Can you get a mortgage with a CCJ?

What a CCJ actually is

A county court judgment is what happens when somebody you owe money to takes the matter to court and the court agrees the debt is owed. Most people who have one did not fight a case and lose. They never replied to the claim form — often because it went to an old address — and the judgment was entered by default.

That detail matters more than people realise, and it is the first thing worth checking, because a judgment entered when you genuinely never saw the paperwork is the one situation where the court itself may be willing to revisit it.

It is worth being clear this is not the same as a default, which is the lender closing the account without anyone going to court. Judgments are the rarer and heavier of the two. If you have both, or you are not certain which you have, the page on mortgages with defaults covers the other one.

The one-month rule nobody tells you about

If the judgment is paid in full within one calendar month of being issued, it can be removed from the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines completely, as though it had never been entered — once the court has proof of payment. That part is not automatic: you normally apply to the court yourself, with the evidence, and pay a small fee. Not marked as settled. Removed.

Pay it on day thirty-one and the outcome is entirely different: the entry stays on the register for six years and is simply marked satisfied. Same debt, same payment, a month apart, and two very different credit files.

If you are reading this inside that first month, it is the single most valuable thing on this page. If you are outside it, the rest matters more.

Satisfied, set aside, and what each one buys you

• Satisfied. You have paid it, after the first month. The entry remains for six years from the judgment date but is marked as settled, and you can obtain a certificate of satisfaction as proof. Lenders treat satisfied and unsatisfied very differently, so this is worth doing even when the six years are nearly up.
• Set aside. The court cancels the judgment itself. This is not a way of clearing a debt you owe — it is for cases where the judgment should not have been entered, most commonly where the claim form never reached you. If it succeeds the register entry goes.
• Still outstanding. The hardest position for a mortgage. A number of lenders will not consider an unsatisfied judgment at any age, which makes settling it the most useful thing you can do before anyone applies.

The register is maintained by Registry Trust, and you can check what is recorded against your own name directly. It is worth doing before any application, because people are sometimes carrying an entry they had forgotten or never knew about.

What a lender is really looking at

• How long ago. The single biggest factor. Most lenders think in windows — anything in the last six months, the last twelve, the last twenty-four. Moving from one window to the next can change both who will lend and what it costs, sometimes by waiting a matter of weeks.
• How large, relative to your income. A satisfied judgment for £250 and one for £15,000 are different propositions. Several lenders ignore very small entries entirely; almost none ignore large ones.
• Settled or still running. A satisfied judgment reads very differently from the same thing outstanding. If it is still running, some lenders are out of the picture regardless of anything else.
• How much deposit you have. The lever that moves most. A CCJ narrows the field at a small deposit and widens it considerably as the deposit grows, because the lender's risk falls. This is often the difference between no and yes, at a price.

Why nobody can give you a straight list of lenders

Criteria in this part of the market change frequently and quietly. A lender that would not look at a recent judgment in the spring may be comfortable with it by the autumn, because its appetite for risk, its funding and its competitors have all moved. Published lists go stale fast, and a list six months old is worse than no list, because it sends people to apply where they will now be refused.

There is a second reason. Many of the lenders who consider cases like this do not deal with the public at all. They distribute only through advisers, so they are invisible if you are searching on your own — and an article naming them does not help, because you cannot approach them directly regardless.

What the tiers look like in practice

Without naming anyone, the market sorts roughly into three groups. High street lenders, who tend to be fine with very old, very small, fully satisfied entries and to stop at anything else, because a computer usually makes the decision. Mainstream specialists, who will look at judgments within defined windows, price modestly above the high street, and have a person read the case. And heavier specialists, who consider recent or multiple events and price accordingly.

In my experience, most people who have been declined by their bank belong in the second group, not the third. Assuming that a decline means the bottom tier is one of the most expensive misunderstandings in this market, and it is why the order of approach matters so much.

So what do you actually do?

Find the exact date the judgment was entered and the exact amount, and establish whether it shows as satisfied. Dates matter more than anything else here. Work out which window you are in today, and whether a short wait moves you into a better one. Then approach one lender that fits, rather than several that might.

That is the job I do, and it takes one phone call to establish. I check current criteria for your situation on the day, rather than relying on what was true last quarter.