Merchant cash advance·9 min read·Updated 7 September 2026

A £250,000 merchant cash advance: a short list, and a shorter one every year

By the CapExpand team

Reviewed by Alex Beardsley, Founder · UK commercial finance broker

Facts checked 7 September 2026 · first published 7 September 2026

Start with the arithmetic, because it disqualifies most enquiries before anything else does. UK advances typically run at 50% to 150% of a merchant's monthly card sales. To support £250,000 the terminal needs to be doing somewhere between £167,000 and £500,000 a month. That is a small chain, a busy multi-site restaurant group or a large single site, not a good independent.

The second thing to know is that the panel at this size is shorter than it was, and shortening. 365 Finance caps at £500,000, so £250,000 is half its ceiling. Nucleus's revenue-based loan stops at £300,000, leaving £50,000 of headroom. Outfund's advertised maximum fell from £10 million to £500,000 between July 2025 and September 2026, with its own funding page slider stopping at £300,000. Capify's direct merchant cash advance pages now return an error or redirect elsewhere, and the product survives only in its broker copy. YouLend and Liberis are the two that still comfortably write a quarter of a million.

What a lender needs to see at £250,000

The card turnover test is the first gate and the hardest to argue with. At £250,000 a lender is buying somewhere between three weeks and three months of your terminal receipts, and it wants a long enough history to believe the run rate. Liberis has a product aimed squarely here, Investment Capital, with eligibility from £40,000 a month and terms agreed case by case rather than published, and a Flex Capital facility with a limit of up to £2 million from £5,000 a month of card revenue.

365 Finance will write £250,000 inside its £10,000 to £500,000 range on the same published criteria it applies at the bottom: six months trading and £10,000 a month of card sales. Those minimums are clearly not what gets a quarter of a million approved, and it asks for twelve months of card statements on its unsecured page rather than the three that used to be standard. Its published approval rate of over 90% describes its whole book, not this end of it.

The paperwork is still light compared with a term loan of the same size, which is most of the point. There is no requirement for full unabbreviated accounts, no valuation and no debenture. What there is instead is a personal guarantee at Liberis for limited companies and LLPs, full company and consumer bureau searches on its route, and a settlement account arrangement at YouLend that reroutes your card receipts for the life of the advance. At £250,000 those are commercial terms rather than small print.

Worked example

Worked example · Illustrative advance on published market terms

£250,000 for a four-site restaurant group consolidating supplier arrears

Assumptions (illustrative, not a quote)

Advance £250,000 to a four-site group, seven years trading, all sites on one card acquirer
Factor rate 1.15, the sharp end of the 1.10 to 1.25 band available to established businesses at scale
Card sales £300,000 a month across the four sites, roughly £10,000 a day
Repayment 14% of card sales, near the top of 365 Finance’s published 5% to 15% band
Illustration only. Neither YouLend nor Liberis publishes a rate card and every figure is subject to underwriting

The arithmetic

Total repayable = £250,000 × 1.15 = £287,500, so the fee is £37,500
The advance is £250,000 against £300,000 of monthly card sales, or 83% of one month, comfortably inside the 50% to 150% band
Monthly collection = 14% of £300,000 = £42,000, and £287,500 ÷ £42,000 = 6.9 months
On a daily view: £10,000 a day × 14% = £1,400 a day, and £287,500 ÷ £1,400 = 205 trading days
Liberis’s 3% monthly minimum on a £287,500 total would be £8,625. At a 14% sweep the collection only falls below that floor if card sales drop under £61,608 a month, which for this group would mean losing three sites

At this scale the flexible-repayment promise is largely theoretical: the sweep would have to fall by 80% before the minimum clause bit. What you are really buying is £37,500 of cost for seven months of money and a decision made without an accountant.

Who funds £250,000

Lender	Published range	At £250,000
YouLend	Up to £2,000,000; no published minimum	The clearest headroom on the panel. Its own site advertises funding up to £2,000,000, although its partner channels are lower: Dojo and eBay both quote up to £1,000,000.
365 Finance	£10,000 to £500,000	Half its ceiling, which was raised from £400,000 during 2024. Backed by a £150m senior secured facility from Pollen Street Capital agreed in February 2025, which supports more than £300m of annual originations.
Liberis Flex Capital	Limit up to £2,000,000 (from £5,000 a month of card revenue)	A revolving limit rather than one advance, which at a quarter of a million usually beats a lump sum. Liberis agreed in June 2026 to be acquired by Nordic Capital and combined with Qred.
Liberis Working Capital	Up to £1,000,000 (from £500 a month of card revenue)	A single fixed-fee advance with renewal from 50% paid down. The 3% monthly minimum on a £287,500 total is £8,625, which at this scale sits far below the normal sweep.
Liberis Investment Capital	From £40,000 a month of revenue; terms agreed case by case	The only product on the panel built specifically for this end. Nothing is published about pricing or size, which is itself informative: at £250,000 these deals are negotiated rather than quoted.
Capify	Up to £500,000 (broker channel)	Its broker page still describes an advance to £500,000 repaid from a percentage of daily card payments, with a sitemap date of August 2026, while direct merchant cash advance URLs return an error or redirect to invoice finance. Reachable through an introducer, not through its own site.
Outfund	£10,000 to £500,000	Published as £500,000 in its FAQ but £300,000 on the funding page slider, so £250,000 is inside both. Revenue-based rather than card-based, over 3, 6, 9 or 12 months, with capital landing in an Outfund wallet.

Examples from the panel, not the full list, from each lender's published criteria as at 7 September 2026. Every figure is subject to the lender's own checks.

What £250,000 says about your card machine

Run the band both ways before you enquire. At 150% of monthly card sales, the least a terminal can be doing to support £250,000 is about £167,000 a month, and a lender stretching that far will price for it. At 50%, the comfortable figure is £500,000 a month. Our worked example sits at £300,000 a month, which makes the advance 83% of one month's takings, and that is where most approved deals land.

The interesting consequence at this scale is that the product's headline feature stops mattering. A cash advance is sold on the promise that repayments shrink when trade shrinks. On our example the group would have to lose four fifths of its card volume before Liberis's 3% monthly minimum became the binding constraint. A restaurant group down 80% has problems no repayment clause solves. So the flexibility is real at £10,000, marginal at £100,000, and close to decorative at £250,000.

What you are actually buying at this size is speed and paperwork avoided. Liberis reported that 70% of its 2025 merchants had money within one working day of approval. YouLend’s own sequence is a decision inside a day and funds inside two more. A £250,000 term loan needs full unabbreviated accounts and takes as long as your accountant takes. That gap is worth money to a business buying a lease or settling arrears against a deadline, and it is worth nothing at all to a business with time.

The comparison you should force at this size

£37,500 for roughly seven months of £250,000 is the number to test, and the fair test is a loan over the same seven months rather than a loan over five years. Funding Circle's Growth Guarantee Scheme loan runs to exactly £250,000 from 13.4% a year. Amortised over seven months at that rate, the interest comes to £11,291. The advance costs £37,500 for the same seven months, which is more than three times as much. What the loan demands in exchange is £37,327 a month in fixed instalments, where the advance takes 14% of whatever the tills produce.

With Bank Rate at 3.75% as at 7 September 2026 and unsecured bank term lending running at about 7% to 11% a year, the spread against a bank is wider still. A business with two clean filed years, a supportable margin and eight weeks to spare is leaving a five-figure sum on the table by taking an advance instead. We would rather say that plainly than place the deal and hope nobody works it out.

The advance wins in three specific situations, and it is worth being honest that they are the situations most of our £250,000 enquiries come from. The accounts do not support a term loan. The money is needed inside a week. Or the business is genuinely seasonal enough that a fixed £5,740 a month through a dead February would be the thing that breaks it. If none of those is true, start with the term loan page instead.

Who is left, and who quietly left

The top of this market has been thinning for three years and the lenders have not always announced it. Uncapped stopped writing revenue-based finance before 2023 and published a blog post saying so, calling the product “potentially misleading” and naming the providers that still offered it. iwoca withdrew its revenue-based loan and now tells visitors to its cash advance page to consider a Flexi-Loan instead. Capify's direct advance pages return an error or redirect to invoice finance while the broker page still sells it.

Outfund's retreat is the most measurable. In July 2025 its site advertised business loans of £25,000 to £10 million with a £25,000 monthly revenue requirement. By September 2026 the range was £10,000 to £500,000, the revenue floor was £10,000 a month, and the funding page slider stopped at £300,000. No announcement accompanied any of that. Its lending entity filed group accounts to 31 January 2025 showing a £7.0m loss on £6.7m of turnover and average headcount down from 38 to 12.

None of that means the product is dying. YouLend grew revenue to £171.5m in the year to March 2025 and turned an £8.8m profit, and 365 Finance secured a £150m facility from Pollen Street Capital in February 2025 to support more than £300m of annual originations. What it means is that the top of the range has consolidated into fewer, larger, better-capitalised names, and that a £250,000 enquiry now has a real answer at two or three lenders rather than ten. Fewer options, but the ones left are the ones that will still be there when you renew.

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Frequently asked questions

YouLend advertises funding up to £2,000,000 on its own merchants page and FAQ, which is the highest published ceiling on our panel, and Liberis Flex Capital offers a limit of up to £2,000,000. Partner channels are lower: Dojo and eBay both quote up to £1,000,000 for the same underlying products.

Between £167,000 and £500,000 a month on the 50% to 150% band UK advances typically work to, with most approved deals landing near one month of takings. Our worked example uses £300,000 a month across four sites, which makes the advance 83% of one month and produces a 6.9-month payback at a 14% sweep.

A loan, on almost any measure. £37,500 of fee for about seven months of money compares with £11,291 of interest over the same seven months at the 13.4% a year Funding Circle publishes for its Growth Guarantee Scheme loan, or £7,556 at 9% a year in the middle of the band clearing banks quote for unsecured term lending. The catch is that the loan wants £37,327 a month whatever trade does.

Barely. On our example the group would have to lose about 80% of its card volume before Liberis’s 3% monthly minimum of £8,625 became the binding constraint. The clause protects the lender at scale rather than flexing for the merchant, which is the opposite of how the product is sold at £10,000.

Uncapped withdrew revenue-based finance before 2023 and said so publicly. iwoca’s cash advance page now points visitors to its Flexi-Loan instead. Capify’s direct merchant cash advance URLs return an error or redirect to invoice finance, leaving the product on its broker page only. Outfund’s advertised ceiling fell from £10 million to £500,000 between July 2025 and September 2026.

It complicates it. The sweep shows in every bank statement an underwriter reads and gets netted off any affordability calculation. At YouLend the card settlement runs through an account it operates as a condition of the financing, which limits what a second funder can secure against. Capify will not sit behind another lender at all and insists on paying them out.

Yes, provided the card volume is visible to the lender, which usually means the sites share an acquirer or the lender can read the group’s bank data. Liberis Investment Capital is the product built for this end, with eligibility from £40,000 a month and terms agreed case by case rather than published.

Days rather than weeks if the card data is clean. Liberis reported one deal in five completing within four hours in 2025, with 70% funded inside a working day of approval. YouLend advertises a decision inside a day and money inside two more. Expect the guarantee and any group structure questions to be what actually holds it up.

Sources and method

Lender ranges were checked against the sources below on 7 September 2026. Panel counts come from our September 2026 lender-platform extract, available products only.