Start Up Loans Company Review (2026)

Start Up Loans Company at a Glance

Our Verdict

A Start Up Loan is a personal loan you use for business purposes. That single sentence carries most of what a founder needs to understand before applying. The Start Up Loans Company is a government-backed programme, wholly owned by the British Business Bank, and it does not lend you anything itself. The money comes from The Enterprise Fund Limited, trading as GC Business Finance, and the credit agreement is in your name rather than your company’s. No business assets are pledged, and nobody asks you to sign a guarantee over your house. But the debt is yours from the first day to the last, and it stays yours if the company closes.

For a founder at that stage, the terms are better than anything the commercial market offers. The fixed rate is 7.5% a year, up from 6% on 6 April 2026, and it is the same 7.5% whether you borrow £500 or £25,000, whether your credit file is spotless or merely acceptable. There are no fees at all: nothing to apply, nothing to arrange the loan, nothing to repay it early. iwoca, one of the commercial lenders working the same market, starts at around 2% a month for a business that can already show revenue, and most commercial lenders will not look at a business that has not started trading at all. That gap is what the scheme exists to close.

The April 2026 rules also widened who can apply. Businesses trading for up to 60 months are now eligible, where the cap used to be 36 months. Three-year-old businesses that were too early for a bank and too old for the scheme are no longer stranded between the two.

The one thing we push back on is the way the support is sold. The scheme’s own headline is 12 months of free mentoring, and almost every article about it repeats that phrase. The support FAQ puts the entitlement at four hours of one-to-one mentoring, spread across those twelve months, and that is the figure we have used throughout this review. Four hours is useful. It is not a year of hand-holding, and no founder should factor a year of hand-holding into the decision.

The other limits are structural. £25,000 is the ceiling per person, and £100,000 is the ceiling for one business across every owner who ever borrows for it. The application is slow by design, because an adviser works through your business plan, your cash-flow forecast and a personal survival budget before anything is decided. Two to three weeks if you arrive fully prepared; two to three months or longer if you do not. The credit check is a hard search and the scheme runs it early, so a founder who drops out halfway through still carries the footprint on their file.

We rate the Start Up Loans Company as the strongest first port of call in UK start-up finance for founders who fit it, and a slow, personally-owned debt for founders who do not read the structure carefully first.

Best For

• UK-resident founders with no trading history, or fewer than 60 months of it, who cannot get conventional business finance
• Anyone who wants a fixed rate with genuinely no fees and no early repayment charge
• Founders who need £25,000 or less, or co-founders who can each apply separately
• People writing a formal business plan for the first time, who will use the adviser rather than resent them
• Borrowers who accept that the repayment obligation is personal and survives the business

Not Ideal For

• Anyone who needs funds in days: the scheme’s own range runs from two to three weeks to two to three months or longer
• Anyone who wants to look before committing. The only credit search the scheme’s own FAQ describes is a hard one, and it usually happens early in the process
• Businesses needing more than £25,000 from one applicant
• Established businesses with filed accounts and real revenue, which can usually borrow more, faster, in the company’s name
• Applicants who are bankrupt, subject to a Debt Relief Order, or in an outstanding IVA, Trust Deed, Debt Management Programme or Debt Arrangement Scheme: the scheme cannot lend to them
• Anyone who wants the debt to sit with a limited company rather than with themselves

Key Facts We Verified

What Is the Start Up Loans Company?

Who You’re Actually Borrowing From

Your lender is The Enterprise Fund Limited, which trades as GC Business Finance and is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority under firm reference number 727252. It is a Manchester company, number 04460763, and a subsidiary of The Growth Company Limited. The scheme’s own complaints policy puts it in one line: since 2023, The Enterprise Fund Limited trading as GC Business Finance “is our Finance Provider and the regulated lender under the Start Up Loans Scheme”.

The brand you applied through is not that company. The Start-Up Loans Company is a company limited by guarantee owned by British Business Bank plc, and the group states plainly that it and its subsidiaries are not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority or the Prudential Regulation Authority, with one exception, BBB Investment Services Limited, which has nothing to do with this programme. So the organisation whose website you filled in is not the organisation whose name is on your credit agreement, and it is the second one you ring about a payment.

That distinction is an easy one to lose, and losing it costs readers real time. This review carried a firm reference number against the programme itself until we corrected it in August 2026, so we name the lender rather than the programme throughout. If you want to check who you are dealing with before you sign, the name to look up on the FCA register is the finance provider on your loan agreement, not the Start Up Loans Company.

One more thing follows from the structure. Your personal financial information passes through three organisations rather than one, because the scheme, your local business support partner and the finance provider all handle it under the scheme’s Privacy and Data-sharing Policy. That is normal for a programme delivered through a network. It is still three sets of hands on your bank statements, and we could not find that spelled out on any of the pages a borrower is likely to read before applying.

How the Start Up Loans Company Works

The Start Up Loans Company runs the government’s Start Up Loans programme. It was set up in September 2012 and now sits inside the British Business Bank group, which is wholly owned by HM Government. Its purpose is narrow and deliberate: to reach founders with a credible plan but no trading record, no assets and no realistic path through a bank’s underwriting.

The mechanism is a personal loan in your name. You do not need a limited company. Sole traders, partners and company directors all apply as individuals, on the same terms, and the assessment runs a personal credit check rather than a business credit assessment. One consequence catches people out at the last moment: the money cannot be paid into a business bank account, because the agreement is personal. You supply personal account details, and you move the money across yourself.

Every applicant is matched with a business support partner, one of the delivery organisations accredited by the programme, and works with an adviser there on three documents: a business plan, a 12-month cash-flow forecast, and a personal survival budget covering your own household income and outgoings. Those documents feed a three-part assessment of your creditworthiness, whether you can personally afford the repayments, and whether the business is viable. Once you are approved, repayments start the following month at 7.5% fixed, over a term of one to five years that you choose. The average loan is £10,264, and the scheme notes that the average moves over time.

What the Start Up Loans Company Controls and What the Lender Controls

Five organisations sit in this chain, and a borrower who knows which one does what saves themselves a fortnight of ringing the wrong number. The division is set out on the scheme’s own About pages, and we rate it unusually clean for a government programme.

• HM Government funds the programme and sets its policy objectives.
• British Business Bank plc is the government-owned development bank that owns the programme. It is not a bank in the ordinary sense and does not take deposits.
• The Start-Up Loans Company sets the rules that apply to everybody: the interest rate, the eligibility criteria, the loan limits and the lending policy the whole network works to. It monitors the partners rather than assessing you.
• Your business support partner assigns your adviser, helps you build the documents, and assesses the final application. The scheme describes funds as being administered “once approved by a Business Support Partner”, and it routes complaints about the outcome of an application to that partner, so this is where the decision genuinely sits.
• The finance provider, GC Business Finance, issues the money, holds the loan agreement and collects the repayments. It has lent more than £175m to over 20,000 businesses through the scheme, on its own figures.

Two details in that division matter more than they look. First, you do not choose your business support partner and you cannot change it: you are allocated one by the region you live in, unless you come in through a specialist partner such as X-Forces for the armed forces community or The King’s Trust for young people. Second, if one partner declines you, you cannot take the same application to another, because they all work to a single lending policy. You can go back to the partner that declined you and ask for a reassessment if your circumstances change, but the network is not a set of second opinions.

The handover after approval is absolute. The scheme states that business support partners “do not get involved at this level once a loan has been granted”, so the adviser who spent six weeks on your forecast is not the person you speak to about a missed direct debit. That is GC Business Finance, on 0161 245 4977.

Main Funding Options Available

There is one product. No tiers, no sector variants, no separate facility for later-stage growth, and the rate is the same on all of it. Three features give it more flexibility than a single product suggests.

• Co-founders apply separately. Two directors can each take £25,000, giving the business £50,000 in combined capital, but as two loans assessed on two people’s finances. There is no joint facility, and each borrower is personally liable for their own loan alone. Across every owner, the scheme will lend a maximum of £100,000 to one business over its lifetime.
• You can draw the money in stages. Tranche loans let you take part of the loan now and the rest later, and you pay no interest on money you have not drawn. For a founder buying equipment in two phases, that is the difference between paying interest for a year on cash sitting in a personal account and paying nothing until you need it.
• There is a Sharia-compliant route. It is administered through a dedicated delivery partner, Financing Sharia Enterprise, so an interest-bearing structure is not the only way in.

The support package comes with the loan rather than being sold alongside it, and it is worth sizing honestly. You are entitled to four hours of one-to-one mentoring over the first 12 months of the loan term. Around that sit an online support platform available at any hour, live and recorded webinars, and free document templates. The mentoring is optional, and you can decline it. What a mentor cannot do is give specific advice such as debt counselling, which matters precisely when a founder most wants someone to ask.

The loan cannot be used to repay existing debt, to pay for training, qualifications or education programmes, or to fund an investment opportunity that is not part of an ongoing, sustainable business. Property investment is out. So is anything the scheme classes as an excluded business type, which we set out in the eligibility section below.

Start Up Loans Company Rates, Fees and How It Gets Paid

How the Start Up Loans Company Prices What You’re Offered

There is one rate, not a range. Every approved applicant pays 7.5% a year, fixed for the life of the loan, from 6 April 2026. Before that date it was 6%, a rate set in 2012 and left untouched for thirteen years, and loans already running at 6% keep 6%. Applicants who passed a credit check before 6 April 2026 had 90 days to complete at the old rate, and that window has closed.

The reason the rate never moves is that the programme sets it, not the lender and not the adviser who assesses you. GC Business Finance issues the loan on terms the Start Up Loans Company has already fixed, so there is nothing to shop and nothing to negotiate. That is the opposite of how a broker works, and it removes an entire category of worry: nobody in this chain is quoting you a worse rate than they quote somebody else.

In pounds, the April increase is smaller than it sounds. A £10,000 loan over three years cost about £10,952 in total at 6%. At 7.5% it costs about £11,198, which is £6.84 more a month and £246 more over the three years. Take the maximum £25,000 over five years and the gap widens to £17.63 a month, or about £1,057 across the term. That is real money to a founder counting every hundred pounds, and it is still a long way below what an early-stage business with no security is quoted elsewhere, when it is quoted anything at all.

The figures below are our own calculations: monthly amortisation at 7.5% a year, checked against the scheme’s official repayment calculator at two points in August 2026, which matched to the penny, and recalculated in part for this update. Small differences from the official tool can arise through rounding.

Read the table across rather than down. The five-year term nearly halves the monthly payment on £10,000, from £311.06 to £200.38, and that is what makes an early-stage cash-flow forecast work. It also doubles the interest, from £1,198 to £2,023. Since there is no early repayment charge and no minimum overpayment, the sensible play for most founders is to take the longer term for the safety of the lower commitment, then overpay once revenue arrives. You get the protection without paying for it.

On fees, there are none, and the scheme’s wording leaves no room: there are no fees for applying, none for receiving the loan, none for the support before or after it, and other than your monthly repayments you will never be asked for any payment. GOV.UK says the same thing in fewer words, and we checked both.

That is worth more than it looks on a comparison table. A commercial lender typically charges 1% to 3% of the facility to arrange it, which on £25,000 is £250 to £750 taken before you have made a single repayment. Here, the 7.5% applied to the outstanding balance is the entire cost of the loan. Miss a payment and the ordinary consequences of a missed personal credit payment follow, but we could not find a published late fee of the kind a commercial lender would set out.

What Affects Your Rate

Nothing does. The 7.5% applies to every approved applicant, whatever the amount, term or credit profile. There is no risk-based pricing, no negotiation, and no discount for a stronger application.

What your credit history and business plan affect is whether you are approved at all. The assessment decides whether you get in rather than what you pay: you pass and borrow at 7.5%, or you do not proceed. The one lever in your hands is the term, which changes the monthly payment and the total interest but never the rate. Anybody comparing this against a commercial quote should hold that difference in mind, because a headline rate elsewhere is usually the best case for the strongest borrower, and this one is simply the price.

How the Start Up Loans Company Makes Money

It does not, in the sense a broker does. Start Up Loans are government funded, the Start Up Loans Company is a not-for-profit subsidiary of a state-owned development bank, and the borrower pays nothing to be introduced, assessed, advised or mentored. There is no arrangement fee taken out of the advance, no success fee, and no commission disclosed anywhere in the scheme’s published material. The only money that moves from you is interest, and it moves to the lender that issued the agreement.

That is the honest answer, and it is worth stating because the question does not disappear just because the programme is public. What the scheme does not publish is what it pays the organisations that deliver it. Business support partners are commercial and charitable organisations in their own right, several of them lenders elsewhere in their business, and we could not find anything on the scheme’s site that says how they are funded for the work they do on your application. There is no published figure that we could locate, and we are not going to guess at one. It is a genuine gap in an otherwise unusually transparent programme.

There is one cost the marketing does not lead with, and it is not a fee. Because the money is government funded, a Start Up Loan counts as a subsidy under the Subsidy Control Act 2022. Minimal Financial Assistance is capped at £315,000 across a rolling three-year period, your loan counts towards that total, and you have to declare any other subsidies you have received in the same window and keep a written record of them for at least three years. For most founders this never binds. If you have taken innovation grants or local authority support, we recommend doing the arithmetic before you apply, because the loan may cost you headroom you were planning to use elsewhere.

Does Checking Affect Your Credit Score?

Yes, and reviewers name it as one of the surprises of the process. We went looking for a soft-search stage in the scheme’s published material and could not find one. Its own credit checks FAQ states that when a credit check is completed as part of your application it shows as a hard search on your credit report, and that this may affect your score. The eligibility questions on the website ask about your age, your residence, your right to work and how long the business has traded, and none of that touches your file. The credit search does, and it is the only search that FAQ describes.

The timing is the trap. The scheme says the check is usually run at an early stage, so that you can be confident about your eligibility before investing time in the rest of the application. That is sensible from the scheme’s side and it is worth understanding from yours: you can pick up the footprint in the first fortnight and still be three months from a decision, or from walking away. If you are also applying for a mortgage or a car loan in the same period, sequence them deliberately rather than by accident.

Three further points are on the record and worth having. The check is a personal credit check, because a Start Up Loan is a personal loan. It stays valid for three months, so an application that stalls beyond that needs a fresh one. And if you are approved, the loan and every repayment you make sit on your personal credit report for at least six years.

Start Up Loans Company Eligibility

Who Can Apply

Eligibility attaches to you, not to the business. You must be 18 or over, currently resident in the UK, and hold the right to work here. The business must be based in the UK and either not trading yet or trading for no more than 60 months. You also self-declare that you have been unable to secure finance from other sources, which the scheme accepts on your word.

The 60-month rule, in from April 2026, is a genuine widening. A business four or five years old, still too small and too asset-light for a bank, can now apply. That gap does not close at three years in sectors with long payback curves such as hospitality, care and professional services, and the old 36-month cap shut those founders out at exactly the point they were becoming fundable.

Where several people own the business, each partner applies separately and each is personally liable for their own loan. The applicants between them must hold at least a 50% share of the business, and each must have an equity stake and a controlling interest. One person can hold only one Start Up Loan, for one business, at a time. If you are in the UK on a visa there is an extra condition that is easy to miss: the loan and all its interest must be repaid at least six months before your visa expires, which can rule out the five-year term rather than the loan itself.

Second loans. Existing borrowers can apply again, and the criteria are specific. You must have made at least six full loan repayments, be trading between three and 60 months, and have kept every repayment on schedule for the three months before you apply. If you have taken a capital repayment holiday, you need three full repayments with capital repaid, on schedule, before the application.

The ceiling that catches people is the outstanding balance: you can owe no more than £25,000 at any one time, so borrowing £15,000 and repaying £5,000 leaves you £15,000 to apply for, not £25,000. A second loan is treated as a new application and takes whatever rate applies on the day, currently 7.5% rather than the 6% an older first loan may still be running at. Expect to supply an up-to-date personal survival budget, six months of actual business cash flow, a fresh 12-month forecast and three consecutive months of business bank statements.

Excluded businesses and loan uses. The exclusions are worth reading before you invest three weeks in an application. The scheme will not fund weapons, chemical manufacture, pornography, drugs or anything illegal; banking, money transfer and other FCA-regulated activities; unlicensed private investigation; gambling and betting; property investment; or agents earning commission for third parties, with franchises the exception. Charities, community interest companies and social enterprises with a purely community focus are considered case by case rather than ruled out. On use of funds, the money cannot repay existing debt, cannot pay for training, qualifications or education programmes, and cannot be put into an investment that is not part of a trading business.

Trading History, Turnover and Credit Checks

There is no minimum trading history and no minimum turnover, because the product exists for the stage before those numbers exist. What replaces them is a personal credit check and an affordability test on your household, and it is the affordability test that surprises people, because it looks at your kitchen table rather than your order book.

On credit history, the scheme is more open than a bank. It says a poor credit history will not necessarily prevent you from securing a loan, and reviewers bear that out: several describe being assessed on the business plan after a bank had already refused them on a score. That human reading of the case is the scheme’s real edge over an automated commercial decision.

The hard stops are stated rather than hinted at. The scheme cannot lend if you are bankrupt or filing for bankruptcy, subject to a Debt Relief Order, in an outstanding Individual Voluntary Arrangement or Trust Deed, or enrolled in a Debt Management Programme or a Debt Arrangement Scheme. It also reserves the right to decline for other credit reasons, particularly where lending would add to debts that already look unmanageable. Everything short of the hard stops, such as historic defaults, a settled CCJ or a thin file, goes into the assessment alongside everything else.

Be honest with yourself about the affordability test rather than the credit one. Affordability here means your personal budget, not the company’s. If your household outgoings already absorb your income, an adviser will see it in the personal survival budget, and no amount of optimism in the forecast will get past it. Applicants turned down at this stage are the ones describing weeks of wasted work in the reviews below, and the test that failed them was one they could have run on themselves in an evening.

Security and Personal Guarantees

Nothing is pledged as security. No charge over your home, no debenture over equipment, no guarantee document, and no guarantor. Founders often hear “unsecured” and conclude there is no personal exposure, which is exactly backwards.

A personal guarantee and a personal loan get conflated constantly, and the difference is worth holding onto. A personal guarantee is a promise you sign to cover a company’s debt if the company cannot pay. A Start Up Loan never gets that far, because the debt was never the company’s: you are the borrower from the outset, so there is no specific asset at risk and nothing standing between you and the debt either. Compared with a secured business loan that puts the family home behind it, most founders should prefer this structure. It is still personal borrowing, and it should be sized as personal borrowing.

If the business fails, you still owe the money. The scheme’s own answer is unambiguous: a Start Up Loan is a personal loan used for business purposes, so you are personally liable for the full amount and interest, whatever happens to the business or to your position in it. Closing the company, dissolving the partnership or walking away from the trade changes none of it.

If you fall behind, the finance provider contacts you, then writes, and if the arrears continue it can apply for a County Court Judgment or pass the account to a debt collection agent. The missed payments go to the credit reference agencies, and the scheme is blunt about what that affects: your credit rating, your ability to obtain goods and services, and in some cases particular forms of employment. We have set that out here rather than leave a founder to meet it first in a letter.

Anyone heading that way should get free advice before it escalates. The scheme itself points borrowers to the Money Advice Trust, which runs National Debtline and Business Debtline, along with Citizens Advice and StepChange, and says explicitly that it does not endorse fee-charging debt management companies. That is the single most important sentence on this page for a founder whose business is not working: the free advice is as good as the paid advice, and it is available now rather than after a fee.

Start Up Loans Company Application Process

How to Apply

You start on the Start Up Loans website with an eligibility check covering age, residence, right to work and how long the business has traded. Pass it, and the scheme says it will be in touch within two working days; general enquiries are answered within five.

You are then matched with a business support partner and assigned an adviser, and this is where the process stops resembling an online loan form. The adviser works with you over calls, video meetings and sometimes in person to get the business plan and 12-month cash-flow forecast to the standard the programme requires. They will challenge revenue assumptions and send work back. For a founder who has never written a formal plan, that is the most valuable part of the whole exercise, and it is free whether or not you are approved. It is also the part that takes the time.

When the adviser is satisfied, the application goes for assessment: credit check, affordability, viability. On approval the agreement is signed digitally and the finance provider transfers the funds to your personal account. You then have 14 days from signing to change your mind, return the money and pay no interest.

Documents and Checks Needed

• Business plan: the model, the market, the competition and how you intend to grow. Built with your adviser.
• 12-month cash-flow forecast: month by month, with the loan repayment in it.
• Personal survival budget: your own income and outgoings, showing you can meet the repayment through the months before the business pays you properly.
• Proof of identity and address: standard personal documents.
• Three months of personal bank statements: the scheme lists these among its application documents.
• Personal credit check: run by the scheme on your consent. You do not supply a report, and its staff cannot discuss the contents of your file with you afterwards.

If the business is already trading, expect to be asked for bank statements or accounts for it as well. Exact requirements vary slightly between delivery partners, which is one of the few places where the partner you are allocated changes the experience.

Approval and Funding Times

The Start Up Loans Company does not publish an average and says it cannot give one. Its own guidance splits the difference between two very different applicants:

• Two to three weeks for someone who arrives highly prepared, with the plan and forecast largely written.
• Two to three months, or longer, for someone who needs the adviser’s help to build the documents from scratch.

The four-week figure that circulates on comparison sites is not on the scheme’s site, and we recommend planning against the scheme’s own range instead. What lengthens the process is nearly always the documents, plus the wait to be matched with a partner that has adviser capacity in your region. What shortens it is turning up with a finished forecast. Once you are approved, the transfer itself takes a few working days, so the waiting is in the assessment rather than the payment. Bear in mind that a credit check only stays valid for three months, so an application that drifts past that point needs another one.

If you are declined, you cannot take the application to a different partner, and you must wait at least six months before applying again. That is long enough that it is worth taking the adviser’s feedback seriously well before you get to that point.

Start Up Loans Company Customer Reviews

What the Rating Does and Does Not Tell You

Start Up Loans holds 4.2 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 486 reviews, read on 21 August 2026. The headline is the least informative part of it. The distribution is 56% five-star and 40% one-star, with 4% spread across everything in between, which is a split verdict rather than a middling one, and it is the distribution we weighed rather than the average. Almost nobody has a moderate experience of this programme.

Two things explain the shape. The first is that the reviews describe a network, not a company: applicants deal with whichever business support partner covers their region, and several reviewers name a different organisation entirely. A four-star average across a network of delivery partners is an average of very different service standards, and since you cannot choose your partner, the average tells you less about your own odds than it appears to.

The second is who writes. The scheme has not solicited reviews recently, which is why 72 reviews arrived in the last twelve months rather than thousands, and unprompted reviews skew towards the delighted and the aggrieved. It replies to 85% of negative reviews, which is a higher rate than most lenders manage.

For the question a founder actually wants answered, which is whether the money helps, there is better evidence than a star rating. The British Business Bank commissioned SQW to evaluate the programme, and the findings were published in December 2024, covering loans drawn down in 2018/19 and 2021/22. Three of its findings are the ones we weighed.

Businesses that took a Start Up Loan survived better, with year-five survival running between four and 26 percentage points above the comparison groups. They grew faster, with roughly 34% higher cumulative growth in assets and 15% higher in employment than the comparator group, and about one additional job created per loan on average. And just over two-thirds of the money, a finance additionality ratio of 68%, would not have been provided by mainstream lenders at all.

That last figure is the one that justifies the programme’s existence, and it is also the honest limit of what the evaluation proves. It measures whether the finance reached people the market was not serving. It does not promise that your business will be in the surviving group.

What Customers Like

The praise is remarkably consistent and lands almost entirely on people. Reviewers name their advisers, describe them as patient and well-informed, and say they were assessed on the business plan rather than a credit score. Several add that this was the only place that would look at them at all. For first-time founders, the discipline of building a plan with someone experienced surfaces assumptions that would otherwise have gone untested, and reviewers describe that as worth more than the money in some cases.

The absence of fees comes up repeatedly among applicants who had priced commercial alternatives first and arrived expecting arrangement charges. So does the paperwork, and not always as a complaint: the phrase reviewers use is “extensive but worth it”.

Common Complaints

The negative reviews cluster into three themes, and they are worth taking seriously because they describe the same process from the other side.

Silence after the fast start. The most common complaint by a distance. The application is picked up quickly and an adviser is assigned, then contact stops. Reviewers describe six weeks without an update, one describes sixteen, and several say the only answer they could get was that the application was “being reviewed”. Where the process is genuinely slow, the scheme’s own two-to-three-month guidance covers it; the complaint is about not being told.

Declined on affordability after weeks of work. Applicants turned down because their household finances were judged too thin, including people directed to the scheme from Universal Credit, describe days of preparation ending in a refusal that a basic check could have delivered at the start. It is a fair criticism of sequencing rather than of the criteria, and it is the strongest argument for reading the affordability test honestly before you begin.

Surprises in the process. A hard credit search the applicant expected to be soft, or a panel approving less than the amount applied for and leaving the plan half-funded. Neither is hidden by the scheme: the credit checks FAQ says plainly that the search is hard. Neither is prominent enough at the point of application for people to feel forewarned, and of the two it is the credit search that costs you something you cannot get back.

One frustration that is not really a complaint: borrowers comparing 7.5% with the 6% that earlier applicants got. The old rate is not coming back.

Start Up Loans Company Support and Regulation

Who Is Actually Regulated

One organisation in this chain is authorised to lend to you, and it is not the one on the website you applied through. The Enterprise Fund Limited, trading as GC Business Finance, registered in England and Wales under company number 04460763, is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority under firm reference number 727252. That is the entity named as the Lender in the scheme’s complaints policy and the entity whose contact details appear on your loan agreement.

The Start-Up Loans Company holds no FCA authorisation of its own. British Business Bank plc states that it and its subsidiaries, the Start-Up Loans Company among them, are not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority or the Prudential Regulation Authority, with the single exception of BBB Investment Services Limited, which is a separate business and not part of this programme. Any review that attributes a firm reference number to the Start Up Loans Company itself is pointing you at the wrong entity.

The business support partners are a mixed picture, and the scheme publishes the split rather than glossing it. It names BEF Bradford, BizBritain, GC Business Finance, DSL Business Finance, Enterprise Loans East Midlands, Enterprise Northern Ireland, Let’s Do Business Finance, NWES and SWIG Finance as FCA-regulated, and names the scheme’s internal delivery partner The Hub, Virgin Start Up, The King’s Trust and X-Forces as not regulated. The scheme says this “will not have a material impact on how a Business Support Partner works with you”, which is true of the service and not true of your rights if the service goes wrong. We come back to that under complaints below.

One practical warning belongs here. The FCA has issued a warning about clone firms impersonating the Start Up Loans Company. The tells are the usual ones: an unsolicited approach, a request for a fee before the loan, a phone number or email address that is not on the official site. Nobody legitimate charges you to apply here, because the scheme has no fees at all, so a fee request is enough on its own to end the conversation. Start every application at startuploans.co.uk, and check the lender named on your agreement against the FCA register before you sign it.

FCA Permissions and What They Cover

“FCA regulated” is doing specific work in this chain, and it is worth knowing which part. GC Business Finance is regulated as the lender: the scheme’s complaints policy calls it “the regulated lender under the Start Up Loans Scheme”, and its own published statement is that The Enterprise Fund Limited is authorised and regulated by the FCA under FRN 727252. So the regulated activity here is the lending and the administration of your credit agreement, which is why the finance provider, and only the finance provider, is the organisation the scheme tells you to contact about loan status, repayments and arrears.

The rest of the chain is a different matter. The Start-Up Loans Company sets the rules and monitors the network without holding any FCA permission of its own, and the British Business Bank is a development bank rather than a lender or a deposit-taker. Business support partners are split: the scheme names nine of them as FCA-regulated and four as not, and it does not publish which permissions the regulated ones hold, so we cannot tell you what those permissions cover in your case. What the split does change is your complaints route, and that is a bigger deal than the scheme’s own wording suggests.

Read “FCA regulated” on this page as a statement about the company that will hold your agreement, not as a badge covering the programme. If you want the detail on the firm you are actually contracting with, the register entry to open is the one for The Enterprise Fund Limited under FRN 727252.

Complaints and the Financial Ombudsman

Complaints split three ways here, and sending one to the wrong place costs weeks. The British Business Bank’s own complaints policy expressly does not cover its delivery partners, its business support partners or its finance provider, so the brand at the top of the chain is rarely the right recipient.

• A complaint about the application: the service you got, the communication, the outcome of the application, or the mentoring afterwards. This goes to your business support partner directly, in the first instance. If you cannot work out which organisation that is, the Start Up Loans customer service team on 0344 264 2600 will direct it.
• A complaint about the loan itself: repayments, the direct debit, arrears, or anything about how the agreement is administered. This goes to The Enterprise Fund Limited trading as GC Business Finance, on 0161 245 4977. Ask for its own complaints policy, because it is a different document from the scheme’s.
• A complaint about the scheme: the rules, the criteria or the programme itself. This goes to the Start Up Loans customer service team, within six years of the event, and escalates internally to the Bank’s complaints escalation panel rather than to an ombudsman.

The Financial Ombudsman Service comes into it only where the organisation you complained about is FCA-regulated. Complain to your finance provider and that route is open, because GC Business Finance is authorised. Complain about a business support partner and the answer turns on which one you were allocated, and you did not choose that.

Where your partner is not regulated and offers no ombudsman route, the scheme’s answer is that you can refer the complaint to the finance provider for review instead, which is a fallback rather than an equivalent. We rate that the weakest point in the programme’s design: your right to an independent adjudicator depends on an allocation you had no say in, and it is worth knowing before you need it rather than after.

Two limits apply even when the route is open. The ombudsman expects you to have gone to the firm first and will send the matter back if you have not. And it can only consider complaints inside its jurisdiction, which includes whether you meet its definition of a consumer; the Bank’s own policy notes that some small-business lending complaints do not, depending on the circumstances, and that this is for the ombudsman to determine.

How We Verified This Review

We last checked this page on 7 September 2026, and we took every changeable fact on it from a primary source: the Start Up Loans website and its FAQs for the rate, fees, eligibility, timings, second-loan rules, credit-check treatment, subsidy position and support entitlement; GOV.UK for the headline terms; the scheme’s complaints handling policy for the lending chain and complaints routing; and GC Business Finance’s own published regulatory statement for the lender’s legal name, company number and firm reference number.

The repayment figures are our own amortisation calculations at 7.5%, and we recalculated three of the six rows for this update. For the programme evidence we read the SQW evaluation published for the British Business Bank in December 2024. We have not borrowed through the scheme and make no first-hand claims about the application experience; where we describe it, we are reporting what the scheme publishes or what borrowers say.

Four things could not be reconciled or independently confirmed, and they are worth naming rather than smoothing over.

• The scheme’s own pages disagree on who the lender is. Its complaints policy says that since 2023 The Enterprise Fund Limited trading as GC Business Finance “is our Finance Provider and the regulated lender”. Its finance provider page describes GC Business Finance as “one of the Start Up Loans Company’s official finance providers”, in the plural. And its business support partner FAQ names the finance provider as “The Growth Company”, which is the parent company rather than the FCA-authorised subsidiary named on the loan agreement. We have used the complaints policy and the lender’s own regulatory statement, because those are the two documents a borrower would be held to.
• The FCA register entry was not read directly. FRN 727252 comes from GC Business Finance’s own published statement and is corroborated by the scheme’s complaints policy naming the same entity as the regulated lender. We did not load the register itself for this update, and anyone signing an agreement should.
• “More than £175m to over 20,000 businesses” is the provider’s own figure, published on the scheme’s site, with no date attached and no independent check available.
• The Trustpilot figures carry their August date. The 4.2 rating, the 486 reviews and the star distribution were read on 21 August 2026 and were not re-read for this update, so treat them as a snapshot rather than today’s number.

One further gap is the scheme’s rather than ours: we could not find anything it publishes that says how its business support partners are funded for the work they do on applications. We looked, we found no figure, and we have not estimated one.

Commercial disclosure. We have no affiliate relationship with the Start Up Loans Company, the British Business Bank or GC Business Finance, and none of them pays us anything for this review. The Tide Funding Options link on this page is an affiliate link: if you use it to gather quotes, we may earn a commission, at no cost to you. That income does not change what this review says. See our editorial policy.

Start Up Loans Company vs Alternatives

A Start Up Loan suits founders who need a modest amount, accept personal responsibility for repaying it, sit inside the trading-age rules, and can wait weeks rather than days. Where any of those is untrue, something else is usually the better answer, and it is worth naming the routes before the head-to-heads.

• You need more than £25,000 on your own. Compare commercial lenders through a broker such as Tide Funding Options, or look at the Growth Guarantee Scheme.
• The business is over five years old, or in an excluded sector. Start with our comparison of the best start-up business loans, which ranks the commercial options by stage.
• Personal borrowing is the wrong shape. An unsecured business loan in the company’s name keeps the debt with the company, at a higher rate and usually behind a personal guarantee.
• You would rather not borrow at all. Grants and non-debt routes are slower and more competitive, but they do not have to be repaid. Our business grants guide covers what is realistically available.
• You have been turned down and want a human assessment. Community Development Finance Institutions lend to viable businesses that banks decline, on similar principles to this scheme but usually in the business’s name. Responsible Finance, the industry body, lists members by area.

Start Up Loans Company vs iwoca

iwoca lends £1,000 to £500,000 to businesses that are already trading and can show revenue, typically wanting at least three to six months of history. Rates are personalised and start around 2% a month for established borrowers, with an arrangement fee on top, and a decision can come the same day.

For a business that has not started, or is in its first months, iwoca will generally decline, which is the gap the Start Up Loans Company exists to fill. Once you have visible revenue and a genuine deadline, the comparison flips: iwoca can fund in 24 hours, and no amount of adviser support makes a two-to-three-week minimum competitive with that. Cost only becomes the deciding factor after speed and access, and on cost we put the fixed 7.5% with no fees comfortably ahead. See our iwoca business loan review for the full terms.

Start Up Loans Company vs Funding Circle

Funding Circle lends from £10,000 upwards to established UK businesses and asks for at least a year of trading history, with two years for asset finance. Rates are risk-priced, terms run to six years, and a personal guarantee may be required, which puts the personal exposure in a different place, since a guarantee is called only if the company cannot pay.

A business at the stage where a Start Up Loan makes sense usually cannot meet that trading requirement, so for most readers these are not competing products but consecutive ones. If you are approaching a year of trading with real revenue, compare both: Funding Circle will lend more than £25,000 in the company’s name, and that is the point at which the per-person cap starts to bind. Our Funding Circle review sets out where it draws the line.

Start Up Loans Company vs the Growth Guarantee Scheme

The Growth Guarantee Scheme is the other government-backed route a small business is likely to meet, and it works the other way round. The government guarantees a portion of a facility that a commercial lender provides on its own terms, so the lender sets the rate, the borrower is usually the company, and the amounts run well past £25,000.

The practical split is about who carries the debt and how far along you are. A Start Up Loan gives an unproven founder money at a rate no commercial lender would offer them, and puts the obligation on the individual. The Growth Guarantee Scheme gives a trading business better access to commercial lending without changing whose name is on it. If you can pass a commercial lender’s underwriting at all, we recommend looking at that route first, because it keeps the borrowing off your own credit file.

For the scheme’s rules in full, covering every eligibility clause, the documents and the application steps, read our Start Up Loans scheme guide. This page is the verdict on whether it is worth using.

Final Verdict: Is the Start Up Loans Company Worth It?

The programme was designed around a particular founder: UK-based, early, with no assets to pledge and no credit record a bank will lend against. For that founder, we rate the Start Up Loans Company the best entry point into business finance in the UK, and it is not close. The rate is fixed at 7.5% however weak your position, there are no fees in either direction, and the application forces you to build a plan and a forecast that you needed anyway. The independent evaluation supports the case: two-thirds of this money would not have come from mainstream lenders at all.

The trade-offs are equally concrete. The debt is yours, not the company’s, and it outlives the business. £25,000 is the ceiling per person and £100,000 the ceiling for the business, for good. The support is four hours of mentoring rather than the year the marketing implies. The credit search is hard and comes early, so you carry the footprint whether or not you finish. And the timeline runs from a fortnight to several months, with the most common complaint being that nobody tells you which one you are in.

Apply if you need under £25,000, want a fixed rate with no fees, and can wait. Look elsewhere first if you have real revenue and a deadline, if you need more than the cap allows, or if you are not prepared to owe the money personally after the business has gone. Those are the three conditions that turn a good scheme into the wrong one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a Start Up Loan a business loan or a personal loan?

It is a personal loan used for business purposes. The agreement is between you as an individual and the finance provider, not your company, so the credit check is personal, the repayment obligation is personal, and any default lands on your personal credit file. You can spend the money on the business, but it is not a commercial facility.

Who actually lends the money?

The Enterprise Fund Limited, trading as GC Business Finance, which is authorised and regulated by the FCA under FRN 727252. The Start Up Loans Company operates the programme and sets the rules; a business support partner assesses your application; the finance provider issues the money, holds the agreement and collects repayments. The scheme’s complaints policy names it as the regulated lender under the scheme.

Is the Start Up Loans Company FCA-regulated?

No. British Business Bank plc states that it and its subsidiaries, which include the Start-Up Loans Company, are not authorised or regulated by the FCA or the PRA, apart from BBB Investment Services Limited, which is not part of this programme. The FCA-authorised firm in the chain is the finance provider that issues your loan.

Does applying affect my credit score?

Yes. The scheme’s credit checks FAQ says the check runs as a hard search on your credit report, and it is usually carried out early in the application rather than at the end. There is no soft-search stage. The check stays valid for three months, and if you are approved the loan and every repayment sit on your personal credit report for at least six years.

What is the interest rate?

7.5% a year, fixed for the life of the loan, from 6 April 2026. It was 6% before that, and existing 6% loans keep that rate. Everyone approved pays 7.5% regardless of amount, term or credit profile, because the programme sets the rate rather than the lender.

What does a £10,000 Start Up Loan cost?

Over three years at 7.5%, about £311.06 a month: roughly £11,198 repaid in total, of which about £1,198 is interest. Over five years the monthly payment falls to about £200.38 and the interest rises to about £2,023. There is no charge for repaying early.

Are there any fees?

None. There are no fees for applying, no fees for receiving the loan, no charge for the support before or after it, and no early repayment fee. Other than your monthly repayments you will never be asked for a payment, which is why any request for an up-front fee is a sign of a clone firm rather than the scheme.

Can I get a Start Up Loan with bad credit?

Possibly. A patchy credit history does not automatically disqualify you, and applicants are assessed on affordability and business viability as well as creditworthiness. The scheme cannot lend if you are bankrupt or filing for bankruptcy, subject to a Debt Relief Order, in an outstanding IVA or Trust Deed, or in a Debt Management Programme or Debt Arrangement Scheme.

Can an established business apply?

Yes, if it has been trading for 60 months or less. That limit rose from 36 months in April 2026. Businesses trading longer than five years are outside the scheme.

How much can I borrow if there are several founders?

Each person can borrow £500 to £25,000, applying separately and taking on their own liability. Across every owner, the scheme will lend a maximum of £100,000 to one business over its lifetime. That is a total, not an annual allowance.

Can I take a second Start Up Loan?

Yes, if you have made at least six full repayments on the first one, have been trading between three and 60 months, and have kept every repayment on schedule for the previous three months. Your total outstanding Start Up Loan balance cannot exceed £25,000 at any time, and a second loan takes the rate that applies on the day you apply.

How long does the application take?

Two to three weeks if you arrive with the business plan and cash-flow forecast largely done; two to three months or longer if you need your adviser to help build them. The scheme publishes no average and says it cannot give one. Funds arrive within a few working days of approval.

Who do I complain to if something goes wrong?

Complaints about the application, the outcome or the mentoring go to your business support partner first. Complaints about repayments or how the loan is administered go to GC Business Finance. Complaints about the scheme itself go to Start Up Loans customer service. The Financial Ombudsman Service is available where the organisation you complained about is FCA-regulated, which the finance provider is and several business support partners are not.

What happens if my business fails?

You still owe the balance. The loan is personal, so closing the business does not end the obligation. If you fall behind, the finance provider can pursue a County Court Judgment or refer the debt to a collection agent, and the arrears go on your credit file. Free advice is available from National Debtline, Business Debtline, Citizens Advice and StepChange, and the scheme itself points borrowers to them rather than to fee-charging debt management firms.

How much mentoring do I actually get?

Four hours of one-to-one mentoring across the first 12 months of the loan, for first-time borrowers, alongside an online support platform, webinars and templates. It is optional, and a mentor cannot give specific advice such as debt counselling.