We wanted to find out what customers really think about the mortgage providers they use – so we asked them. Now we can reveal how customers of all the major mortgage providers rated their experiences.
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 the moment you have been waiting for (*drum roll please*), here are our 2023 winners.
Nationwide has retained the top spot in our mortgage category. As 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.
It scored 5 out of 5 in our annual customer satisfaction survey and polled an impressive “would recommend” score of 91%.
Compare mortgages from Nationwide
Barclays is a well-known high-street bank offering mortgages and other financial products such as current accounts and savings accounts. It has a varied range of mortgage products and often market-leading rates.
The responses from its mortgage customers in our survey meant that Barclays received a customer satisfaction rating of 4.5 stars, earning it a high commendation in this year’s awards.
Compare mortgages from Barclays
| Overall satisfaction | Customers who’d recommend | Issuer | Review | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ★★★★★ | 91% |  | 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 |
| ★★★★★ | 95% |  | This bank has a varied range of products, including fixed rate, tracker, offset and green home mortgages. Barclays often has leading rates and an impressive 95% of the customers we surveyed would also recommend the lender to a friend. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 91% |  | NatWest is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group and has a range of mortgages available, including offset products. Its online features and level of service were praised by some of the customers in our survey. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 90% |  | 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 |
| ★★★★★ | 90% |  | 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 |
| ★★★★★ | 89% |  | 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% |  | 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 |
| ★★★★★ | 87% |  | Santander is another provider offering mostly fixed rate mortgages, and it often ranks highly in best-rates tables. The bank’s customer service performance also generally polls well, reflected in the 87% “would recommend” score in our survey. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 83% |  | 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 |
| ★★★★★ | 82% |  | Lloyds offers an extensive number of mortgages, which are predominantly fixed term deals lasting 2, 5 or 10 years. It currently lends on loan-to-value (LTV) ratios of up to 95% through the government’s mortgage guarantee scheme. | Compare with broker |
| ★★★★★ | 94% |  | 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. | |
| ★★★★★ | 78% |  | 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 |
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 1,588 mortgage customers was carried out in December 2022.
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, we used the “would recommend” percentage as a tie-breaker).
Read full details of our methodology here.
★★★★★ — Excellent
★★★★★ — Good
★★★★★ — Average
★★★★★ — Subpar
★★★★★ — Poor
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