Restaurant Funding
For Restaurants and Cafés

The first thing an underwriter looks for in a restaurant is not the food. It is the trading record in the bank statements. Kitchen equipment, a fit-out and the building itself are each funded in a different way, and each has lenders that specialise in it.

Delivery changes what the statements show. Money from the aggregator platforms arrives as a weekly bank transfer rather than at the till, so a kitchen doing half its covers through an app has two income streams in its account. Telling the lender what share is delivery lets it see the whole business, and each lender decides how it reads that income.

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 there is no charge for sending them.

Each lender prices a restaurant case on its own criteria. The rate a lender quotes turns on the statements, the trading history and the term rather than on any published floor.

Trading history moves the needle more than the credit file. A business trading under a year has fewer unsecured lenders to choose from, and a genuine start-up fewer again. 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; it goes to the lender as the facts you give us, set out with the case.

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.