Mortgage advisers in the UK: FCA register and fees

What the mortgage adviser does

A mortgage adviser looks at your income, deposit and plans, compares loans and recommends one, then helps with the application. Some advisers look across the market, others only at one lender’s products. Ask which, and how the adviser is paid.

The adviser does not value the property (see the valuer) and does not do the legal work (see the conveyancer). To get a first idea of what a lender might offer, ask for a mortgage in principle. For the rules lenders apply, see mortgage affordability rules and mortgage in principle.

The title and where to check it

What the rule says. On its page about the Register, the FCA writes that “Residential mortgages, equity release and home purchase plans, including Sharia-compliant options, are regulated” and that firms offering them “must be authorised”. It also says consumer buy-to-let mortgages are supervised, so the firm must be registered, while buy-to-let and commercial mortgages are neither regulated nor supervised. We read these as the FCA’s own summary of the position on 14 October 2026. For a borrower buying a home to live in, the adviser should therefore be on the Register.

Authorised and registered are not the same thing: the FCA defines “registered” as meeting requirements but being unable to “offer regulated products that need authorisation”. It adds that not all individuals at a firm need approval, so some may not appear. A firm can also be authorised yet not have permission for the service you want, so look at its permissions.

Where to check. Use the FCA Firm Checker, then the Financial Services Register: register.fca.org.uk. The FCA tells you to “Use the FCA Firm Checker before you buy a financial product or service”, and to make sure the contact details you were given match those on the checker, because of cloned firms. If the firm is not authorised, the FCA says you “should avoid dealing with them”. Check one firm at a time, for your own purchase. Payotte could not load the Register itself when preparing this page, so we describe it from the FCA’s guidance pages only.

Terms of use. The FCA’s legal page (https://www.fca.org.uk/legal) sets conditions for the whole site. Those that matter here, verbatim:

• clause 3.3: “You must not reproduce or store any part of this site in any other website” […] “or include it in any public or private electronic retrieval system or service without our prior written permission.”
• clause 3.4: “You must not use data from this site to provide a data feed to any comparison table” […] “or any other website without our written permission.”
• clause 3.9: “Any re-use of material on this site otherwise than as explicitly permitted in this copyright notice is prohibited” […] “unless prior written permission to the re-use has been obtained from the FCA.”
• clause 4.8 (iii): users will not “use nor attempt to use any “scraper,” “robot,” “bot,” “spider,” “data mining,” “computer code,"" […] “or any other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, process or methodology to access, acquire, copy, or monitor” […] “any portion of the website, any data or content found on or accessed through the website” […] “without the prior written consent of the FCA.”

In plain terms, without the FCA’s written permission you may not copy or store the content, feed it to a comparison table, or collect it automatically. We could not read the Register’s own pages, so we do not know whether it carries further conditions. Payotte copies nothing from it and never queries it in series: the listing only sends you to the official search.

How Payotte chooses the firm

Payotte selects one firm per trade and per area, on a published grid based only on public data:

• only companies are selected, never a person: no adviser is named;
• the title is published on the listing so that you check it yourself, at the FCA Register, free of charge;
• the selection is never paid for;
• no firm is listed yet in the UK section;
• Payotte never queries a register in series, and does not copy it.

Questions to ask

• What is your FCA firm reference number, and what are your permissions?
• Do you advise on the whole market or on a limited range?
• How are you paid: a fee, commission from the lender, or both? How much, in writing?
• Is any fee payable if I do not go ahead?
• Who exactly will advise me, and are they authorised?
• Do you receive anything for referring me to other services?