The 9 Best Peer-To-Peer Lending Accounts In The UK 2024

My team and I have been assessing P2P lending accounts since 2014 and we continue to have a 100% record. (We won't always get all the most important calls right – that's impossible in investing – but we expect that we almost always will.) My picks of the absolute best P2P lending accounts in the UK are based on the fruit of all our labours pooled into one page.

Introduction

4thWay’s specialists probe deeply and continuously into the P2P lending companies to assess them for ratings based on international banking standards. We sort the best peer-to-peer lending opportunities from the chaff.

We consider it a huge responsibility to give you impeccable information and for me personally it's an honour that you take the time to read what I have to say, so I want to ensure everything I write has been properly considered.

The industry itself makes it relatively easy to find enough quality opportunities. With today's report into the best of the best, you’ll see that the top standards in peer-to-peer lending remain very high and the risk-reward balance excellent.

For lenders who adopt the strategy of spreading their money across lots of platforms and loans, the rewards paid out to each of them shouldn’t vary much. In other words, there's a lot of stability and consistency, as demonstrated by the industry since it started in 2005.

The majority of the P2P lending companies I mention also offer lending through tax-free IFISAs. Even so, most people based in the UK with less than £10,000-£30,000 (£5,000-£15,000 for higher-rate taxpayers) will typically pay no tax even in regular P2P accounts.

The nine best peer-to-peer lending providers in the UK are:

CapitalStackers: talented, honest management team has enabled investors to consistently earn high interest rates.
Loanpad: the lowest-risk P2P lending company in the UK, and probably one of the safest investments anywhere, in any asset class.
AxiaFunder: the most exciting offering in this list, with remarkable returns of 20% or more being highly achievable.
Housemartin: stable lending with added potential to profit from property-price rises.
Invest & Fund: the best record of development loans repaying on time, with no losses on any loans to lenders.
Proplend: £26 million in interest paid to lenders and just £40,000 in losses.
CrowdProperty: less than 0.1% losses.
Kuflink: a great record since 2011 and adds diversity to your investments.
CapitalRise: rounds off the list with its professionalism, only disappointing by being limited to wealthy or sophisticated investors.

Click the above links to go the relevant section on each of the best P2P lending providers.

CapitalStackers

CapitalStackers’ talented, honest management team has enabled investors to consistently earn high interest rates.

CapitalStackers* offers property lending that has been paying 5.64% to 30.60%, and the average return is 13.41% per year.

IFISA is available. | High minimum lending amount of £2,500 per loan.

Why is CapitalStackers one of the best peer-to-peer lending providers in the UK?

• The CapitalStackers team is very thorough in its approach in selecting borrowers and property developments to fund.
• It allows for a large amount of leeway in the event that there’s both a substantial cost overrun and a serious delay in a sale of a development – and therefore a delay in receiving your money and interest.
• Full loan funding for the development is raised and sequestered in advance, but it’s granted to developers in tranches after competent assessment of progress. This ensures that lending doesn’t dry up part way through the project.
• The CEO and key decision maker is down-to-Earth, honest and excellent at communicating the position to lenders in a balanced way that exudes the caution you would hope for when providing these kinds of loans.
• CapitalStackers has all the essentials that I would want from junior development loans. Namely, a lot of the right kinds of experience, as well as imagination when it comes to working with borrowers to solve any issues. It also pays great attention to detail and to line-by-line development figures when approving loans.
• As with all my picks, it has an excellent risk-reward balance. In a decade of carefully approved loans, the lowest return on any loan has been 5.64% and the average has been 13.41%. I don’t know precisely what returns will occur over the next decade, but I’m confident, based on the quality of the loans, and the property that backs them up, that lenders will be very satisfied with their results.

CapitalStackers doesn’t approve many loans, so make sure you're ready to jump in when one becomes available.

Read more in the CapitalStackers Review. | Visit CapitalStackers*.

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Loanpad

Loanpad is the lowest-risk P2P lending company in the UK, and probably one of the safest investments anywhere, in any asset class.

Loanpad is paying 6.5%.

IFISA available. | Minimum lending amount of £10, spread automatically across all loans.

Why is Loanpad one of the best peer-to-peer lending providers in the UK?

• In times like these, you can’t really do better than have your money automatically lent across all outstanding borrowers in a book of loans to spread your risks.
• But actually you can do better: you can do so when the borrowers are securing their loans on properties that are all valued at the start at between 2-3 times the amount you’re lending. These loans are therefore very heavily sheltered from losses in any economic or property-market conditions.
• Many of these loans are developments and so the properties will usually be worth even more than 2-3 times the loan size by the time the developments are completed.
• Unlike competitors in development lending, Loanpad* doesn’t use the hoped-for sale valuation of the property when deciding to lend unless the development is already 75% complete. In which case, loans will be for under half the expected sale price.
• Borrowers raise the money they need in advance, so that a recession, building crisis or another pandemic can’t suddenly send development projects to a grinding halt due to lack of new money.
• Loanpad lenders are the senior lenders, so you receive back all the lent money plus interest first. Anyone else who has lent to the developer gets repaid afterwards.
• Loanpad’s lending partners are primarily responsible for approving borrowers. They typically lend around a third on top of what you lend, and lose all their money and interest first if a loan turns bad.
• All loans have either repaid successfully in full or are expected to do so.
• Loanpad has been praised by lenders for the ease with which you can re-lend your money as interest and repayments come in, because of its very low minimum lending amount.

Read more in the Loanpad Review | Visit Loanpad*.

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AxiaFunder

AxiaFunder is the most exciting offering in this list, with remarkable returns of 20% or more being highly achievable.

Through AxiaFunder, you provide funding for legal cases. You can lose a lot of money if a case is lost, but the rewards if you win are usually very high.

Just a few cases have lost so far, slightly outperforming expectations. After all the losses, the return has still been well above 20% per year.

No IFISA available. | Minimum you can put in is £1,000 per investment.

Limitations to lenders

To use AxiaFunder, you need to be a sophisticated or professional investor, and you need to be wealthy. Full definitions here.

Why is AxiaFunder one of the best in the UK?

• The sorts of legal cases you fund have a strong reputation for a high proportion of cases settling in your favour.
• AxiaFunder has a lead solicitor who is highly experienced in this field.
• It focuses on cases not just with strong prospects of winning, but where the other party appears highly likely to have both the will and the means to pay out on losing the case. The opposing party, for example, can be local authorities.

All that said, why are the returns so high?

The biggest reason is that you could lose all your money on any given case you fund, although insurance often protects you from the worst of this.

It's also theoretically possible to actually lose more than you put into any specific case – although AxiaFunder offers you a highly plausible way to reduce that risk, and calculates and balances the odds across different cases to put the maths in your favour.

Read more on all that in the AxiaFunder Review.

Visit AxiaFunder*.

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Housemartin

Housemartin offers stable lending but also with the potential to sell loans at a profit.

Housemartin involves lending to separate companies set up by Housemartin that act as landlords. These landlords have properties that are tenanted by charities and housing associations, and sub-let to the people they are supporting.

Lenders have typically been earning around 6%, but more recently it’s been 7%.

IFISA available. | Minimum £1.

Why is Housemartin one of the best peer-to-peer lending providers in the UK?

• This is a unique lending offer and it’s always great to diversify into different kinds of lending to further stabilise your returns.
• The charities and housing associations are not just receiving rent from their sub-tenants, but they typically get funding from local authorities as well.
• The unusual structure of the lending means that you also usually profit when selling your loans if house prices have risen when you sell (although you can also lose money, so in this sense it’s quite like being a landlord yourself).
• The returns to you for this kind of lending are very attractive indeed, considering the risk of making overall losses is extremely low.

There’s an awful lot to unpack about Housemartin, so, if you’re ready for a marathon, read more in the Housemartin Review. | Visit Housemartin*.

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Invest & Fund

Invest & Fund has the best record of development loans repaying on time, with no losses on any loans to lenders.

Invest & Fund has recently been paying an annual rate of 8.52% after fees and bad debts in its P2P lending account. It pays 8.02% in the IFISA, due to slightly higher fees.

IFISA available. | Minimum £2,500, which can be split across 10 loans.

Why is Invest & Fund one of the best peer-to-peer lending providers in the UK?

• In nine years and £350 million in lending, just two loans have gone more than three months beyond their initial expected end date, before repaying in full.
• With an average amount lent under 65% of the expected sale price of the completed developments, this is a good standard to go alongside the high quality of these particular loans.
• Although it has approved some bridging loans, Invest & Fund* sticks almost exclusively to development lending, where it’s strongest. It’s always good to see providers focusing where their experience lies.
• Lending is almost always senior, meaning you’re repaid first in the event the borrower can’t pay and the property needs to be sold to recover your loan.
• It only ever approves junior loans to existing developer borrowers and only in specific circumstances. Lenders earn a very attractive 15% to 25% for the additional risk. Just four very small junior loans are outstanding at this time.
• Like most P2P development lending, it doesn’t take in all the funding for the entire development in advance. That is not optimal, as it means there’s a risk the developer struggles to get cash to complete started works. But Invest & Fund’s results keep lenders happy to lend more and it has institutional investors (i.e. financial companies that exist to invest) to support any shortfall in cash that is needed.

Read more in the Invest & Fund Review. Visit Invest & Fund*.

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Proplend

Proplend has been extremely active – and successful – at keeping its borrowers and lenders in healthy shape.

Proplend* pays an average7.80% after fees on property mortgages. Properties are almost always receiving rent, and with property valued at least twice as much as the loan. You can also lend in riskier loans too, if you choose, for 8.96% to 10.05%.

IFISA available. | Minimum lending amount of £1,000. You can choose loans or you can lend automatically across its lowest-risk ones – or both.

Why is Proplend one of the best peer-to-peer lending providers in the UK?

• Lenders can limit the risks by choosing to lend in Proplend loans that are for no more than half the property valuations. This is an unusually excellent level of protection.
• Proplend focuses mostly on lending to landlords against currently rented properties.
• Interest rates are very attractive at Proplend for the risks involved. Higher rates give you additional protection against losses, since it can be used to cover losses.
• Proplend adds diversity to your portfolio of lending accounts, because most other property peer-to-peer lending in the UK is focused on residential development lending or short-term (bridging) property lending. Diversity gives lenders additional protection.
• Just one loan has ever suffered losses in Proplend’s near 10-year history, with a small fraction of one percent of the total lent through Proplend being written off.
• Few loans turn bad. When they do, Proplend works quickly with borrowers to turn them around, so you're not normally left waiting a very long time for your loan amounts and all interest up to the actual repayment date. This is useful for lenders who get concerned when problem loans are dragged on for a very long time.
• A substantial interest reserve held by Proplend on many loans means that landlords’ payments to Proplend lenders remain steady, even if landlords are late to make a payment. (Note this doesn't reduce risks, but it does stabilise payments, if that's important to you.)

Proplend’s downside is getting your money re-lent as interest and payments come in. That's partly due to its minimum lending amount of £1,000 and partly because other lenders are quick to lend. To keep lending, drip your money into many loans over lots of months. More tips on that in the Proplend Review.

Read more in the Proplend Review | Visit Proplend*.

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CrowdProperty

CrowdProperty maintains less than 0.1% losses.

CrowdProperty is paying an average 9.92% on development lending – after boosting rates substantially to help lenders fight inflation.

It also does some short-term bridging loans when developers require a sales period for their completed properties.

IFISA available. | Minimum lending amount of £500 per loan or, if you use auto-lend, your £500 could be split across as many as 10 borrowers.

Why is CrowdProperty one of the best peer-to-peer lending providers in the UK?

• CrowdProperty has had a great record in development lending, with only tiny amounts written off on a couple of loans since 2015.
• CrowdProperty isn’t as stringent as some of the other, best P2P lending companies in the UK about the amount initially borrowed compared to the starting property/site valuation. But these are the best borrowers, developers, and development projects that you can get. This gives lenders a different kind of diversity within the overall development lending area.
• CrowdProperty lenders are always the senior lenders – receiving all the loans back and interest first. Anyone else who has lent to the developer gets repaid afterwards.
• CrowdProperty borrowers don’t always raise all the money they need for a development project in advance. This is a potential weakness in P2P lending, but CrowdProperty has a variety of sources of cash for funding loans and has shown great ability to keep doing so. Indeed, it continued to grow through the pandemic and beyond, even while making its lending standards even tougher.

Read more in the CrowdProperty Review | Visit CrowdProperty.

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Kuflink

Kuflink has a great record since 2011 and adds diversity to your investments.

Kuflink* does development property loans and short-term “bridging” property loans. While its completed 700 such loans in P2P lending since 2016, its been doing the same types of loans in other ways since 2011.

IFISA available. | Minimum lending amount of £1,000, which you can spread across many loans in a pool of loans automatically if you use auto-lend.

Why is Kuflink one of the best peer-to-peer lending providers in the UK?

• These loans typically charge borrowers a total annualised rate, including fees, of about 15% to 20%+. The high cost is partly to cover the potential risks in this kind of lending, which are reflected in the lending rates that hit 8.75% in one of its lending accounts. Yet the high borrower rates are mostly to cover the difficulty of assessing the borrowers, as well as the costs in chasing loan payments, managing borrowers, and to make any inevitable delays in loan payments worthwhile.
• Kuflink established an excellent repayment record. While its bridging loan record is deeper, due to a shift in its focus over the years, its deepening record in development lending is performing at least as well as its bridge lending.
• For these kinds of loans, you typically see a lot of them being repaid some time after the initially agreed date – earning more interest while you wait – and with quite a few borrowers being chased to encourage repayment. This is true of Kuflink, too. Kuflink has demonstrated it has what it takes to manage these loans.
• Looking at its more mature loans to see what happens after loans are rolled into new loans or extended, the results show that Kuflink has ultimately collected the entire loan back plus interest for the whole period.
• There are few options in the P2P space that offer this level of risk and provide sufficient data, access and information to 4thWay and the public, and that can demonstrate good results across a large number of loans. But Kuflink is one of them.
• About one-third of the amounts lent are in junior loans. This does include a few large outstanding loans, so it’s one of the bigger points to watch.
• Kuflink takes the first loss of up to 5% on many loans in its self-select account. While it protects auto lenders by trying to spread their money across different loans, it has also so far covered a small amount of losses those lenders would have faced out of its own pocket, and it tries to do this in the first instance. Even if it had not done so, lenders would hardly have felt the impact of the losses up to this point.

Lenders choosing their own loans should aim for more senior loans

Rates paid to lenders in junior loans are actually slightly lower than senior ones.

Furthermore, on average, senior loans offer better cover against suffering any losses at all.

For senior loans, you won’t typically lose money unless the property is sold for less than about 65% of the property valuation. For junior loans, you would more typically lose money if the property sold for less than 70% of the valuation.

Therefore, if selecting loans yourself, you should aim for the senior loans where you can.

Drip your money in and lend in its higher-rate accounts

When using the self-select account, drip your money in over six to 12 months to ensure your money is spread across enough loans, although Kuflink has more than most in the property space.

Its auto-lend accounts automatically distribute your money across all the loans in the pool, which should be a lot of loans. It redistributes your money regularly as new loans come in and others are repaid.

When using auto-lend accounts, I think it makes little sense to go for Kuflink’s lower-rate accounts. These pay substantially less interest but with the same level of risk of bad debts in the underlying loans.

Kuflink's website shows higher rates than we do, because we have standardised the calculation so that it is comparable to other P2P lending companies and because this better reflects reality.

Read more in the Kuflink Review | Visit Kuflink*.

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CapitalRise

CapitalRise rounds off the list with its professionalism, only disappointing by being limited to wealthy or sophisticated investors.

CapitalRise does property development lending and has paid an average 8.79%.

IFISA available. | Minimum lending amount of £1,000 per loan.

Limitations to lenders

To use CapitalRise, you need to have:

• Invested in an unlisted company in the past 12 months (such as through crowdfunding websites).
• Or you need an income of at least £100,000 or savings and assets excluding your own home worth £250,000.
• Or you need to be a professional investor or have been one in the past two years.

Why is CapitalRise one of the best peer-to-peer lending providers in the UK?

• Most peer-to-peer lending providers in the UK fall over themselves to say they try and avoid lending against prime central London properties. But this is precisely where CapitalRise focuses, along with some lending in wealthier parts of outer London and the Home Counties. This can help you restore much needed balance to your lending or investing portfolio, because prime London has had excellent results. It will continue to have at least satisfactory results most of the time.
• I always like it when a P2P lending company sticks to just one type of lending. CapitalRise almost exclusively does property development lending. More rarely, it offers a bridging loan, for example to give one of the developers extra time to sell completed developments.
• You're usually first in line to recover your money and earning an average of more than 8% to do so. On the rare occasions when you're not first in line, you’re looking at earning a couple of percentage points extra.
• CapitalRise has a lot of in-house development experience and a keen understanding of numbers.
• CapitalRise has fewer distinct loans from different development projects, but they are extremely high quality.

Read more in the CapitalRise Review | Visit CapitalRise*.

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Read more:

It's all very well lending through the best P2P lending providers in the UK, but that's only half the story to getting good lending returns. The other half is down to you. To that end, here's my suggested reading:

4thWay’s 10 P2P Investing Principles. If you'd followed these principles, you would have easily made money every single year through P2P lending.

8 P2P Lending Mistakes People Make. Don't do what others do. Make just a little bit of effort and you'll sleep much, much better at night, every night.

The 13 Key Peer-To-Peer Lending Risks. Find out not just what the risks are, but highly effective ways to minimise those risks.

And even more reading:

Which P2P Lending Sites Are Profitable?

Why Is Low-Risk P2P Lending Labelled As “High Risk”?