Product transfer season is coming: is your pipeline built for the volume?
Before writing this, it is worth being upfront about one thing. Nobody publishes a month by month breakdown of exactly when fixed rate mortgages come to an end. A Freedom of Information request asking for precisely that figure was turned down in 2023 because the data simply does not exist in that form anywhere in government, and UK Finance would charge to produce it. So there is no clean answer to which specific month counts as peak season this year. What there is, is a much more useful set of numbers about scale, timing mechanics, and where the volume actually ends up going, and that turns out to matter more than the calendar does.
The scale is not in question
UK Finance estimates around 1.8 million fixed rate mortgages are due to expire in 2026, up from 1.6 million in 2025. Product transfers are forecast to reach £261 billion this year, alongside a further £77 billion in external remortgaging, a 10 per cent rise on 2025. Product transfer activity does not appear in official measures of gross mortgage lending at all, which means a figure nearly as large as the entire £300 billion gross lending forecast for the year is essentially invisible in the headline market statistics most people quote.
The early data for 2026 backs this up. In the first quarter alone, 499,830 mortgages were refinanced, up 33 per cent year on year, and 84 per cent of those were internal transfers rather than moves to a new lender. Around 420,000 borrowers stayed with their existing lender in that quarter without ever going to market. This is not a forecast anymore. It is what is already happening.
The volume moves in a six month window, not a season
The mechanic that actually shapes when this business arrives is the Government's Mortgage Charter, introduced in 2023 and now signed by 47 lenders covering around 90 per cent of the market. It commits lenders to letting borrowers lock in a new deal up to six months ahead of their fixed rate ending, and to offer a better like for like deal if one becomes available before the new one starts. The FCA's own Mortgage Charter data shows what that does in practice. Roughly 232,000 mortgages locked into new deals in November and December 2025 alone, which is a clear sign that engaged borrowers are acting early rather than waiting for the deal to actually expire.
What this means for pipeline planning is that the relevant window for any given client is not a fixed point on the calendar, it is six months before that specific client's own maturity date. A broker's busiest period is not one season, it is however many client maturity dates happen to cluster around the same point each year, shaped by whatever was happening in the housing market two or five years earlier.
The volume does not automatically come to the broker
This is the part that matters more than raw scale. A product transfer can be completed entirely between the customer and the lender, with no adviser involved and no procuration fee generated for anyone. The historical pattern here is not new. As far back as 2016, the FCA found that 42 per cent of mortgage transactions were internal switches, 86 per cent of which were arranged directly with the lender rather than through an intermediary, and roughly half of those were execution only rather than advised. What has changed is the scale that pattern now applies to. If a similar share of the 1.8 million maturities this year go the same way, a large number of clients will simply renew with their existing lender inside that six month window, and the broker who originally arranged the mortgage will not be part of the conversation at all.
That is the actual risk behind the word volume in this title. It is not primarily a question of whether the back office can process enough paperwork. It is a question of whether a broker's client contact happens early enough, inside that six month window, to be part of the decision before the lender's own retention channel closes it out first.
The cases a broker does capture are being paid less for the same work
Even where a broker does keep the case, the economics have shifted. Procuration fees on product transfers can run as low as 0.2 per cent of the loan amount, compared with a fuller rate elsewhere. As David Hollingworth of London & Country has pointed out, some lenders pay closer to 0.3 per cent in recognition that the advice process for a product transfer looks much like the process for a new mortgage, but plenty do not. At the start of 2026, Lloyds Banking Group, the UK's largest lender, scaled back product transfer fees across all of its lending brands, adding further pressure to a fee structure advisers had already been raising concerns about for some time.
The practical effect is that volume growth on its own does not translate into revenue growth. A broker handling more product transfer cases at a lower fee per case needs meaningfully more efficiency per case just to hold their income steady, let alone grow it.
What a pipeline actually needs to be built for
Put together, these numbers point to a fairly specific set of requirements, and none of them are about handling more paper.
Client review timing needs to be built around each individual client's own maturity date minus six months, rather than a generic annual check in, so the broker's outreach lands inside the Mortgage Charter window rather than after it has already started closing.
Upcoming maturities need to be flagged automatically rather than depending on someone remembering to check a spreadsheet, because at national volumes of 1.8 million, missing even a modest share of a client book adds up to a meaningful amount of lost business.
And the per case time cost needs to come down to match the fee compression already underway, because a pipeline that assumed 2023 or 2024 fee levels will not clear 2026 volumes profitably without some adjustment to how much time goes into each case.
This is close to what the CRM and case management side of this platform, alongside its automated client marketing tools, is built to do, surfacing a client's maturity date well ahead of time and prompting outreach inside that window rather than after it, so the case stays with the adviser who already knows the client rather than defaulting to whichever lender happens to hold the mortgage.
The number that actually matters
The 1.8 million figure is a useful sense of scale, but it is not really the number worth planning around. The number that matters is how many of a broker's own clients fall inside that six month window at any given point in the year, and whether the outreach reaches them before the lender's own system does. That is a capture problem before it is a capacity problem, and the two call for different fixes.
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