The outstanding value of all residential mortgages ticked up by 0.8% in Q4 2025 to a record £1.73trn, new Bank of England (BoE) figures have estimated.

This is the highest stock of outstanding mortgage loans since the central bank’s reporting began in 2007 and was 3% higher than the same quarter a year earlier.

According to the BoE’s latest Mortgage Lenders and Administrators Statistics, the value of gross mortgage advances fell by 1.3% from Q3, to £79.4bn, but remained 15.4% up on Q4 2024.

The value of new mortgage commitments decreased by 11.9% from Q3 to £69.9bn, which marks the largest fall since Q3 2023, but the figure remained 0.8% higher than the same quarter in 2024.

In terms of lower deposit mortgage lending, the share of gross mortgage advances with loan-to-value (LTV) ratios exceeding 90% increased by 0.9 percentage points from the previous quarter to 8.3%. This was the highest share since Q2 2008 and was 2.1 percentage points higher than Q4 2024.

Chief sales and marketing officer at Phoebus, Richard Pike, said that uncertainty in the run-up to the November budget was a “contributory factor to the mortgage market slowing down” in the final quarter of 2025.

“A large number of households put their plans on hold in anticipation of what was going to be announced by Rachel Reeves, which we can see in the latest set of figures from the BoE,” Pike said.

“While the base rate reduction in December re-established momentum in the market, it wasn’t enough to deliver a meaningful increase by the end of the year.”

The BoE’s figures also revealed that the proportion of the total mortgage loan balances with arrears stayed the same in Q4 as the previous quarter, at 1.2%, a figure that was 0.1 percentage point down from the same point a year earlier.

Pike added: “The welcome news from these figures is that arrears rates continue to fall, showing that households are managing their finances. The warning sign for lenders will be if this figure starts to rise, and then servicing teams will need to be ready to support customers who may be in financial difficulty.”

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