Coronavirus mortgage payment breaks

A mortgage payment break is a 3 month break from paying your full mortgage payments.

You can apply to either:

• take a full break from making your monthly mortgage payments, or
• make reduced payments.

Mortgage payment breaks will be available until 31 October 2020.

If you’ve already had 3 months of support and you need longer, you can apply for another 3 month mortgage payment break.

If you’ve already had 6 months of support, you can’t apply for another mortgage payment break.

Find out what you can do after your payment break ends

If you’re thinking about a mortgage payment break, it’s important to understand that interest will continue to build  at your usual interest rate during the payment break.

This means that the total amount of interest you’ll pay over the term of your mortgage will go up, increasing the overall cost of your mortgage.

As a result, your monthly payments at the end of the break will be higher.

Although a mortgage payment break won’t affect your credit rating, lenders may look at other information (for example, information provided by you, or bank account information) when they decide whether to lend to you in the future.

• Change your mortgage by adding or removing someone
• Alter the length of your mortgage term, unless you are in the last month of your payment break
• Change the way you repay your mortgage
• Let out your property during the payment break

Before you apply, you must have consent from everyone named on the mortgage. 

To help you complete the application, please have information about your income and outgoings to hand.

We’ll send a letter to you before your payments are due to restart. It will confirm the start month and the amount of your new payment.

There are a 3 options for what to do next.

If you normally pay by Direct Debit, you don’t need to do anything. We’ll collect your new payment amount.

If you cancelled your Direct Debit, you’ll need to set it up again. Remember, this usually takes 2 weeks, so make sure you give yourself enough time before your next payment date.

Set up a Direct Debit

If you already pay by standing order, you’ll need to ask your bank or building society to update your standing order’s payment amount.

If your financial situation has improved, you could pay back the payments you’ve missed to minimise the effect on your monthly payments. This means you’ll pay less interest long term, but it will impact your overpayment allowance on your mortgage. Any Early Repayment Charges (ERCs) you get as a result of making up missed payments will be refunded.

If you were making overpayments before taking a payment break, you’ll need to set them up again.

Find out how to set up an overpayment

You can’t apply for another payment break. We will send you a letter to let you know when your payment break is coming to an end, and what you can do next.

Help is available if you still aren’t able to make your payments. The first step to working out a payment plan is to tell us more detail about your financial situation.