The full answer
What actually decides it.
With some lenders, yes – and where it applies it is usually the single largest difference between what you think you can borrow and what you can actually borrow.
A conventional lender assesses you on what you have taken out of the company: your salary and your dividends. A lender comfortable with professional limited-company applicants may instead assess you on your salary plus your share of the company’s profits, whether or not you have drawn them.
Take an illustration – the figures here are made up to show the arithmetic and are not a client’s. A dentist owns 100% of their limited company. The latest accounts show a salary of £12,570 and dividends of £40,000, so £52,570 of personal income taken, against £100,000 of company profit available to the owner. The first kind of lender assesses £52,570. The second may assess against the profit figure instead, subject to its own calculation and underwriting. On a normal income multiple, that is the difference between two quite different houses.
There are conditions. A lender will usually want to establish that the profits are sustainable rather than a single good year, that you own an appropriate share of the company, and that drawing on those profits would not damage the financial health of the business. It is not a way of counting money twice; it is a recognition that money left in a company you own is still yours.
Which route is right depends on your circumstances and on what you are trying to do. The point is that being assessed on salary and dividends alone is a lender’s choice rather than a fact about your income, and it is a choice that can be changed by going to a different lender.
Where lenders differ
- Three camps rather than the usual two. Some lenders accept retained profit or share of profits. Some will not consider it at all. And some will use it, but only through their own version of the profit calculation, which may not produce the figure your accountant would.
- That third group is the one worth understanding, because a lender that says yes in principle can still arrive at a materially lower number than another that also says yes.
- Where you end up depends on your shareholding, the consistency of the profits and how much you need to borrow, which is why this is worth establishing before an application rather than during one.
Written from Colin Wallace’s typed answers of 24 August 2026 and reviewed by Colin Wallace.