A County Court Judgment (CCJ) against your limited company does not normally appear on your personal credit file. That does not mean every mortgage lender ignores it. Three of the 14 lenders we checked ask about company judgments separately, and Barclays publishes a specific decline rule.
The distinction that matters is between the credit search and the application form. A search of your personal credit record can be completely clean while the application still asks whether a judgment has been registered against a business you own.
Barclays Has a Specific Company-CCJ Decline Rule
Barclays lists a company judgment among the circumstances in which an application must be declined. The rule applies where the applicant holds more than a 15% shareholding in a limited company and that company has unpaid judgments totalling more than £5,000.
Both thresholds have to be met, which is what makes the rule unusual among the 14. A 10% shareholding falls outside it. So does a £4,000 judgment against a company you wholly own.
The criteria state one route to consideration: documentary evidence that the dispute has been settled. Note the wording. Barclays refers to the dispute being settled rather than to the judgment being paid, and those are not necessarily the same thing.
Paying the judgment and having it recorded as satisfied is the obvious starting point. Whether that is sufficient on its own is a question for Barclays through your broker, because the criteria do not say.
Where a judgment cannot be paid, the practical consequence is a narrower lender list. Halifax and BM Solutions ask about company judgments without publishing an equivalent decline rule.
Halifax and BM Solutions Ask, Rather Than Decline
Halifax and BM Solutions are both Lloyds Banking Group and use near-identical wording. Where a CCJ or default has been registered against a self-employed applicant’s business within the last six years, the credit-history question on the application must be answered yes.
Neither publishes a threshold that limits this. There is no minimum value, so a £300 judgment falls within the question, and no shareholding floor, so it applies whether the applicant holds 5% of the company or all of it.
The criteria describe what follows as credit scoring together with a request for background detail, rather than an automatic refusal. They do not say how an individual case is decided, so the disclosure is the part within your control and the outcome is a matter for the lender.
The important point is that the disclosure question is separate from what appears on your personal credit report. If a lender asks about judgments against your business, a clean personal credit file does not remove the obligation to disclose one.
What the 14 Lenders Publish on Company CCJs
Three of the 14 publish a company-specific question or rule. The other eleven do not address company judgments in their published criteria either way.
Two of the three sit inside the same banking group, so the sample contains two independently established approaches rather than three: the Lloyds disclosure question and the Barclays decline rule.
An absence of published wording is not a statement that a lender will never ask. It means the position cannot be established in advance from the criteria, and that the question may instead arise at application or underwriting stage.
How the 14 Lenders Compare on Company CCJs
Where a lender publishes different criteria for residential and buy-to-let lending, the book we checked is stated.
| Lender | Book checked | Asks about company CCJs | Thresholds published | What it triggers | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Halifax | Residential | Yes, for self-employed applicants | No value floor. Six-year look-back. | Disclosure question, then manual review | 12 Aug 2026 |
| BM Solutions | Buy-to-let, personal and limited company | Yes, for self-employed directors or shareholders | No value floor. No shareholding floor. Six-year look-back. | Disclosure question, then credit scoring | 12 Aug 2026 |
| Barclays | Residential and buy-to-let | Yes | Over 15% shareholding. Outstanding judgments over £5,000. | Decline, unless a settled dispute is evidenced | 12 Aug 2026 |
| Nationwide | Residential | No published criterion | None published. Value and date said to matter. | Case-by-case on your own judgments | 12 Aug 2026 |
| NatWest | Residential | No published criterion | Any personal CCJ in six years | Decline on a personal CCJ | 12 Aug 2026 |
| Santander | Residential | No published criterion | None published. No CCJ question at all. | Absorbed into credit scoring | 12 Aug 2026 |
| HSBC UK | Residential | No published criterion | Personal judgments over £500 in three years | Decline under the credit-impaired test | 12 Aug 2026 |
| Virgin Money | Residential | No published criterion | One satisfied CCJ, £500 max, six years. No unsatisfied CCJs. | Policy decline above the limits | 12 Aug 2026 |
| Skipton | Residential | No published criterion | All CCJs on the credit report, under £500, three years | Acceptable within limits, subject to score | 12 Aug 2026 |
| Coventry | Residential | No published criterion | Under £500 satisfied, under £250 unsatisfied | Matrix limits, with an appeals route | 12 Aug 2026 |
| Accord | Residential | No published criterion | Zero CCJs in six years, all satisfied | Policy decline, with a stated exceptions route | 12 Aug 2026 |
| Leeds | Residential and buy-to-let | No published criterion | One satisfied CCJ, £500 max, three years | Policy decline above the limits | 12 Aug 2026 |
| The Mortgage Works | Buy-to-let, including limited company | No published criterion | Under £100 usually fine. Over £500 generally declined. | Value-banded assessment | 12 Aug 2026 |
| Precise | Buy-to-let, individual and limited company | No published criterion | Zero CCJs in 24 months | Policy limit on your own record | 12 Aug 2026 |
Where the Company CCJ Thresholds Sit
Six of the lenders we checked impose personal-CCJ limits at £500 or below: HSBC, Virgin Money, Skipton, Coventry, Leeds and The Mortgage Works. Barclays sets its personal limit lower still, at £200. Look-back windows sit at three and six years.
Barclays’ published company-judgment rule starts above £5,000. The criteria therefore treat a judgment registered against a company differently from one registered personally against the applicant, by a wide margin.
The consequence is that the two cannot be reasoned about interchangeably. A £600 personal judgment falls outside the published criteria of six lenders in this sample. A £600 judgment against a company falls below every company threshold we found.
Residential Versus Buy-to-Let Is Not the Clean Split It Looks
Company-judgment rules are not confined to buy-to-let lending, which is where they are commonly assumed to sit.
Barclays carries the 15% and £5,000 criterion in near-identical wording in both books. In the residential criteria it appears under the heading “Adverse credit history, Residential”, inside the list of circumstances that must be declined.
Lloyds Banking Group covers both books by a different route, asking the business question in residential lending through Halifax and in buy-to-let lending through BM Solutions, its limited company range included.
An earlier version of our main CCJ guide described the Barclays rule as applying to buy-to-let only. That was wrong, and we corrected it on 12 August 2026 after checking the residential criteria directly.
Satisfied Judgments and What Lenders Do With Them
Paying the judgment changes the position with Barclays and does not change the disclosure requirement with Lloyds.
The Barclays criterion is keyed to unpaid judgments, and evidence of a settled dispute is the stated route to consideration, so payment is directly relevant there.
The Lloyds question makes no distinction between satisfied and unsatisfied judgments. A company CCJ paid in year two still falls within the six-year question in year five, so it must still be declared.
What a Clean Personal Credit File Does and Does Not Prove
Credit reference data is organised around people, and your company is a separate legal person. Its judgment is filed against the company and does not reach your personal file, so a lender searching your record finds nothing.
The application form asks a different question. Skipton’s published limit applies to “all CCJs on the credit report”, which a company judgment is not. Halifax’s question does not refer to the credit report at all, and asks what has been registered against the applicant’s business.
This creates an important distinction. A credit search may be completely clean while the mortgage application still requires you to disclose the company judgment. Read the wording of the application question rather than assuming the credit report settles it.
What to Check Before You Apply
Establish first that the document is a judgment. A County Court Judgment names the court, carries a case number, states the amount ordered to be paid and gives a date for payment.
A demand from a creditor is not a judgment, and neither is a solicitor’s letter threatening proceedings. A claim form is the start of a case rather than the end of one, so if the time to respond has not expired, no CCJ exists yet.
Check the judgment on the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines at trustonline.org.uk. A single register search costs £6. What you need from it is the amount, the date, and whether it is recorded as satisfied, meaning paid and updated on the register.
Search on the company name together with its registered office address, using the address that applied when the judgment was entered. There is no company-number field, so the address is what distinguishes your company from a similarly named one, and a wrong address can return a nil result that means nothing.
Treat a nil result with caution where the judgment is recent. Court records reach the register through an update process rather than immediately, and TrustOnline offers a discounted repeat search for that reason.
Searching requires nobody’s permission and leaves no footprint on any credit record.
Check your exact shareholding at Companies House, which is free. That figure determines whether the Barclays rule applies to you at all, and it can differ from what a director expects where shares have been issued or transferred since incorporation.
Check whether you signed a personal guarantee for the debt behind the judgment. A guarantee makes you personally liable for that company debt, which changes the position this page describes. Overdrafts, asset finance and commercial leases are the common sources, and our guide to company CCJs and director liability covers what follows.
Establish which lender your broker intends to approach. The illustration issued to you names the lender it was produced for. Then ask whether that lender’s credit-history question covers judgments against a business you own, which may require the broker to go back to the lender.
Where a Company Cannot Pay the Judgment
An unpaid judgment is evidence a creditor can use to support a winding-up petition, which is an application to court to close the company down. This is the part of the subject we deal with as insolvency practitioners rather than as readers of lender criteria.
A petition is not the automatic consequence of one unpaid judgment, and it is not the only route open to a creditor. It is, however, a route that becomes available once a judgment is in place and remains unsatisfied.
Where a company cannot satisfy a judgment, the solvency question is the one to resolve first, because the options available narrow as enforcement progresses. Advice at that stage is a separate matter from the mortgage application.
How We Keep This Lender Study Current
Lender criteria change without announcement, so we re-read them on a schedule rather than relying on memory. An out-of-date table on a page about mortgages would be worse than no table.
Halifax, BM Solutions and Barclays are re-read every month, because the page’s conclusions rest on those three. The other eleven are re-read every six months.
Each row shows the date we last read the criteria. Where a row falls behind that schedule we will withdraw it rather than leave a figure standing that has not been checked recently.
One row carries a warning already. The Precise criteria guide available to us is dated 22 May 2023, which is too old to present as current, so the row states that rather than omitting it.
FAQs on Company CCJs and Mortgage Applications
My application has already gone in and I think I answered the question wrongly
Raise it with your broker before an offer is issued. Correcting an answer on a live application is an ordinary amendment, and the point at which an offer is made is the boundary that changes the position.
A lender that identifies an inaccurate answer can withdraw the offer. Where it concludes the answer was deliberately false in order to obtain the loan, it can treat that as mortgage fraud and report it. A correction made by the applicant before the lender finds it is a materially different situation.
We are insolvency practitioners rather than mortgage advisers, so the amendment itself is a conversation for your broker or the lender directly.
Will a mortgage lender find my company’s CCJ if it does not ask?
Not through a standard personal credit search, because the judgment sits against the company and not against you. The Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines is public, so it is findable by anyone who looks, but a routine mortgage credit check on an individual does not look there.
Where a lender assesses business accounts as part of a self-employed application, the judgment or the dispute behind it can surface in the figures instead.
Whether a lender would find it is a separate question from whether you have been asked to declare it. The declaration is the part that carries the obligation, and a judgment drops off the register after six years while an inaccurate answer on a mortgage file does not.
Does it matter how much of the company I own?
With Barclays, yes. Its criterion applies where you hold more than a 15% shareholding, so a small minority stake falls outside it.
With the Lloyds Banking Group question there is no shareholding floor at all. What matters there is self-employment and whether the judgment was registered against the business.
So a 10% stake sits outside the Barclays criterion and squarely inside the Lloyds one. Shareholding is not a general defence, it is a Barclays-specific threshold.
I am a sole trader, not a limited company. Is my position the same?
No, and your position is considerably worse. A sole trader is not a separate legal person, so a judgment against the business is a judgment against you. It goes on your personal credit file and every threshold in the table above applies to it directly.
The distinction this page turns on exists only because a limited company is a separate legal person. A sole trader has no separate entity, so none of the company-versus-personal analysis above applies.
Should I just apply to one of the eleven with no published rule?
Choosing a lender whose criteria you meet is ordinary, sensible mortgage broking. Choosing one specifically to dodge a question you would have to answer yes to is a different thing, and a broker is the right person to steer that.
The weakness in the approach is that it relies on an absence. Those eleven lenders have not said they will not ask; they have not published a position either way, and the question can still be raised on a self-employed case. Published criteria also change, which is why every row in the table above carries a date.
The judgment against my company is wrong. What can I do before I apply?
A judgment entered in error or without the company having a chance to defend can sometimes be set aside, which is a matter for a litigation solicitor rather than for us. If it is set aside, it comes off the register.
Paying it in full within one calendar month of judgment also removes it from the register entirely. Miss that window and paying only marks it satisfied, and it stays visible for six years.
The one-month window is therefore worth acting on where the debt is genuinely owed and payment is possible. Outside it, the best available outcome is a judgment recorded as satisfied rather than one removed.
