Porting Your Mortgage

Taking Your Deal With You When You Move

If you're moving house and you're currently on a fixed rate deal, one of the first questions worth asking is whether you can take your existing mortgage with you rather than starting from scratch. This is what's known as porting, and it's a feature that a lot of borrowers don't fully understand until they're already in the middle of a move and trying to work out their options under time pressure, which is not the ideal moment to be figuring it out for the first time.

What Porting Actually Means

Porting means transferring your existing mortgage deal, including your current interest rate and terms, from your old property to your new one. It sounds straightforward, and in principle it is, but there are some important practical considerations that make it more nuanced than simply picking up your mortgage and dropping it onto a new house.

The first thing to understand is that porting isn't automatic. Even though you're keeping the same lender and the same deal, you'll still need to go through a new affordability assessment on your new property. Your lender will treat this almost like a new application, which means your income, outgoings and credit profile will all be reviewed again. If your circumstances have changed since you took out your original mortgage, that can affect whether the port is approved.

What Happens if You Need to Borrow More

This is where porting gets particularly interesting, because most people who are moving house aren't just transferring the same loan amount, they're buying something more expensive and need to borrow additional funds. In that situation, the ported amount stays on its existing rate and terms, but the additional borrowing will typically be offered on a new rate, which could be higher or lower than what you're currently paying depending on what's available at the time.

That means you could end up with two separate mortgage products sitting alongside each other, which isn't necessarily a problem but does add a layer of complexity, particularly if they have different end dates and you want to avoid being on two different variable rates at the same time.

When Porting Makes Sense

Porting tends to make the most sense when you're on a particularly good rate that you'd lose by paying off your mortgage early and taking a new deal, and when your early repayment charge would make breaking the current deal expensive. If you're mid-fix and your rate is lower than what's currently available in the market, the ability to port that rate to your new property is genuinely valuable and worth planning around.

It's less straightforward if your new property is significantly more expensive, if your lender's affordability criteria have tightened since you originally applied, or if the property you're buying has features that your lender isn't comfortable with, such as non-standard construction or certain leasehold arrangements.

When Porting Might Not Be the Best Option

It's also worth doing the maths on whether porting is actually the most cost-effective route even when it's available. If your early repayment charge is relatively small and the deals currently available in the wider market are significantly better than what you're on, switching to a new lender entirely might leave you in a better position overall. That calculation depends on your specific numbers and it's worth working through carefully rather than assuming that porting is always the right answer just because it's available.

Getting the Timing Right

One practical point that catches people out is the timing of the port. Most lenders require you to complete your purchase within a set window of your sale completing, and if there's a gap, you could find yourself temporarily on your lender's standard variable rate, which is rarely the cheapest place to be. Planning ahead and understanding your lender's specific requirements around timing is an important part of making a port work smoothly.

If you're planning a move and want to understand whether porting makes sense for your situation, I'm happy to work through the numbers with you and look at how it compares to the alternatives. Get in touch and we'll take it from there.

Barry, The Mortgage Network - Helping you make confident decisions and plan a mortgage that works for you.

Your home may be repossessed if you do not keep up repayments on your mortgage.