A dedicated holiday let mortgage caps your own use of the property, usually somewhere between 30 and 90 nights a year, set out in the mortgage terms. An expat residential mortgage with letting permitted has no fixed cap, because the lender treats the property as yours. It is often the cheaper option too, not just the more flexible one.
There is a question that comes up in almost every conversation we have with British expats buying a UK property from overseas, and it is almost never the one they open with.
They start with the deposit, the currency, or whether a lender will look at a Dubai employment contract at all. Two or three minutes in, it surfaces:
how often can I actually stay in the property?
It is a fair question, and the honest answer surprises most people. On the products usually shown to expats first, you can use the property for less than you would expect, and someone is counting the nights.
There are two different ways to structure this kind of mortgage, built on opposite logic, and which one you are offered changes almost everything: the rate, the deposit, the night count, and whether the property can sit in a company.
This article walks through both, so you know which question to ask before an application goes anywhere near a lender.
How many nights can you use your own holiday let mortgage?
A dedicated expat holiday let mortgage is an investment product.
The lender is lending against the rent, and the whole underwriting case rests on the property being available to paying guests. Your own use of it is treated as a cost to that arrangement, not the point of owning it.
That is why personal use is capped, and why the cap is contractual.
Across the market it usually sits somewhere between 30 and 60 nights a year, with a handful of more generous societies stretching to 90. A few lenders will not permit meaningful personal use at all.
How does a 60-night cap work for a holiday let investor?
For someone who bought the property purely to let, 60 nights is generous. That is a fortnight in spring, a fortnight in autumn, and a scattering of long weekends, with the property earning for the rest of the year. The cap barely registers.
Why doesn’t the same cap work for an expat?
An expat’s situation looks different. If you are flying back from Singapore, you are not popping over for a long weekend. You are coming for three weeks at Christmas, a fortnight in the summer with the children, and a week in March when your mother has an operation. Add a funeral or a wedding you did not plan for, and you reach the ceiling before you have had a proper holiday in your own holiday home. The cap does not care why you were there.
What is an expat residential mortgage with letting permitted?
There is a second structure, and most expats have never had it explained to them, because it does not sit in the holiday let aisle of the market. It sits in expat residential lending.
The logic here is inverted. Rather than an investment you are occasionally allowed to occupy, the lender treats the property as yours, bought for your own use, with short-term letting permitted as a secondary activity when you are not in it.
What replaces the night count for this option?
Once a property is categorised this way, the night count stops being the issue, because the lender’s starting assumption is that you will be using it. The conditions attach elsewhere instead.
You need to genuinely intend to keep the property for your own use.
Lenders treat this as a statement of intent. Short-term letting to guests outside your family is permitted, but on the lender’s terms rather than through an assured tenancy.
Letting income is excluded from the affordability assessment completely, so the loan has to stand up on your overseas salary alone.
What do you give up in exchange?
That last point is the real trade, and it is worth pausing on.
You give up the ability to borrow against the rent.
In exchange, you get the property on expat residential terms, with the freedom to come and go, and a lender who does not treat your presence in your own house as something to manage.
For a well-paid expat buying a modest UK base, that trade is usually the easy one to make.
Is an expat residential mortgage cheaper than a holiday let mortgage?
This is the part that tends to surprise people, because it runs against the instinct that more freedom must cost more. It does not.
The expat residential route usually works out cheaper because it only carries the expat premium, not the extra holiday let premium stacked on top of it in a dedicated holiday let mortgage.
What loan to value can you get on an expat mortgage?
There is a second advantage worth naming: the deposit.
Holiday let mortgages generally top out around 75% loan to value, a 25% deposit, so £100,000 on a £400,000 property.
Expat residential lending goes further, reaching 85% for some cases, with maximum loan sizes tiered as the loan to value climbs. This matters most for a younger expat with a strong salary and a smaller deposit.
Read more: Holiday let mortgage deposits
What do lenders need from expat mortgage applicants?
This is a bigger group than it sounds: the UN estimates at least 4.8 million Britain-born people lived overseas in 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics, with Australia the largest destination at 1.1 million.
Most lenders want similar groundwork: British citizenship, six months in your current role, a UK correspondence address and bank account, an evidenced deposit, and a property in England or Wales with no holiday park or occupancy restriction.
When should you choose an investment holiday let mortgage instead?
The dedicated holiday let route is still the right call if you have no real intention of living in the property yourself, if your salary alone will not cover the loan without rental income, if you want to hold it in a company or SPV, or if you are building a portfolio rather than buying a single home.
Read more: Holiday let mortgage guide
Which mortgage route is right for you?
If you are living abroad and thinking about a UK property you will use and let, the single most useful thing you can do before you speak to anyone is get clear on one question: is this primarily a home you will eventually live in, or primarily an income asset?
Everything downstream follows from that answer: the product, the rate, the deposit, the night count, whether you can hold it in a company, and what you have to prove and to whom.
Most expats we speak to know the answer immediately once the question is put to them plainly.
They just had not realised it was the question that decided everything else, because the products are usually presented as if holiday letting were a single thing with a single set of rules. It is not.
There are two routes with opposite logic, and the cheaper one is frequently the one nobody showed them.
Call us on 020 8301 7930 or email info@drakemortgages.co.uk to speak to one of our experienced advisers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most dedicated holiday let mortgages for expats set a contractual cap, usually between 30 and 60 nights a year, with a handful of more generous lenders stretching to 90. If you want to use the property without counting nights, an expat residential mortgage with letting permitted removes the cap entirely, because the lender’s starting assumption is that you will be living in it.
The cap is written into your mortgage conditions, so lenders can treat exceeding it as a breach of those terms. If your circumstances mean you are likely to need more time in the property than the cap allows, raise this with your adviser before you apply rather than after, since the two lending routes are structured very differently.
A holiday let mortgage is underwritten as an investment: the lender is lending against the rent, so your own use is capped and counted. An expat residential mortgage with letting permitted works the other way round. The lender treats the property as your home, so there is no fixed night limit, but your letting income is excluded from the affordability assessment entirely.
Usually, yes, a modest premium over the equivalent UK resident product, because the case is manually underwritten. Depending on whose figures you read, that expat premium runs roughly 0.3 to 1 percentage point. Which route you choose, holiday let or residential, often has a bigger effect on the final rate than your residency status alone.
Often, yes. A holiday let mortgage carries both the expat premium and a holiday let premium stacked together. An expat residential mortgage only carries the expat premium, on a lower residential baseline. That is a general market pattern rather than a guarantee, so always ask your adviser to check the actual position between two live offers.
Investment-led holiday let mortgages typically top out around 75% loan to value, meaning a 25% deposit; on a £400,000 property that is £100,000. Expat residential lending with letting permitted has reached 85% for some cases, with maximum loan sizes tiered as loan to value rises. Exact figures depend on your country of residence, income structure and the property itself.
Yes, for a dedicated holiday let mortgage, limited company and SPV ownership is available through several lenders. An expat residential mortgage with letting permitted has to be in your personal name, because the entire basis of the product is that it is your own home. If you are planning to hold property through a company structure, the holiday let route is the one to look at.
On a holiday let mortgage, yes, the projected rent is the whole basis of the affordability assessment. On an expat residential mortgage with letting permitted, no, that income is excluded completely and the loan has to stand up on your overseas salary alone. Which one suits you depends on whether your salary alone can carry the borrowing you need.
It depends on the route. An expat residential mortgage with letting permitted is usually a regulated mortgage contract, since the property is your home. Dedicated holiday let mortgages sit outside FCA regulation, because they are treated as business or investment lending rather than a loan secured on your own home. We can help you with both types.