Key figures › Mortgage approvals for house purchase

Mortgage approvals for house purchase: history

Bank of England publishes 401 monthly values for this series, from Apr 1993 to Aug 2026. The latest is 54,918 for Aug 2026. The highest value in the series is 132,806, first reached in Dec 2003; the lowest is 9,360, first reached in May 2020. Ten years before 2026, in 2016, the yearly value was 67,517; in 2026 it was 59,477.38.

Source: Bank of England, Bank of England database series LPMVTVX. Read from the publisher's data file, refreshed every six hours. Download the full series (CSV).

Mortgage approvals for house purchase by year

Each year shows the average of that year's values, the value on the last working day and the year's high and low, worked out from the Bank of England's daily series.

Latest monthly values

What this figure measures

Mortgage approvals count the number of loans that lenders have agreed to provide for the purchase of a home in a month, seasonally adjusted. An approval comes before the purchase completes, so this figure gives an early signal of housing transactions and future mortgage lending. It covers loans to individuals for house purchase only: remortgaging and other secured borrowing are counted separately. The Bank of England collects the data from lenders and publishes it in its monthly Money and Credit release.

For the latest value with what it means and how to read it, see Mortgage approvals for house purchase.

These are the publisher's own numbers, repeated without adjustment. Earlier values can be revised when the publisher revises its series; this page always shows the series as it stands today.