For employees · Proving your income

Applying for a mortgage when your employer is overseas

You are employed, on a good salary, with a permanent contract. Your employer is not a UK company, and the first lender you spoke to did not know what to do with that. Here is what they are actually asking for and how to give it to them.

Why it is awkward rather than difficult

Lenders are not suspicious of overseas employers. Their processes are built around a UK employer producing UK payslips with PAYE deducted, and when the documents do not arrive in that shape the application drops out of the automated route into manual underwriting.

Manual underwriting is not a rejection. It means a human reads it, and a human can be convinced by a coherent file. The whole task is assembling one.

The three things they are trying to establish

That the income is real. That it is going to continue. And that your tax position is in order, because a lender does not want to discover an unexpected liability against a borrower.

Every document below exists to answer one of those three.

The document list

Your employment contract, in English, showing the salary, the start date and that the role is permanent.

Bank statements covering at least three and preferably six months, with the salary credits visible and identifiable.

Payslips if you receive them. On a direct payment scheme you should, and if you are not getting them that is worth fixing regardless of the mortgage.

Your P60 if you have one, or the year-end statement from whoever runs your scheme.

Your tax returns and the tax calculation for the last two years if you file Self Assessment, along with the tax year overview from HMRC. Lenders ask for these constantly and applicants often supply only half of the pair.

And a letter from your employer confirming the role, the salary and that it is ongoing. This is the document that most often unsticks a stalled application, and most people never think to ask for it.

The question that causes the trouble

Whether you are employed or self-employed. You are employed. But because you pay your own tax, some lenders will initially treat you as self-employed and ask for two or three years of accounts you do not have.

Say it clearly and early: you are an employee, your employer has no UK entity, and the tax is accounted for through a scheme in your name because HMRC requires it in that form. Put it in the covering note rather than waiting to be asked.

Prepare before you apply, not during

Get the employer letter before you start. Make sure your salary credits are identifiable rather than an unlabelled transfer. Check your tax is genuinely up to date, because an underwriter who finds arrears will decline rather than query.

If you have not been setting money aside for tax, sort that before applying rather than after. A lender looking at your statements will see the pattern.

Use a broker

Genuinely worth it here. Lender appetite varies enormously and it changes. A broker who has placed this kind of case before will know which lenders handle it without a fuss, which saves you failed applications and the credit footprint that comes with them.

What we can do

If we run your scheme, we can produce the year-end statement and confirm what has been paid and declared. If we do not, and your paperwork is thin because nobody has been issuing payslips, that is worth fixing anyway, because the same gap that annoys a lender is the one that causes problems with HMRC.