UK Bridging Loan Market: What the FCA’s Data Shows

How big is the UK bridging market in 2026?

The regulated side of the market wrote £1,827,539,702 across 4,691 loans in 2025. That is the FCA's own number, drawn from Product Sales Data returns under disclosure FOI2026/00294, not a lender survey or a trade-body estimate. It covers regulated residential bridging only: loans secured on a home the borrower or their family lives in or will live in.

2026 is tracking slightly ahead. A second FCA disclosure, obtained by Orton Financial and reported by Bridging & Commercial in August 2026, shows 1,052 regulated bridges completing in England alone in the first quarter of 2026, worth £471.4 million. Run that rate across a full year and regulated bridging is heading for roughly £1.9 billion in 2026.

The regulated flow is only part of the picture. Unregulated bridging, which covers investment property, corporate borrowers and most commercial cases, does not appear in FCA Product Sales Data at all. The Bridging and Development Lenders Association put total UK bridging and development loan books at £13.4 billion at the end of 2025. Books measure loans outstanding rather than loans written in a year, so the figures are not directly comparable, but the gap between £1.8 billion of regulated completions and £13.4 billion of total books tells you where most of the market actually sits: on the unregulated side, which is the larger part of what we arrange.

How is bridging lending split by loan size?

This is the table the FCA data gives up that no survey can. Nine loan-size bands, with the count of loans and value advanced in each during 2025. The share columns and averages are our calculations from the FCA figures.

Two numbers in that table describe the whole market. Just over half of all regulated bridges, 52.5% of them, are written below £250,000, yet they account for only 18% of the money advanced. At the other end, loans of £500,000 and above are 21% of cases and 58% of the money. Bridging volume is ordinary homemovers; bridging value is high-value property.

The £1.5 million-plus band is the sharpest illustration. It contains 154 loans, barely 3% of the market by count, but £410.1 million of lending, more than any other single band, at an average of £2.66 million per loan.

What share of the market is £1 million-plus bridging?

Across 2025, 333 loans of £1 million or more completed, worth £624.4 million. That is 7.1% of cases and 34.2% of all money advanced. The concentration is increasing: in the first quarter of 2026, the England figures show £1 million-plus loans at 8.8% of cases and 43% of total value, with a mean loan of about £2.18 million and a median of about £1.43 million.

The gap between that mean and median is worth a pause. It means the top of the market is not a cluster of loans just over £1 million; a tail of much larger facilities is pulling the average up. That matches our casework. Large bridges are rarely simple versions of small ones: they involve cross-charged security, offshore or corporate structures, private bank routes and the FCA high net worth rules high net worth exemptions, which is why we built a dedicated practice around them. Our large loan broker's guide to bridging finance covers how these facilities are actually structured and priced, and our high net worth bridging page covers the product itself.

Where in the UK are most bridging loans written?

Central and Greater London took £503 million of the £1.83 billion advanced in 2025, 27.5% of all regulated bridging by value from 16.5% of loans. The average London bridge was around £651,000 against a national average of £390,000.

Security values point the same way. Property worth £1 million or more secured £1.02 billion of 2025's lending, 56% of the entire market's value, across 1,166 loans. Regulated bridging in the UK is, to a first approximation, a prime property product: the typical pound lent is secured on a seven-figure home, disproportionately in London and the South East, even though the typical loan is written against a mid-market one.

None of this means bridging is a London product only. Nearly three quarters of the money and more than 80% of the loans are written outside the capital, and the regional spread in the FCA data runs through every English region plus Scotland and Wales. It means the market has two distinct centres of gravity, and a borrower at £300,000 in Leeds and a borrower at £3 million in Kensington are, in practice, using different lender pools at different pricing. Which is the point of using a broker who works across both.

How fast is the bridging market growing?

The time series in the August disclosure covers England from 2021 to 2025, and the direction is unambiguous. Completions rose from 2,134 to 4,249, up 99%. Value advanced rose from £862.9 million to £1.72 billion, also up 99%. Regulated bridging has doubled in four years.

The more interesting number is the one that did not move: the average loan, £404,000 in 2021 and £405,000 in 2025. The market has not grown because loans got bigger. It has grown because twice as many people are bridging. High-value lending grew slightly faster than the market as a whole, with £1 million-plus loans up 89% by count and 107% by value over the same period, but the story of the last four years is volume.

The drivers are familiar from our own enquiry book. Chains remain fragile, and a collapsed sale with a purchase at stake is still the classic regulated bridge. Base rate has settled at 3.75%, held again by the Monetary Policy Committee in July 2026, which keeps bridging's pricing gap to term lending narrower than it was in 2023. Downsizers with substantial equity increasingly buy first and sell second, deliberately, rather than as a rescue. And auction purchases of residential property continue to pull mainstream borrowers into short-term finance. Our regulated versus unregulated guide explains which of these cases fall on which side of the line.

What does the FCA data not show?

Four things, and they matter for reading any headline built on these numbers.

Unregulated bridging is invisible. Product Sales Data captures regulated mortgage contracts only. Every buy to let bridge, auction purchase of an investment property, commercial bridge, development exit and company borrowing sits outside it. On the BDLA's book figures, the unregulated side is comfortably the larger part of UK bridging. If you read "the bridging market is £1.8 billion" anywhere, the true market including unregulated lending is several times that.

Second charge bridging is marginal. The 2025 data shows 281 second charge regulated bridges worth £42.2 million, 6% of loans and 2.3% of value. The product has uses, but the market is overwhelmingly first charge.

The growth series is England only. The 2021 to 2025 doubling covers England. The full-year UK figures include Scotland and Wales, which is why the two disclosures show slightly different 2025 totals.

Completions, not demand. The data counts loans that completed. It says nothing about applications that failed on valuation, on exit evidence or on structure. Our experience is that the gap between enquiry and completion is where most value is lost, usually because a case went to the wrong lender first. The criteria guide sets out what lenders actually test.

What do the numbers mean if you need a bridging loan?

If you are borrowing between £250,000 and £500,000, you are in the deepest part of the market: 1,250 loans and £433.6 million in 2025, the largest mainstream band by value. Lender competition is strongest here, and with base rate at 3.75% the pricing gap between the best and worst offer on identical facts is wide enough to pay for the transaction costs several times over. Our bridging loan rates guide, reviewed monthly, shows the current bands, and the bridging calculator models total cost of funds on your figures.

If you are borrowing £1 million or more, the data confirms you have plenty of company, 333 completions in 2025 and rising, but the routes narrow. At this level lending is structured case by case: private banks, specialist high net worth lenders, cross-collateralised security and, on regulated loans, the FCA high net worth rules that unlocks terms a standard regulated bridge cannot offer. The average £1.5 million-plus borrower completed at £2.66 million; nobody places that loan well by filling in a comparison site form.

And if your case is unregulated, an investment purchase, a company borrower, a commercial asset, you are in the part of the market the FCA numbers cannot see, which is also the part with the most lender variety. Either way the job is the same: match the case to the lender pool that actually wants it. We do that daily, from £250,000 to £250 million plus, with no broker fee on bridging.

Where does this data come from, and can anyone get it?

Both disclosures come from FCA Product Sales Data, the transaction-level reporting every regulated mortgage lender files. The FCA does not publish a bridging breakdown in its regular statistics, but it answers Freedom of Information requests for aggregated cuts of the data, and it publishes every response in its public disclosure log. The February 2026 disclosure, reference FOI2026/00294, contains the loan-size, property-value, regional and second charge tables used on this page. The August 2026 figures were obtained by Orton Financial and reported in the trade press.

Anyone can file an FOI request with the FCA, free, with a response due within 20 working days. We analyse each bridging disclosure as it appears and keep this page aligned with the newest data, so the figures here are the current published picture of the UK regulated bridging market.

UK bridging market data: frequently asked questions

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