Our awards are decided by the only votes that really matter – yours. We asked customers of all the major mortgage providers to tell us about their experiences. Now we can reveal how they rated the UK’s largest mortgage lenders.
The winning and highly commended companies were decided by both their overall customer satisfaction scores (star ratings out of five) and their recommendation scores (the percentage of survey respondents who would recommend the brand to a friend). Read more on our methodology and see our full results below.
Now without any further ado, here are our winners (*applause please*)…
The winner of this year’s mortgage category award is Nationwide – the UK’s largest building society and second biggest mortgage lender. It provides a broad selection of mortgages and is consistently rated highly for its level of customer service.
Nationwide scored 5 stars out of 5 in our annual customer satisfaction survey, and polled an impressive “would recommend” score of 88%.
Compare mortgages from Nationwide
Lloyds Bank is the UK’s largest mortgage lender, in addition to being a well-known high street bank offering products such as current accounts and savings accounts.
The responses from its mortgage customers in our survey meant that Lloyds Bank received a customer satisfaction rating of 4.5 stars, earning it a high commendation in this year’s awards.
Compare mortgages from Lloyds Bank
| Overall satisfaction | Customers who’d recommend | Issuer | Review | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ★★★★★ | 88% |  | As the UK’s second largest mortgage provider, the building society offers a wide number of products, mainly with fixed rates. Founded in 1846 as a mutual financial institution, Nationwide is run for the benefit of its members, and consistently ranks highly for customer service. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 91% |  | Lloyds offers an extensive number of mortgages, which are predominantly fixed term deals lasting two, five or 10 years. It currently lends on loan-to-value (LTV) ratios of up to 90% and is recommended by nine out of 10 customers in our survey. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 88% |  | NatWest is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group and has a range of mortgages available, including offset products. Its online features and levels of service were praised by some of the customers in our survey. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 88% |  | The UK’s biggest bank is not one of the UK’s biggest mortgage lenders, with fewer specialist products in its range. But HSBC does offer fixed term mortgages at rates that are consistently among the most competitive. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 88% |  | Now part of Lloyds Banking Group, Halifax offers one of the largest number of mortgages from a single lender, particularly in the fixed-rate space. Not always the top ranked for competitive rates, the bank does poll well for customer service. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 87% |  | This bank mainly offers fixed rate mortgages, along with some tracker products. Barclays often has leading rates, and 87% of the customers we surveyed would also recommend the lender to a friend. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 84% |  | Santander is another provider offering mostly fixed rate mortgages, and often it ranks highly in best-rates tables. The bank’s customer service performance also generally polls well, reflected in the 84% ‘would recommend’ score in our survey. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 80% |  | Virgin Money first began operating as a bank in 2010, developing its mortgage and saving products before its current account. Predominantly online-based, in 2019 the lender was the first in the UK to launch a 15-year fixed term mortgage. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 78% |  | The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is part of the same banking group as NatWest. It has a decent number of mortgage products available, which are mainly fixed terms products, although it doesn’t often have the most competitive rates. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 83% |  | Relative newcomer Habito launched in 2015. It’s a digital-only, whole of the market mortgage broker, which means not only does it have access to mortgages from all different UK lenders, the application process can be carried out online. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 77% |  | Mojo is another online mortgage broker, which works with more than 90 lenders, to give its users access to a range of different mortgage products in the market. | |
| ★★★★★ | 76% |  | L&C is the country’s largest fee-free mortgage broker. With access to over 90 lenders, it’s able to advise on a vast choice of mortgages depending on a borrower’s personal circumstances. | Visit broker |
We asked mortgage holders to rate their satisfaction with the service they had received from their lender, and also whether they would recommend their mortgage provider to a friend. Our independent survey of 893 mortgage customers was carried out in December 2020 – read full details of our methodology here.
We have shown all the star ratings and recommendation scores for the brands listed in the table above, and used these results to decide the winners of our awards (if there was a draw on the star ratings score, we used the “would recommend” percentage as a tie-breaker).
★★★★★ — Excellent
★★★★★ — Good
★★★★★ — Average
★★★★★ — Subpar
★★★★★ — Poor
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