. There is no discretion in that language.
In the middle, one lender's near prime ranges accept satisfied judgments older than a stated number of months and consider unsatisfied ones at underwriter discretion. Discretion means a human reading your file, so the explanation and the evidence earn their keep.
At the adverse end, two published ranges state that judgments need not be satisfied, and one five tier grid defines its tiers purely by count, recency and value with no satisfaction requirement at all.
So what does paying it off at eighteen months actually do?
It does not shorten the clock. The register period runs six years from the date of judgment rather than the date you pay, and GOV.UK (2026) is explicit that a satisfied judgment stays on the register for six years, with searchers able to see that you have paid.
It does not remove it either, because removal is only available where the judgment is paid in full within one calendar month of being issued, per Registry Trust (2026). At eighteen months that window closed long ago.
Nor does it reduce the recorded value, which matters because so many gates are written on the total value showing on the report. A satisfied nine hundred pound judgment is still nine hundred pounds against a five hundred pound cap.
What it does do is change which lenders can look at you later. Satisfying at eighteen months is largely wasted on the adverse tier, which did not require it, and is really an investment in the near prime and mutual tier that opens at twenty four or thirty six months. The payoff is deferred and it is a tier payoff, which is the logic behind planning a route through the credit repair mortgage ranges.
A Joint Application Where Only One of You Has the CCJ
Two forces pull in opposite directions here. Criteria are assessed against the application, while affordability is assessed on the combined income.
The clearest evidence that adverse is counted per application rather than per person sits in the concession wording itself: allowances written as so many items ignored per application. The reasonable reading is that if you each carry one judgment, that is two against a tier allowing one in twenty four months, so a couple who would each pass alone can fail together.
Alongside that sits a market convention rather than a published rule: lenders commonly decide on the profile of the weaker applicant. None of the five criteria documents reviewed for this article distinguished which applicant holds the judgment.
Be precise about what this does to the clean partner's file, because it is commonly got wrong. A CCJ is recorded against an individual and does not transfer onto anyone else's file. A joint mortgage creates a financial association, which means a lender searching one file can see the associated person's record. TransUnion (2026) sets out that disassociation is only possible once joint accounts are closed or moved into a single name.
So should the clean applicant apply alone? Sometimes, but it is a worse trade than most couples expect, because removing the partner removes their income from affordability entirely. In most households that costs more borrowing capacity than the tier penalty costs in rate.
If the excluded partner contributes to the deposit it usually becomes a gift, which typically comes with a declaration that the giver has no interest in the property, and sometimes a request that they sign away occupancy rights. That is a question for a solicitor.
A sole application also hides nothing. The association means the lender can still see the record, and non disclosure risks a finding of fraud rather than a cheaper rate.
The right comparison is arithmetic and case specific: a joint application on an adverse tier with both incomes, against a sole application on a cleaner tier with one income and a better rate. Whichever produces the larger achievable loan at a payment you can live with is the answer, and our partner bad credit page goes further into how couples here are placed.
What the Tier Split Costs in Rate at Eighteen Months
Steering you towards a specialist route without being straight about the cost would be useless, so here is the cost, measured rather than guessed.
Comparing like for like on one lender's July 2026 rate card, same deposit band, same product type and same fee, moving from its cleanest tier to the tier written for one judgment in twenty four months cost roughly half a percentage point. Going all the way down to the deepest adverse tier cost roughly a full point. Those gaps held on both a two year and a five year comparison.
There is a further step before that one. Bank of England (2026) data put quoted two year fixed rates at seventy five percent loan to value at around 4.8 percent for June 2026, and a specialist's cleanest tier sat roughly half a point above that the following month. Treat both as a dated snapshot rather than a price you can hold.
End to end, from the mainstream average to the deepest adverse tier at comparable loan to value, the spread in mid 2026 was on the order of one and a half to two percentage points. That is narrower than the copied guides suggest, and being wrong in that direction has its own cost, because readers conclude the market is shut and stop looking.
Two things to weigh besides the headline rate. Fees in the specialist tier are often higher and sometimes percentage based, which can matter more than a tenth of a point on a smaller loan. And the sensible plan here is usually a shorter initial period, so you can move up a tier once the twenty four or thirty six month gates pass, which is how the specialist route is meant to work.
Case Study: Sixteen Months Post Judgment, Ten Percent Deposit
The following is an illustrative composite rather than one real household, and the figures are indicative only.
A band 7 NHS nurse and her partner in the North West, combined income around 69,000 pounds, buying at 245,000 pounds with a 24,500 pound deposit, so 90 percent loan to value on a 220,500 pound loan. She had a single CCJ for 1,150 pounds from a disputed mobile contract, registered sixteen months earlier and satisfied at month fourteen. Two mainstream lenders were non starters, because the judgment sat inside their three year window and exceeded their value cap, and satisfying it had not reduced the recorded amount.
The case was placed instead on a lender whose tier for this band is defined by count and recency rather than by that particular value cap, at 90 percent, with a pay rate in the low six percent range at the time on a two year fix. Affordability was assessed not at the pay rate but at the lender's higher stress rate, which is the figure that decided the maximum loan. The plan agreed at outset was to review at the twenty four month point, when a near prime range with a satisfied judgment gate could come into reach.
"I Should Just Wait Until It Is Three Years Old"
This is the belief almost every reader of this article arrives holding, and it is half right, which is what makes it expensive.
The reality on waiting. Waiting is not worthless here, because the twenty four month cliff is real and crossing it can move you a rung. But three years is not the milestone people think, and several lenders publish ranges gated at six months since registration.
The reality on who is stricter. Because specialist grids run twenty four month windows and mainstream criteria commonly run three year windows, the borrower who waits for the high street may be waiting a year longer than the borrower who does not.
The reality on paying it off. Paying does not reset the clock or remove the entry. It marks the record satisfied, and the six years run from the judgment date regardless, per GOV.UK (2026) and Registry Trust (2026).
The reality on scale. Registry Trust data reported by The Intermediary (2026) put judgments registered across the UK and Ireland in 2025 at just under 1.2 million, with a median value around five hundred pounds and roughly forty three percent issued for under that. You are not an unusual case, and the market is built accordingly.
So the question worth asking is not how long to wait. It is which tier your file fits today, what specific date changes that, and whether the cost of waiting in rent, house prices and rate movement is smaller than the rung you would gain. That has to be worked out on your numbers, not read off a table.
FAQs
Can I get a mortgage with a CCJ registered eighteen months ago?
Often yes, but not from every lender. Mainstream lenders typically measure judgments over a three year window and may decline regardless of deposit, while specialist and near prime ranges published in July 2026 include tiers written specifically for one judgment inside twenty four months. What usually decides it is the value of the judgment and the loan to value you need, rather than the eighteen months itself.
Does satisfying a CCJ at eighteen months improve my chances straight away?
Usually less than people expect, and the benefit is mostly deferred. The tier most likely to lend at eighteen months often does not require satisfaction at all, so paying it does not change that decision. Where it pays off is at twenty four or thirty six months, when ranges that do require a satisfied judgment come into reach.
How much deposit do I need with a CCJ that is one to two years old?
Less than the fifteen to twenty percent figure that circulates widely. Criteria published in July 2026 show single judgments in this band reaching roughly eighty five to ninety five percent loan to value, subject to value caps and the lender's own scoring. Above ninety percent the criteria tighten sharply, so ten percent is a more realistic planning figure than five.
Does the amount of the CCJ matter more than its age?
In this band it frequently does. Tier gates are commonly written as a count plus a value cap, so a judgment above the cap fails the tier at any age inside the window. Some lenders also disregard judgments below a stated threshold entirely, which matters given that a large share of judgments are issued for under five hundred pounds.
My partner has the CCJ and I do not. Should we apply in my name only?
It is worth modelling rather than assuming. A sole application removes your partner's income from affordability, which often costs more borrowing capacity than the adverse tier costs in rate, and it complicates the deposit and the legal ownership. It also does not conceal anything, because a financial association means the lender can still see the record.
What happens when the CCJ passes twenty four months?
For grid lenders this is usually the most significant date in the whole band. Crossing twenty four months can move a case from an adverse range into a near prime range, which in one published guide meant a higher maximum loan to value and better pricing. Lenders using three year windows do not react to that date at all, so the benefit depends entirely on which tier you are dealing with.
Summary
A judgment aged one to two years does not close the market, it sorts it. Mainstream lenders working to three year windows are likely to say no, grid lenders place you on a rung priced to your recency and value, and manual underwriters read the file. Deposit moves you between rungs rather than through doors. Getting the tier right is worth more than another year of waiting, and it is worth talking through properly.
Updated: 31 July 2026
Written by Ben Stephenson, CeMAP-qualified Mortgage Broker.
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
GOV.UK (2026) - https://gov.uk/county-court-judgments-ccj-for-debt/ccjs-and-your-credit-rating - accessed 31 July 2026
Registry Trust (2026) - https://www.registry-trust.org.uk/court-judgments/england-and-wales/ccjs - accessed 31 July 2026
Bank of England (2026) - https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/boeapps/database/ - accessed 31 July 2026
The Intermediary (2026) - https://theintermediary.co.uk/2026/03/ccj-volumes-hit-highest-level-since-2019-research-reveals/ - accessed 31 July 2026
The Intermediary (2025) - https://theintermediary.co.uk/2025/05/building-societies-have-become-the-lenders-of-choice-for-complex-residential-borrowers/ - accessed 31 July 2026
Financial Reporter (2026) - https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/academy/adverse-credit-in-2026-what-brokers-need-to-look-out-for.html - accessed 31 July 2026
Financial Reporter (2024) - https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/the-role-of-building-societies-in-the-modern-mortgage-market.html - accessed 31 July 2026
TransUnion (2026) - https://www.transunion.co.uk/consumer-solutions/help/how-to-issue-a-notice-of-disassociation - accessed 31 July 2026
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