How much do mortgage brokers make in the UK? An honest breakdown
Employed salaries, self-employed commission, proc fees and the per-case maths, worked through by a practising broker. Plus a calculator to model your own monthly earnings.
How do mortgage brokers get paid?
Before you can work out what a broker makes, you need to know where the money comes from. A UK mortgage broker earns from up to four places on a single client, and most people outside the industry only know about one of them.
- The procuration fee (the "proc fee"). Commission the lender pays you when a mortgage completes, usually 0.35% to 0.5% of the loan (Loan Corp). I get 0.4% on a purchase or remortgage and 0.2% on a product transfer, so on a £200,000 mortgage at 0.4% that's £800. It comes out of the lender's own margin, so it isn't added to your client's loan and doesn't touch their rate.
- The broker fee (your advice fee). A fee you charge the client directly, anywhere from nothing to around £1,000, or 1% to 2% of the loan on complex cases (Unbiased). Some brokers charge nothing and live on proc fees and protection. At Bluewave I charge a flat £795 on a residential case, £995 on buy-to-let, and £195 on a product transfer. It's the lever you control most directly.
- Protection commission. When a client takes life cover, critical illness or income protection alongside the mortgage, the insurer pays you. A single case commonly pays £800 to £1,500 or more, depending on the premium. About three in four of my clients take cover, and a £50-a-month policy earns me roughly £1,200. One catch: if the policy lapses inside about four years, some or all of that commission is clawed back, so it pays to arrange cover the client actually keeps.
- Referral income. You can earn for referring the parts you don't handle yourself. I get around £300 for sending a client to a conveyancing solicitor, and there's similar money in passing on general insurance or specialist protection you don't write. Small per case, but it stacks up over a year.
Employed brokers usually get a base salary plus a share of this commission. Self-employed brokers take the commission directly, then hand a slice to their network or principal firm (more on that split shortly). Either way the engine underneath is identical: every client is worth a proc fee, often a broker fee, frequently a protection case, and sometimes a referral or two on top. (The size of that network split varies wildly. I compared every major UK mortgage network and club in a separate post if you want the full picture.)
How much does the average UK mortgage broker earn?
For the headline number: the average mortgage broker salary in the UK sits at roughly £43,000 a year, on Indeed's 2026 data, with most brokers landing between £27,000 starting out and £70,000-plus once experienced. Glassdoor and Reed put it in a similar band.
Location moves it about. London brokers average closer to £49,000, Manchester around £44,000, and a few regions higher still. One thing those salary surveys miss, though: most experienced brokers aren't on a flat salary at all, they're on commission. A "salary average" lumps a commission-only top earner in with a salaried newcomer, so it understates what a genuinely busy broker takes home. Treat £43k as the middle of the employed market, not the ceiling of the job.
Employed vs self-employed: what you'll actually earn
The single biggest factor in your income, bigger than your town or your years in the job, is whether you're employed or self-employed and where your clients come from. Here's roughly how those paths play out across a career. They're blended UK industry ranges, so read the shape rather than the exact pound figure.
| Career stage | Employed | Self-employed (network leads) | Self-employed (own leads) | What moves the needle |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First year | £25k–£35k | £20k–£45k | £0–£60k | Whether you have any pipeline at all |
| Years 2–3 | £35k–£45k | £40k–£60k | £45k–£80k | Repeat clients and referrals kicking in |
| Experienced (5yr+) | £45k–£60k | £55k–£85k | £70k–£110k | Case volume plus protection attach |
| Top performers | £60k–£75k | £85k–£110k | £110k–£150k+ | Consistent, high client flow |
Career-stage figures are blended UK 2026 industry ranges (Indeed, Glassdoor, AshBorland, published mortgage-network splits), so read the shape rather than the exact pound. The per-case maths further down uses my own real Bluewave numbers.
How much do self-employed mortgage brokers make?
Self-employed is where the ceiling lifts and the floor drops out. You keep far more of each case, but you carry the risk of finding the clients. Two things decide where you land.
Your commission split
Almost no self-employed broker keeps 100%, and the way the split works catches a lot of new brokers out. Here's exactly how it runs for me. First my network takes 15% of the proc fee for the compliance umbrella and lender access. Then my firm splits what's left with the adviser, and that's where the lead question decides everything: 50/50 if the firm provides the leads, or 75/25 in the broker's favour if the broker brings their own. Across the wider industry you'll see shares anywhere from 60% to 90% on the same trade-off (Echo Finance), but it's always that one question underneath: whose leads are these?
The gap is enormous over a year. Take the firm's leads and you start warmer but hand over half. Bring your own and you keep three-quarters, but you've taken on the job of finding them. On £80,000 of business, the difference between a 50% and a 75% share is £20,000 in your pocket.
Where your clients come from
Take the network's leads and you get a warmer start but a thinner split. Bring your own and you keep more, but now you're responsible for filling the diary, which is the part that catches most people out. A self-employed broker working their own leads can earn nothing in a dead month and £8,000 in a good one. The brokers pulling six figures usually aren't better advisers. They've simply solved client flow.
That's the honest trade: more independence and more upside, in exchange for owning the question of where the next case comes from.
What a realistic first year looks like
Ask a new broker what they expect to earn and plenty of them say £100,000. The reality in year one is closer to £30,000 to £35,000, and the reason is timing as much as ability.
Expect roughly £0 for the first three months. The work you put in takes ages to turn into cash: a purchase can take six months to complete, and you're paid about a month after that. Remortgages are quicker, but you're still waiting until a month after completion. So commission only really starts landing three to six months in, and your first year is always front-loaded with effort and back-loaded with pay.
Once you're up and running, the maths gets friendlier. Take a new broker writing four cases a month (one a week), signing protection on half of them at around £800 a case, on a 50/50 split. That works out around £850 a case, so £3,400 a month, or roughly £40,800 a year as a run-rate. The first-year total lands lower because of that slow start, but it shows where steady effort gets you once the pipeline is flowing.
From there the lever is case value. An experienced broker signs protection on 80% of clients instead of half, reviews every client's insurance even when the mortgage itself isn't one they can place, and squeezes a little more from each lead. Same number of clients, a noticeably bigger number at the end of the year.
The per-case maths: what one mortgage actually earns you
Most salary articles stop right here. Let's keep going and price a real one. These are my own Bluewave figures on a typical £250,000 residential purchase (close to the UK average loan size), for a client who takes everything.
- Procuration fee from the lender at 0.4%: £1,000
- My advice fee on a residential case: £795
- Protection, on a £50-a-month policy: about £1,200
- Conveyancing referral to a solicitor: £300
- One fully-loaded client: about £3,295
That £3,295 is the gross on a client who takes the lot. It isn't what lands in my account, because my network and firm take their cut first (the splits I covered just above). And not every client takes protection or needs a conveyancer, so a realistic blended average sits lower once you fold in the mortgage-only cases. But it shows the shape of the thing: a single mortgage client is worth far more than the proc fee alone, once you stack the advice fee, protection and referrals on top.
Then multiply by the cases you write. As a rough rule, an average broker signs about one case a week. A busy one signs two or three. That volume, times your per-case value, times your split, is your income. Which is exactly why the calculator below lets you drag every one of those levers.
Work out your own numbers
Set the sliders to match how you work: case volume, average loan size, the proc fee, your advice fee, how often clients take protection, any referral income, and the split you keep. The presets sit at my real Bluewave figures, so nudge them to fit your own situation. It updates live.
- Per case, before split £0
- Monthly gross £0
- Your share after split £0
Rough guide, not a forecast or financial advice. It applies a single split to your total for simplicity. In practice my network takes 15% of the proc fee first, then the firm splits the rest 50/50 on provided leads or 75/25 on leads you bring yourself. It also ignores protection clawback. Use it to see how the levers move, not as a promise of income.
What actually caps your income
Play with that calculator for a minute and you'll spot the thing I worked out years ago. The proc fee barely moves. Your broker fee can only climb so far before clients walk. The split is whatever your network offers, and not much more. That leaves one lever with no ceiling on it: the number of cases you write. And case volume is just client flow wearing a different hat.
So, stepping back from the calculator, the honest answer comes down to two things: how good you are, and how many people you get in front of. You need both. As I put it to new brokers, you could have twenty clients a month and still make £0 if you don't know what you're doing. Skill with no clients earns nothing, and a full diary earns nothing either if you can't do the job. Get the two together and the number climbs fast.
Of the two, client flow is the one with no ceiling, and the one most brokers run short of. The advice you sharpen over time. The pipeline you have to build and keep building.
That's the hard part, and the part I learned the expensive way. I run my own brokerage, Bluewave Mortgages, and for years my best source of clients was dead simple: look after people properly, gather the Google reviews, let referrals compound. Still the bread and butter. I wrote up everything that worked, channel by channel, in how to get mortgage clients.
Then I tried to scale it with paid ads and burned through £5,000 getting it wrong. I'm a broker, not a marketer, and I was bidding against big platforms with full-time teams. That lesson is why I built MortgagesBooked, which folds the ad spend, the compliant marketing and the no-show risk into booked appointments you only pay for when someone actually turns up, at £110 a show. If your income is capped by client flow and you'd sooner advise than run ad campaigns, that's one way to lift the cap. You can see how it works or look at this week's appointments without spending anything.
Whichever route you take, the maths doesn't change. Sort your client flow, and the earnings look after themselves.