OakNorth business loans: the £1 million floor, and what it actually rules out

OakNorth Bank lends from £1 million up to tens of millions, to UK companies that have traded for at least two years, turn over more than £1 million, and are profitable. It publishes no interest rate, no arrangement fee, and no representative APR on any of it. Checked on 15 October 2026 against OakNorth's own pages.

Notice which of those tests is which. Four are tests on your company; one – the £1 million – is a test on the loan. So a profitable company that has traded three years and clears the turnover bar, but needs £200,000 rather than £1m, passes everything OakNorth asks of a business and falls short only on the size of the cheque. That is a far bigger group than 'too small for OakNorth' suggests.

iwoca lends to UK limited companies too, so we compete with OakNorth for a sliver of this business, though not at its scale. Every OakNorth figure here comes from oaknorth.co.uk, read page by page on 15 October 2026. It structures every facility individually and its pages change, so read its own before you apply.

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What OakNorth lends, and who it lends to

OakNorth lends from £1 million up to tens of millions, and nothing below it. Its own answer is blunt: 'the minimum loan size that we provide businesses is £1million'.

Five tests decide whether it will talk to you, and OakNorth publishes all five on its business loan application page:

• A loan of £1 million or more
• At least two years of trading
• Profit, and a positive balance sheet
• Turnover above £1 million
• A business based in the UK

On sectors it is broad and explicit: healthcare, manufacturing, engineering, hospitality, leisure, property, education, technology, wholesale, retail, and professional services, with gambling, weapons, and oil and gas ruled out.

What it does with all that is the thing OakNorth is known for. Rather than scoring your filed accounts, it builds a facility around where the business is going – 'not just where it's been, but where it's heading', in its own words. In practice that means no off-the-shelf product: a deal team structures the amount, the term, and the repayment profile around your cash flow, and will write either an amortising loan or an interest-only one where the capital is repaid in a lump at the end.

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How long it takes, and who decides

Weeks rather than months, by OakNorth's own account, and there is no instant decision to wait for.

OakNorth says it can fund a business 'within days or weeks, rather than months like typical lenders'. What sets that pace is what sits in the path: 'every loan goes through a thorough review, including our Credit Committee'. On larger facilities you may be invited to present to that committee yourself, which is unusual and genuinely in the borrower's favour.

Be clear about what the online application is, because an earlier version of this page was not. You fill in a short form, and then 'one of our expert team members will be in touch'. The one exception is residential property investment, where you can apply for £1,000,000 to £3,000,000 and 'receive loan terms tailored to your next residential property investment in just 5 minutes', subject to the circumstances. Everywhere else the form starts a conversation, not a decision.

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What an OakNorth loan costs is not published

No interest rate, no margin, no arrangement fee, and no representative APR, on any product, anywhere on the site. So you cannot work out what an OakNorth loan would cost you before you apply for one.

OakNorth's position is that price is not the headline: pricing follows 'your risk profile', and it would rather compete on 'speed, flexibility and tailored terms'. That is defensible for individually structured lending, but it changes the order you do things in: you talk, you hand over accounts and forecasts, and you find out the price at the end.

What the same website does publish is instructive. OakNorth's business savings rates are there to the second decimal place – notice accounts from 3.20% to 3.65% AER, fixed-term deposits up to 4.25% AER. A bank that prices its deposits in public and its lending in private is telling you how the lending is sold.

The closest thing to a published answer on cost is a customer OakNorth quotes on its own banking page: 'They may not be the cheapest lender in the market, but the quality of the experience makes the extra cost well worth it.' That is Paul Crookes and Dave Walker, founders of CWC.

On early repayment there is nothing to report either way: OakNorth's business loan terms neither set out a charge nor rule one out, so your answer will be in your own agreement. Ask for it in writing before you sign.

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What OakNorth means by an unsecured loan

Not what most readers assume. An OakNorth unsecured loan takes no charge over property, but it does take a debenture and share charges over the company.

OakNorth is unusually clear about it: 'unsecured loan' means different things to different lenders, and 'At OakNorth, we only do the latter – unsecured loans that are not backed by any tangible assets (such as property) but have debentures in place.' Those start at £1m as well.

A debenture is a fixed and floating charge over the company's assets, present and future, registered at Companies House. So an unsecured OakNorth loan still puts the company's assets behind the debt; what it spares you is a charge over a specific building. Its secured lending does take that charge, usually against commercial property, vehicles, or machinery.

On guarantees, OakNorth says it 'may request either a personal or corporate guarantee', so a guarantee from a group company can stand in for one from a person. On revolving credit it is firmer: 'Most lenders, including us, will ask you to provide a personal guarantor.' The trigger it publishes is not the age of the business – it could hardly be, given the two-year test – but the director: 'A director's personal guarantee is made more likely if the credit history of the company director is poor.' A personal guarantee makes the signatory liable if the company cannot repay, so read what you are signing and take your own legal advice.

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The rest of what OakNorth lends on

Property, acquisitions, and working capital, in several shapes – plus two products it does not offer at all, and one number on its own site that contradicts the rest.

Property is the biggest part of it. OakNorth funds development at up to 55% of a project's gross development value, writes commercial mortgages, lends on property investment, and does bridging. For any of it the conditions are a loan of £1 million or more, a loan to value of 75% or below, and a UK property.

On working capital it offers a revolving credit facility at a floating rate, where you draw, repay, and draw again up to an agreed limit and pay interest only on what is out. And it does acquisition finance for mergers and management buyouts: the example it publishes is a £2.1m loan that let Richard Morsely buy his sister's share of the family textile business, Europa Wools.

Two gaps are worth knowing about: OakNorth publishes no asset finance product and no invoice finance product, with no page for either and no such address in its sitemap, checked on 15 October 2026.

Then a contradiction, which is OakNorth's rather than ours. Its commercial mortgages page says three times that it lends 'starting from £250,000 up to tens of millions'. The form you would use for a commercial mortgage asks for '£1 million or more', and every other page says £1 million. If £250,000 is the number you need, that one page is the only place OakNorth says yes, so ask rather than assume either way.

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OakNorth's business bank account, and whether you need one

Yes to the first and no to the second. OakNorth has a business current account, and it says in two places that you do not have to move your everyday banking to borrow from it.

The account is built for the same companies as the lending: several entities under one login, no charge on Faster Payments, Bacs, or CHAPS, a named business partner you can phone, and Xero, Sage, and NetSuite sync. It has a floor of its own, published on its business banking page: 'Eligible businesses need turnover above £1m, or £50k+ to deposit.'

The second half matters more than the first. 'There's no need to switch your everyday banking to apply,' OakNorth says, and elsewhere, 'we won't make you transfer your business banking over to us.' Several high street banks do make an account with them a condition of borrowing, which turns a loan application into two decisions. Here it stays one.

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Where else to look for a loan under £1 million

Which test you failed decides where to go next.

If the amount is the problem, you want a lender whose floor is lower, and most non-bank lenders start in the low thousands rather than the low millions. If it is the security, the specialist secured lenders – Allica, Shawbrook, and Aldermore among them – set lower thresholds on commercial mortgages and property investment than OakNorth does, and some of them publish rate cards. If you have the assets, the trading record, and the patience, a clearing bank will usually beat a challenger bank on margin and usually take longer to say so. If the deal is complicated, a whole-of-market commercial finance broker will put OakNorth up against the rest on your behalf.

One thing not to wait for: OakNorth publishes no appeals process and no onward referral anywhere in its lending pages. A no is the end of that conversation rather than the start of another one, so the next move is yours. Ask which of the five tests you missed, because the answer decides which of the options above is worth your time.

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What a Flexi-Loan does, and when it is the wrong answer

If you clear OakNorth's company tests but not its loan size, you are in the band an iwoca Flexi-Loan was built for. It is a business loan with flexible repayment options, from £1,000 to £1m, and what it buys you is timing. You have 30 days to draw it down after we approve it, so the money can be in place before the thing you need it for happens – a deal still being papered, or a tax bill that lands before your customers pay. You choose a fixed term of between 12 months and five years, so the repayment schedule is known from the outset, and because there is no fee for repaying early you can clear it as soon as the cash arrives: many of our customers only take out our finance for a few weeks, or even days.

OakNorth funds management buyouts from £1 million, and the one it publishes is £2.1m. Plenty of buyouts are a fraction of that and no simpler to pull off, because institutional money is not interested at that size and the seller still wants a date. Stephen Murray bought out ECF Accident Repair Group with a £500k loan from us, and what he talks about is friction rather than price: 'It was so simple compared to the hoops I've had to jump through with private equity in the past. The iwoca deal was quick and no stress.' That is the shape of the sub-£1m band generally: not struggling companies, but profitable ones whose next step happens to cost £200,000, and for whom the weeks matter more than the margin.

We lend to UK limited companies, and every new Flexi-Loan needs a personal guarantee from at least one director, though not every director has to sign. A decision is made within 24 hours, but it might be longer depending on the complexity of the request, and a quick decision is not a light one: we wouldn't lend to a business unless we were confident it could meet its minimum repayments.

Where we are the wrong answer is worth saying plainly. We do not lend above £1m, so if your need genuinely is £1 million or more, OakNorth is a real option and we are not. We do not write commercial mortgages, fund property development, or lend on bridging, and over a long term a secured facility priced off the base rate will usually cost less than ours.