Coventry Building Society Mortgage Deals: Rates, Criteria and the Dates Its Fixes End

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Coventry Building Society's cheapest advertised mortgage for buying a home is 5.10% fixed to 28 February 2029, at 65% loan to value with a £999 product fee and a 6.4% APRC. The fee-free alternative at the same LTV is 5.21% fixed to 29 February 2032, and its 5.9% APRC is the only one under 6% anywhere in the range. Every figure on this page was read from Coventry's own pages and documents on 22 October 2026.

The Society was founded in 1884 by a Coventry businessman, Thomas Mason Daffern, and it is still owned by its members rather than by shareholders. Its group advanced £9.6 billion of mortgages in 2025 against £6.7 billion in 2024, taking the lending book to £72.9 billion and its share of the UK mortgage market to 4.2% from 3.1%. It paid members a £398 million premium over the year, it has been a certified B Corporation since 2023, and on 1 January 2025 it bought The Co-operative Bank outright. First-time buyers can borrow up to 6.5 times income at up to 95% loan to value, which is the most generous published multiple of any large lender.

Two things about the way Coventry sells its mortgages are worth knowing before you go any further, and neither is a criticism. First, it fixes rates to a date rather than for a term: every fixed product in both ranges ends on 28 February 2029, 28 February 2030 or 29 February 2032, so a deal that was a five-year fix in 2027 is a four-year fix by 2028 at the same price. Second, there is no online application. Coventry takes mortgage business by telephone on 0800 121 8899, where it warns that “it can take 45 minutes to 1.5 hours”, or through a mortgage broker; it does not have advisers in every branch, and its own advice is free but covers only its own mortgages.

Fixed to a date, not for a term

Most lenders sell a two-year or a five-year fix and the clock starts when your mortgage completes. Coventry does the opposite: it sets an end date and sells everything up to it. On 22 October 2026 every fixed product in both the purchase and the remortgage range carried one of three expiry dates — 28 February 2029, 28 February 2030 or 29 February 2032. Measured from that day those are 860, 1,225 and 1,956 days away, or roughly 28, 40 and 64 months.

So the familiar labels do not apply cleanly. The 5.10% deal to 28 February 2029 is not a two-year fix; it was a 28-month fix on the day it was read, and it will be a 24-month fix for somebody completing at the end of February 2027. The 29 February 2032 products were a 64-month fix in October 2026 and will be a five-year fix in March 2027. The rate does not change as the window shortens, which means two borrowers can pay exactly the same price for materially different lengths of protection depending only on when their purchase completes.

There is an argument in the Society's favour here, and it is worth making. A dated fix means the whole book reprices on the same three days, which is administratively simpler and lets Coventry tell a borrower precisely when their deal ends rather than approximately. It also means that if you are buying and your completion slips by two months, your fix does not quietly extend — you simply get less of it. The practical move is to work out the months remaining to the end date before comparing the rate with anybody else's, because a 5.10% fix with 28 months to run and a rival's 5.10% two-year fix are not the same product.

Coventry publishes no “information correct as at” line on either rate page, so there is no way to tell from the page itself how fresh the numbers are. Lenders that print one — Santander does on its card pages — hand the reader a free currency check. Here the only date on the page is inside the representative example, which assumes a mortgage “starting on 01.05.26” and is an illustration rather than a rate date.

What the two ranges actually pay

Coventry runs separate lists for buying and remortgaging, and the purchase list is cheaper at every loan to value. At 65% LTV with a £999 fee, a purchaser gets 5.10% to 28 February 2029 and a remortgagor gets 5.20%. At 75% the purchase rate is 5.20% and the remortgage rate 5.29%. The gap is a consistent nine or ten basis points, it is published on the Society's own pages rather than inferred, and it is the opposite of the loyalty argument a mutual usually makes.

The range itself is wide. On purchase it runs from 5.10% at 65% LTV up to 6.13%-equivalent pricing at the top of the ladder, with 95% LTV available at 5.69% with a £999 fee or 5.84% with no fee at all, both fixed to 28 February 2029. APRCs across the purchase products read between 5.9% and 6.6%. Every single product in both ranges reverts to the same 6.54% variable rate, and every one carries an early repayment charge.

Whether the £999 fee is worth paying depends entirely on the size of the loan, and Coventry gives you both halves of the sum. Take the two 65% LTV products ending on 28 February 2029: 5.10% with a £999 fee against 5.35% with none. Run both over 28 months on a 25-year repayment basis and the crossover sits at about £172,250. Below that the fee-free deal wins; above it the fee is cheaper, and at £250,000 it is about £451 cheaper over the fixed period. That calculation is this page's own arithmetic from Coventry's published rates and fee, not a figure the Society quotes.

At the top of the ladder the answer flips. The ONS put the average first-time buyer property at £230,097 in August 2026, in a release published on 21 October 2026. A 5% deposit on that is £11,504.85 and the loan is £218,592. On those numbers the 5.84% fee-free 95% product costs about £555 more in interest over the 28 months than the 5.69% product does — but the 5.69% product costs £999 up front, so the fee-free deal comes out roughly £444 ahead. A buyer at the national average is better off ignoring the headline rate and taking the one with no fee.

The rate after the fix, and what it is not tied to

This is the most consequential number on the page and it is the same on all 40-plus products: “Followed by 6.54% Variable for remainder of term”. Coventry names it the Standard Variable Rate, and it runs a second managed rate called the Privilege Rate at 6.29% for some older borrowers. Its own help page is unusually direct about what governs them: these rates “aren't linked to the Bank of England Base Rate or any other external rates”.

That sentence is doing a lot of work. Bank Rate was 3.75% on 22 October 2026, held at the 17 September 2026 meeting with the next decision due on 5 November 2026. Coventry's SVR therefore sits 2.79 percentage points above Bank Rate with no stated ceiling and no mechanical link to it, so a cut in Bank Rate obliges the Society to pass on nothing at all. Nationwide, by contrast, publishes two reversion rates on its own page, both effective 1 January 2026: a Base Mortgage Rate “guaranteed to be no more than 2% above the Bank of England base rate”, which on the same day stood at 5.75%, and a Standard Mortgage Rate of 6.49% that its page says has “no upper limit or cap”. Coventry's 6.54% is 0.79 points above Nationwide's capped rate and five basis points above its uncapped one, which is the fairer of the two comparisons and still does not flatter it.

The cost of drifting onto it is easy to state. On a £200,000 loan over 25 years, 5.10% is £1,180.86 a month and 6.54% is £1,355.42 — £174.56 a month, or £2,094.66 a year, for doing nothing at the end of a fix. Those two payment figures are calculated here from Coventry's own published rates, because the Society's rate listings show each monthly payment as a placeholder rather than a number. Ask for the reversion rate in writing, and ask whether it is capped against anything, because the published answer is that it is not.

Six and a half times income, and the sum that follows

Coventry's first-time buyer product guide advertises “Up to 6.5x LTI” alongside “Up to 95% LTV” and the line that eligible first-time buyers “can now purchase a home with a deposit of as little as 5%”. Gifted deposits are accepted from a wide family list including aunts, uncles and adopted children. The footnote attached to the 6.5x figure sets three conditions: “No applicant can be self-employed, min income £30k (sole), £50k combined (joint)”, and every application still has to pass the Society's lending checks including a minimum scorecard requirement.

Six and a half times income is the highest published multiple of any big lender; Nationwide's Helping Hand reaches six times and the market norm is 4.5. It is a genuinely useful product and it deserves to be said plainly. But the two published numbers only reach so far together, and the sum is worth doing before you ring. The minimum sole income of £30,000 multiplied by 6.5 is £195,000. At 95% loan to value that buys a property of £205,263. The average first-time buyer property in August 2026 cost £230,097, so a borrower on the minimum income taking the maximum multiple is about £24,800 short of the national average purchase — and to buy at that average on a £195,000 loan they would need a deposit of £35,097, which is 15.3% rather than 5%. To reach 95% of the average on the full 6.5 multiple you need an income of about £33,630. All of that division is this page's own arithmetic on Coventry's published minimum and the ONS average.

Note also where the multiple is not published. Coventry's residential criteria page sets out loan-to-value limits, age limits, acceptable income types and self-employed requirements in detail, and then says of the maximum loan only that “Our affordability calculator provides you with both the maximum loan amount and maximum monthly payments”. No income multiple appears on the criteria pages at all, and none appears on the affordability calculator page either. The 6.5x figure lives on one marketing page, with a footnote.

How far into retirement the Society will lend

Coventry publishes its age rules clearly, which is more than many lenders do. All applicants must be 18 or over and “they must be no more than 75 years old at the end of the mortgage term” on a residential mortgage; the ceiling rises to 85 on buy to let. The maximum repayment term is 40 years, so a 35-year-old is the oldest borrower who can take the full term.

The interesting part is what happens when the term reaches into retirement, because Coventry sets two separate thresholds. Where five years or more of the term falls after retirement, an underwriter assesses affordability in retirement. Where half the term or more falls after retirement, the maximum payment and the maximum loan are set by the lower of current or anticipated retirement income, both measured net of ongoing commitments. And where the applicant cannot evidence acceptable income past retirement at all, “the loan term will be restricted to the retirement age (maximum age 70)” — so the headline 75 collapses to 70 for anyone without pension paperwork.

Income treatment is set out line by line and it rewards reading. Basic salary counts at 100%; regular overtime, commission, shift allowance and bonuses at 50%; an annual bonus at 50% of the lower of the two-year average and the latest year. Non-pensionable allowances that form part of the package, London weighting among them, count at 100%. Child maintenance counts at 50% and only where the child is under 13. Daily-rate contractors need a “minimum income £50k (gross annual) using the calculation ‘day rate x5 x41’”. Self-employed applicants must have owned the business for at least two years, have been actively trading for at least three months, and produce two years of HMRC tax year calculations plus tax overviews.

Loan to value falls as the loan rises, on a ladder most lenders do not publish at all: 95% up to £600,000, 90% from there to £750,000, 85% to £1 million, 80% to £1.5 million and 75% to £3 million. On the ONS's England average of £294,000 in August 2026 a buyer sits comfortably inside the 95% band; on a £900,000 London purchase the maximum is 85%, which is a £135,000 deposit.

Interest-only, written out in full

Coventry still writes residential interest-only business and publishes the rules, which is rarer than it sounds. The maximum loan to value is 75% for all applications, with no additional borrowing permitted above it, and the minimum equity at completion is £200,000 outside London and the South East and £300,000 inside them. There is no minimum income, but the applicant “must have sufficient income to support an equivalent repayment mortgage” — so the affordability test is run as though the capital were being repaid.

The repayment plan is where the detail sits, and each acceptable vehicle takes a haircut. A stocks and shares ISA counts at 80% of its accrued value, an endowment at 100%, the tax-free lump sum from a defined contribution pension at 12.5% of the pot, a guaranteed defined benefit lump sum at 50%, sale of the mortgaged property at 75% of value, another unencumbered UK residential property at 60%, and FTSE-listed shares, unit trusts, OEICs and investment trusts at 80%. Two exclusions matter: “We do not accept new Interest-only applications on a part/part basis”, and debt consolidation “is not allowed when applying for an Interest-only loan on an Interest-only specific product”.

The 12.5% figure is the one to sit with. A borrower planning to clear a £150,000 interest-only mortgage from a pension lump sum needs Coventry to see a defined contribution pot of £1.2 million, because it will only count an eighth of it. That is a conservative rule rather than an unfair one — the tax-free element is 25% of the pot and Coventry is counting half of that — but it is the kind of number that ends a conversation, and it is better to know it before the 45-minute phone call than during it.

In August 2026 the Society changed the interest-only loan to value limits and the new build limits, on both residential and buy to let. Its own criteria updates page records all four changes as “Loan to Value (LTV) update” and effective August 2026, and names no figures for what moved, directing brokers instead to “read our revised lending policy prior to submitting any applications”. So the fact that the limits changed is published; what they changed from is not.

A mutual that bought a bank, and the court date that finishes the job

On 1 January 2025 Coventry Building Society bought The Co-operative Bank. The year-end results spell out the economics: the consideration was “over 40% below the fair value of the net assets acquired”, which produced a gain of £584 million, and the acquired balances included £20.4 billion of lending, £4.9 billion of personal current account balances, £3.4 billion of business and commercial deposits and £1.9 billion of Bank wholesale funding. Group total assets went from £64,031 million to £88,239 million in a single year.

That gain is why the 2025 statutory profit before tax of £801 million looks so different from the underlying figure of £374 million — the bargain purchase accounts for roughly 73% of the statutory number, on this page's own division. Underlying profit rose far more modestly, from £349 million to £374 million. In the same year the premium paid to members fell slightly, from £401 million to £398 million, and loans more than three months in arrears rose from 0.33% to 0.38%, or from 1,045 cases to 1,637. None of that is hidden; all of it is in the Society's own news release.

The merger is not finished. Coventry is proposing to transfer the Bank's business, including the smile brand, into the Society itself: “A Court hearing will take place on 2 December 2026 to decide whether to approve the proposed transfer”, and the Society expects it to happen on 1 January 2027, subject to that approval. For most members nothing changes — the Society says the transfer “will not impact your account with the Society” and “there's nothing you need to do to maintain your day-to-day banking”. For anyone holding savings with both organisations it does: once the two balance sheets are one, “your FSCS eligible deposit protection may be affected”, because two separate £85,000 limits become one. If you have a Coventry mortgage and Co-operative Bank savings, that is worth checking before the new year.

Behind all of this sits a statutory constraint on mutuals that almost nobody writes about. Section 7 of the Building Societies Act 1986 — the funding limit — requires that the excess of a society's total funding over the shares held by individual members “does not exceed 50 per cent” of that total, which in practice forces at least half the balance sheet to be funded by ordinary savers rather than by wholesale markets. The Building Societies Act 1986 (Amendment) Act 2024 carved out certain Bank of England liquidity facilities, some debt instruments and PRA-related sale and repurchase agreements from that calculation, which gave societies more headroom — and that headroom is part of what made buying a bank with £1.9 billion of wholesale funding possible at all.

The mutual sector it belongs to is larger than most readers assume. The Building Societies Association reported that in the six months to March 2026 building societies held £499 billion of mortgage balances, 29% of all outstanding UK mortgage loans, wrote almost a third — 32% — of all lending to new homebuyers, advanced 61,730 mortgages to first-time buyers, held 46% of all cash ISA balances worth £212 billion, and ran 35% of all high street branches. Two banks have been mutualised in that time: Virgin Money into Nationwide in October 2024 and The Co-operative Bank into Coventry in January 2025.

Reading the complaints return column by column

Coventry publishes its half-yearly complaints return openly, covering Coventry Building Society, Godiva Mortgages Limited and ITL Mortgages Limited together. For 1 January to 30 June 2026 the home finance line reads: 707 complaints opened, 706 closed, a Provision measure of 2.04, “Percentage closed within 3 days” 50%, “Percentage closed after 3 days but within 8 weeks” 50%, “Percentage upheld” 70%, main cause other general administration and customer service.

Those two closure columns are disjoint, which is easy to get wrong and worth stating carefully: 50% plus 50% means every single home finance complaint was closed inside eight weeks, which is a good result against the eight-week regulatory deadline, not a bad one. Half of them were resolved within three days. The Society's own summary adds that it received “fewer than 3 complaints for every 1,000 home finance accounts”.

The uphold rate is the figure that should give a borrower pause. Seven out of ten home finance complaints were decided in the customer's favour, against 55% on the banking and credit cards line in the same return — a 15-point gap inside one firm's own numbers, on the same methodology, in the same six months. A high uphold rate is not straightforwardly bad; it can mean a firm that concedes readily rather than one that errs often, and Coventry's three-day resolution rate points that way. But it does mean that if you think Coventry has got something wrong on your mortgage, the odds on its own published record are that it will agree with you, which is a reason to complain rather than to let it go. The credit-related line, on only six complaints, ran at 83% upheld; the banking and credit cards line opened 3,632 complaints at a Provision measure of 1.39.

The charges, and the gaps in the paperwork

The tariff of mortgage charges is a short document, reference 07591 11/25, carrying the line “Information correct at time of going to print (November 2025)” and the firm reference number 150892. What it quantifies is cheap: a funds transfer fee of £8, a change of parties administration fee of £80, and £40 for unpaid ground rent. For comparison, Nationwide's own intermediary fees page charges “a £20 fee if your client or conveyancer requests to send money by telegraphic transfer”, and Barclays' tariff of mortgage charges (item reference 9914226_UK 09/2021) sets £35 for “Electronically transferring the mortgage funds to you or your solicitor”. All three were read on 22 October 2026, and £8 is the lowest of them by a wide margin.

What the tariff does not quantify is more significant. Against “Early repayment charge” it says only “This will vary. Please refer to your mortgage illustration.” The same answer is given for the product fee, the legal fee, the additional lending valuation fee and the mortgage exit fee. So a prospective borrower comparing Coventry's deals cannot find out, from anything the Society publishes, what it would cost to repay a fix early — no percentage, no ladder by year, no ceiling. Nationwide publishes its whole early repayment ladder on its intermediary site, down to 6% for each of the first five years of a ten-year fix. Coventry's own page on charges for repaying early adds nothing numerical either, saying the details are in your mortgage offer and your annual statement.

Two further charges are published and worth knowing. Repaying in full or in part by cheque adds seven days' interest to cover clearance, which does not apply to cleared funds or to money moved from a Coventry savings account. And the mortgage exit fee is waived if less than a year remains on the mortgage and is refundable if you take your next Coventry mortgage within six months of redeeming — twelve months for borrowers on a former Stroud & Swindon Building Society scheme, a relic of the 2010 merger still sitting in the current terms. No annual overpayment allowance is published anywhere on the Society's site, which is the other standard figure a borrower would expect to find and cannot.

On the other side of the ledger, the remortgage transfer service is generous and clearly described. Coventry pays for the standard legal work of changing lender through a conveyancer from its own panel — Land Registry searches, preparing the mortgage deed, repaying the old lender — and arranges a valuation “up to £670 (£700 for a Buy to Let mortgage)”. The limit is stated too: Land Registry registration is covered only “up to a maximum of £30 … anything charged above this will be your responsibility to pay”, and a long list of extras is excluded, including resolving title problems, transfers of equity, first registration of unregistered property, landlord consent on leasehold and certifying identification documents.

Coventry's Consumer Duty paperwork is published for brokers and is partly unfinished. The residential repayment fair value statement concludes that “the products continue to deliver fair value for customers in the target market for the products”, and is dated February 2025 under reference CFI PDF 0076 02/25 — twenty months old on 22 October 2026, on a document the regulator expects to be kept current. The statements for the residential tracker and the residential Standard Variable Rate are listed on the same page with no working link at all, so the fair value assessment of the 6.54% rate every borrower eventually lands on cannot be read. A third card on that page carries the placeholder title “Header text” and the body text “Intro text for card catergory.”, misspelling included. The Society does deserve credit on one point here: buy to let lending sits outside the Consumer Duty, and Coventry states that it has “taken the voluntary decision to apply the same PRIN principles” to it anyway.

The unfinished paperwork is not confined to one page. The “First Time Buyer product range” section of Coventry's live first-time buyer product guide — the page carrying the 6.5x income claim — consists of two paragraphs of Latin placeholder text beginning “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.” It was read twice on 22 October 2026 to be sure, and the second read returned the same text. That is a cosmetic fault rather than a factual one, but it is on the page a broker is sent to for the product range.

Finally, the independent ratings. Coventry's own “why choose us” page displays three Fairer Finance “Gold ribbon for customer experience” awards for 2026, marked “(autumn 2026)”, two of them for mortgages. Fairer Finance's own mortgages customer-experience table returned “Sorry, there are no ratings to show here just yet” when checked on 22 October 2026, along with a loading failure, so the award cannot be confirmed from the rating agency's own published table and is reported here as the Society's claim rather than as a verified rating. Defaqto does not rate mortgage ranges at all. Smart Money People gives the Coventry brand 4.44 out of 5 from 165 product reviews, “Last reviewed within 14 days”, but its mortgages section is empty — there is no mortgage-specific independent score for this lender.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 22 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.