Why We Built Cleerly For Contractors Like Yours

Why the banks say no

Most high street lenders were built around one shape of income: a fixed salary, paid monthly, by one employer, for years on end. That's never been how contracting works. An umbrella payslip moves around week to week because of holiday pay, employer's NI, the apprenticeship levy, margin, none of which has anything to do with what someone actually takes home, but plenty of underwriters see that movement and read it as unstable. Limited company contractors get hit from the other side: sensible, tax-efficient structures that shrink the number a lender is willing to count as income. Add a gap between contracts, two engagements running at once, or six months with a new agency, and a lot of banks just stop reading and say no.

We started Cleerly because we were tired of watching good earners get treated like bad risks, purely because of how they're paid rather than how much. Our founder was a contractor himself before this, so none of this is theory to us.

What we do differently

We work from the contract, not the payslip. Gross day rate or hourly rate, annualised properly, taken straight to the specialist underwriting teams we've built relationships with over two decades, at Halifax, Barclays, NatWest, Nationwide, Skipton, Principality, Metro, Virgin and Accord. For umbrella contractors specifically, that means we're assessing contract value rather than a payslip that moves around every week, and there's no tax return or set of accounts required either.

What that unlocks

• Up to 5x annual income, against the 4.5x most high street lenders cap out at • Deposits from as little as 5%, not the 20%+ a lot of contractors get quoted elsewhere • A single contract accepted as proof of employment, which matters when someone's just started somewhere new • Conversations with underwriters before the application goes in, so cases are built to be approved rather than submitted and hoped for

Why it matters to you, not just them

A contractor who can't get a mortgage while working through your umbrella might take that as a sign to go permanent somewhere, or drift to whichever agency's PAYE book looks safer to a bank. Nine times out of ten, it isn't that contracting failed them. It's that nobody pointed them to the right person at the right time. Passing on our name costs you thirty seconds. It tends to buy you a contractor who remembers who actually helped.

The track record

We've brokered over £3 billion in mortgages for more than 30,000 people this way. We're FCA regulated, and we were shortlisted for Best Contractor Mortgage Provider or Broker at last year's Contracting Awards. Honestly, none of that matters to us as much as our 4.9 on Trustpilot, because that's the one bit that actually comes from the people we've helped.

Who we love to help

Umbrella and limited company contractors, fixed-term and short renewable contracts, zero-hours workers like NHS bank nurses, supply teachers and firefighters, and specialists across IT, engineering, medicine, law, and oil and gas. If your agency has placed someone in any of those categories, odds are you've already placed someone who's hit this wall, or will soon enough.

You don't need to learn the underwriting side yourself. You just need to be the person who says “talk to Cleerly” when a contractor mentions they're house-hunting, remortgaging, or got knocked back somewhere else.