Yes, many lenders may count bonus income. The real question is how much of it counts, because the answer varies by hundreds of thousands of pounds of borrowing depending on where you apply.
In short
Bonus income may be used towards a mortgage at many lenders, but it is treated as variable income and discounted accordingly. Common approaches include averaging two years and counting 50% to 100% of the average, or using the latest year in full where the track record supports it. On a six-figure bonus the gap between the cautious end and the generous end of the range can be several hundred thousand pounds of borrowing, which makes lender selection the single biggest decision in a bonus-led application. Evidence, timing, and how a job move is handled decide the rest, and a banked bonus can sometimes do more as deposit than as assessed income.
Who this is for
You are an investment banking professional, lawyer, or other City professional whose bonus is a meaningful part of total compensation, and you want to know whether it counts towards a mortgage before you set a budget. This article answers the question directly, shows how the assessment works, covers the situations where the answer gets more nuanced (job moves, first bonuses, deferred awards), and explains when a bonus is better used as deposit than as income.
Can you use your bonus for a mortgage?
Yes, in many cases. Many lenders may include bonus income in an affordability assessment, provided it is evidenced and looks repeatable. Lenders rarely take the number on your compensation statement at face value: bonus is classed as variable income, and each lender applies its own rules for how much of it to count.
That distinction, between whether bonus counts and how much of it counts, is where confusion usually starts. Two colleagues with identical packages can be quoted borrowing figures hundreds of thousands of pounds apart, not because either lender rejected the bonus, but because one counted half of a two-year average and the other counted all of the latest year.
You earn well, so you will probably be fine. But "fine" spans a wide range, and for bonus-led professionals the top of that range is reached by lender selection rather than by earning more. This piece is part of our wider coverage of mortgages for investment banking professionals. Investment banking mortgage guide →
Director and Mortgage Adviser
Specialist mortgage broker for City professionals. David advises investment banking professionals, lawyers, and other bonus-led earners on how variable pay is assessed and which lenders read it most favourably.
How do lenders assess bonus income?
Lenders are answering one question: is this income likely to continue? The published criteria vary, but the assessment generally turns on the same few facts. How many years of bonus history you can evidence, usually via P60s and payslips. Whether the bonus is contractual, formulaic, or discretionary. Whether the trend is stable, rising, or falling. And whether you have recently changed employer.
From those facts, each lender applies its own formula. The common patterns among the lenders on our panel: average the last two years and count a set percentage of the average, often between 50% and 100%; use only the latest year, sometimes capped at a multiple of basic salary; or, at the cautious end, decline variable income where the history is short. A falling trend usually pulls the assessment down to the lower year rather than the average. A bonus paid monthly or quarterly can face a lower bar to being counted in full than an annual one, because a payment arriving twelve times a year looks like income rather than an event.
None of these treatments is the standard, because there is no standard. That is the practical takeaway: the treatment your bonus receives is a property of the lender you choose, not of your bonus.
Criteria correct as of October 2026. Mortgage lending policies change regularly, for the latest advice, speak to us directly.
Please note: These figures are for illustrative purposes only. The actual amount you can borrow will depend upon your personal circumstances, credit profile, LTV, the lender's individual criteria and full affordability assessment.
For the cross-lender picture behind these calculations, the four settings lenders differ on, the cash-versus-deferred split, and which lenders may count 100% of a bonus and on what condition, see How Investment Banking Bonuses Are Assessed Across Different Lenders.
What if you have recently changed jobs?
A job move resets some clocks and not others, and lenders split on which. Cautious lenders may want two years of bonus history with your current employer before counting variable pay at all. More flexible lenders may average bonus income across employers, provided the role and sector are comparable: an associate moving between banks generally keeps a continuous story, while a move from banking into a startup does not. Some lenders ask only that the most recent bonus was paid by the current employer within the last twelve months.
Two house observations from placing these cases. First, sign-on bonuses are generally not accepted as income; they are one-off by construction, whatever their size. Second, where a new employer guarantees the first year's bonus, lenders in our experience count it when it has actually been received rather than when it is promised, so the guarantee shapes timing more than it shapes eligibility.
If a move is on your horizon and a purchase is too, sequencing matters. Completing before the move, or timing the application for just after the first new-employer bonus lands, can each be right depending on the numbers. This is a planning conversation worth having early.
Does deferred or stock-based bonus count?
Sometimes, and the split matters more than most applicants expect. Cash bonus paid through payroll is the straightforward part. Deferred cash, vesting over future years, may be considered by some lenders once a vesting track record exists, and discounted or excluded by others. Equity awards, restricted stock units (RSUs) and similar, are a category of their own: some lenders may count vested awards, usually averaged and discounted, while many mainstream models exclude them entirely.
If a large share of your bonus arrives as equity, your effective assessed income depends heavily on lender choice, and the right answer often sits with the subset of lenders comfortable with equity compensation. That topic has its own detailed coverage in Can Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) Be Used to Qualify for a Mortgage?
The composition question is worth settling before you budget. Two packages with the same headline number, one mostly cash, one mostly deferred equity, can support very different borrowing at the same lender.
What evidence will you need?
The standard pack is short: your last two P60s, recent payslips including the ones showing bonus payments, and, where it helps, a letter from your employer confirming the nature of the bonus and whether it is expected to continue. Contractual or formulaic bonuses benefit from the scheme documentation; discretionary bonuses lean on the multi-year record.
The evidence rarely decides a case by itself, but weak evidence caps what a strong case can achieve. A missing P60 or an unexplained gap year invites the cautious treatment. A clean, complete pack lets a lender apply its most favourable rules with confidence.
The full documentation picture, what each document proves and how underwriters read it, is covered in Proof of Bonus Income: What Lenders Want to See.
Does timing your application matter?
More than most people expect. Bonus income counts when it is visible: on a payslip, a P60, or in your bank account. Applying a month before your bonus lands means being assessed on last year's figures; applying just after can lift the latest-year number the assessment uses. For professionals whose bonus jumped this year, that difference flows straight through the arithmetic shown above, and it is the whole story of this refinance placed on the latest bonus year rather than the average.
Trend matters alongside timing. A rising two-year record reads well under any treatment. A down year does not end the conversation, but it usually pulls the assessment toward the lower figure, and at that point lender selection, specifically which lenders read a down year in context rather than mechanically, does most of the work.
Bonus can also fund the deposit rather than the affordability side, which is a different decision with its own trade-offs. The next section works through it.
Should you use your bonus as deposit or as income?
A banked bonus can work on either side of the application. Used as income, it lifts the figure a lender multiplies, subject to the percentage and averaging rules above. Used as deposit, it lowers the loan-to-value (LTV), which can open a cheaper rate band, widen lender choice and ease the affordability test. Which side it works harder on depends on your numbers, and for many bonus-led buyers the answer is a split between the two.
Deposit size matters because lenders price and gate by LTV band. Moving from 90% to 85% LTV, or from 80% to 75%, can change the rate on offer, bring more lenders into range (some lenders cap LTV for larger loans or for variable-income cases), and reduce the stressed monthly payment the affordability model has to clear. A worked illustration: a buyer with a £150,000 deposit on a £1,000,000 purchase is at 85% LTV (loan £850,000 ÷ £1,000,000). Adding a £50,000 banked bonus takes the deposit to £200,000 and the LTV to 80% (£800,000 ÷ £1,000,000), a threshold at which a number of lenders' product ranges and larger-loan LTV ladders change.
Please note: These figures are for illustrative purposes only. The actual amount you can borrow will depend upon your personal circumstances, credit profile, LTV, the lender's individual criteria and full affordability assessment.
Bonus used as deposit has to be visible and clean. Lenders may want to see the payslip showing the bonus paid, the bank statement showing the funds received and cleared, and a trail that confirms the money is yours rather than borrowed or gifted. A bonus that has not yet been paid is unlikely to count as deposit at the lenders on our panel, because deposit has to be cash in an account rather than a figure in an offer letter. The same bonus can serve both sides once it has been paid, because the payslip evidences the income history while the balance sits in the account as deposit, but it cannot be spent twice: money committed to the deposit is not available as a reserve.
There is a third use. Keeping part of a bonus back, for overpayments or an offset account, trades a slightly higher LTV for liquidity, which suits professionals whose income arrives unevenly and who value the option of paying down later. An offset mortgage lets the balance reduce the interest charged while remaining accessible. The comparison below sets the two main uses side by side; the decision is a structuring one, and worth taking with advice before you commit the funds.
Which lenders treat bonus income best?
The names change; the structure of the answer does not. At any given time, a tier of lenders treats bonus income generously, counting high percentages or the latest year, and a tier treats it cautiously. Large-loan and specialist underwriting desks within mainstream banks often apply more pragmatic treatment than the same bank's standard channel, because a senior underwriter with a mandate is assessing the case rather than an automated model. Private banks sit beyond that for larger or more complex files.
Which lender sits in which tier moves with criteria updates, which is why we do not publish a league table that would be wrong within months. What holds still is the set of conditions a lender attaches before it counts a bonus in full: how often it is paid, whether it is contractual, how long the record is, and how large the loan is. Those conditions, and the lender categories that operate each one, are set out in How Investment Banking Bonuses Are Assessed Across Different Lenders. Identifying the current best fit for a specific bonus profile is the job of a specialist broker with a broad panel, and it is where a bonus-led application gains most of its edge.
The wider landscape, including how different professions' bonus structures are read, is in our complete guide to bonus income mortgages, linked below.
Making your bonus count
The sequence that works: establish what your bonus history supports under different treatments, before you set a budget; decide how much of a banked bonus goes to deposit and how much stays in reserve; time the application around bonus visibility where the numbers reward it; assemble the evidence pack completely; and choose the lender for its bonus treatment first, with rate compared across the realistic shortlist rather than against advertising headlines.
Advice earns its keep in that first step. Many bonus-led professionals we meet have anchored on a borrowing figure from a calculator that treated their bonus crudely, in either direction. Knowing the realistic range, and which lenders produce the top of it, changes what you can offer on. That conversation is fee-free and carries no obligation.
Part of a wider guide
This article sits within our broader bonus income guide, covering how lenders assess variable pay, averaging and caps, evidence, timing, and the structures that suit bonus-led professionals.
Read the full bonus income guide →FAQs
Some may, where the history is strong; many count a percentage of a two-year average instead. The proportion counted is a lender-by-lender rule, not a standard, which is why the same bonus supports different borrowing at different lenders.
Two years is the common evidencing baseline, usually via P60s and payslips. Some lenders may work with less, particularly where the bonus is contractual or the employer confirms it in writing, and a single strong year can carry weight at the right lender.
Often, yes. More flexible lenders may average bonus history across employers where the role and sector are comparable, while cautious lenders may want history with the current employer. A same-sector move usually keeps your bonus story intact.
Generally only once it has been received. In our experience lenders count a guaranteed first-year bonus when it appears on payslips or a P60, not when it is promised in an offer letter, so a guarantee shapes the timing of an application more than its eligibility.
Generally not. A sign-on bonus is one-off by construction, so lenders exclude it from income assessment regardless of size. It can still be useful as deposit funds once it has been paid and cleared, which is a different part of the application.
It varies most here. Some lenders may consider deferred cash or vested Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) with a track record, usually averaged and discounted; many mainstream models exclude them. If equity is a large share of your package, lender choice largely sets your assessed income.
Yes, once it has been paid and cleared: a bonus that has not yet landed is not deposit. Banked bonus lowers the loan-to-value (LTV), which can improve the rate and widen lender choice. Whether it works harder as deposit or as assessed income depends on your numbers; it is a structuring decision worth taking with advice.
A down year usually pulls the assessment toward the lower figure rather than the average, but it rarely ends the conversation. Some lenders read a down year in the context of a longer record, and presenting that context well is exactly where specialist placement helps.
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