Restaurant Funding
When You Need It Most

The first thing an underwriter looks for in a restaurant is not the food. It is what share of the money arrives at the terminal. 20 of our lenders fund restaurant and bar equipment as an asset, 22 fund a fit-out, and 31 will lend against leisure premises where you are buying the building (checked September 2026; panel composition changes over time).

Delivery has quietly broken the old sizing model. Money from the aggregator platforms arrives as a weekly bank transfer, not as card takings, so a kitchen doing half its covers through an app shows a card figure that understates the business by a wide margin. A card-split advance sized on that figure will be smaller than the restaurant deserves. Say up front what share is delivery and ask for the offer to be sized on total revenue rather than terminal revenue. Some lenders will, some will not, and that is worth knowing before you sign.

Seasonality is the other misread. Three months of statements taken in January describe a different restaurant to the one that exists in July. Twelve months of takings is the fix, and it costs you nothing to send them.

At £25,000 unsecured, 36 lenders on our panel have a product covering the amount, over terms of 1 to 72 months, with published rate floors starting at 4.1% and a median floor of 19.2% (checked September 2026). At £50,000 the count rises to 47 and the median floor falls to 17%. Restaurants sit towards the upper half of that range more often than most sectors, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

Trading history moves the needle more than the credit file. 21 of our 55 unsecured lenders will look at a business trading under a year, 5 will look at a genuine start-up, and 24 accept minor adverse credit older than 24 months. A second site backed by a first site's figures is a far easier case than a first site backed by a business plan.

Restaurants borrow into a sector lenders already treat as high risk, and the data behind that view is public. Accommodation and food services accounted for 14% of the 23,942 company insolvencies recorded in England and Wales in 2025, on the Insolvency Service's own figures. That is why restaurant pricing sits where it does, and why a lender asks for a personal guarantee on a facility it would grant a dental practice without one.

What moves your case is the detail that separates you from the average. A signed five-year lease with a rent review already agreed. A second site that has traded through two winters. A head chef on a contract rather than a handshake. None of that appears in a scorecard, all of it appears in a covering note, and we write one.

We say no to more restaurant advances than we used to. Where a kitchen is refinancing an existing advance rather than buying something, a second advance stacked on the first usually makes the cash flow worse, not better. That is a conversation we would rather have on the phone than after the money lands.

The ONS counted 31,615 VAT or PAYE registered enterprises under licensed restaurants in the UK at March 2025, up from 31,020 a year earlier, and 18,920 of them employ fewer than 10 people. The 125 largest, with 250 or more staff, employed 149,546 of the class's 524,174 workers, so a bank's picture of the trade is shaped by the groups while the enquiries we take come from the 18,920 (ONS ad hoc release 3495, 24 June 2026, read 9 September 2026).

Business rates changed for restaurants in England on 1 April 2026. Restaurants are on the gov.uk list of qualifying uses, so a property with a rateable value under £51,000 pays a 38.2p multiplier and one between £51,000 and £499,999 pays 43p, each 5p below the equivalent standard figure, in place of the 40% relief of 2025/26 that was capped at £110,000 per business (guidance updated 30 March 2026, factsheet updated 30 January 2026). A restaurant whose rateable value sits at £500,000 or above is outside the scheme and pays a higher multiplier set 2.8p above the standard one, which is worth checking before a forecast goes to a lender.