Information on number of mortgage prisoners and impact of affordability tests - August 2025

Before responding to your request, please note that we do not record the number of mortgage prisoners as part of our market analysis. Mortgage Prisoners are part of a wider population of closed-book borrowers, that is borrowers who have mortgages in closed books with inactive firms. Mortgage prisoners are defined as borrowers who, despite being up to date with payments, cannot switch when it might be beneficial for them to do so because they have loan and/or borrower characteristics that are outside current lender's appetite. 

We conducted our Mortgage Prisoner Review in 2021, which was a one-off exercise in which we established an estimated a total of 47,000 mortgage prisoners within a wider population of 195,000 closed-book borrowers. Further information on our Mortgage Prisoners review can be found here: Mortgage Prisoner Review | FCA[1]

Our Product Sales Data (PSD) collects information on closed book borrowers, of which a portion will be considered mortgage prisoners. Between 2021 and 2024, 16,474 closed book borrowers have remortgaged to an active lender. 

Please note that the Freedom of Information Act only applies to recorded information and as such we are unable to speculate on expectations around changes to our rules.

The FCA changed its rules back in 2019 to facilitate switching for all borrowers, regardless of whether they are in open or closed books. However, a lender’s risk appetite is a commercial decision, and the FCA cannot compel a firm to lend.

We did undertake a cost-benefit analysis within the industry as a whole as part of our Mortgage Rule Review, published in CP25/11: Mortgage Rule Review: First steps to simplify our rules and increase flexibility[2]. 

Our most recent data (H1 2024) highlights the number of accounts held by closed books sits at 143,000. This is a reduction of over 50,000 since June 2021.

Source: FCA Product Sales Data (PSD007)