First-time buyers now account for more than half of UK mortgage sales. Figures published by the Office for National Statistics on 18 September put their share at 52.8% in 2025, up from 33.8% in 2006. On the surface, that looks like a story about first-time buyers finally winning ground in a market that has spent two decades making entry difficult. Office for National Statistics — Mortgage statistics, UK: 2025
It isn’t, really. Look at the absolute numbers rather than the share and the picture changes. First-time buyer mortgage sales were 369,596 in 2006 and 379,207 in 2025 — scarcely transformed over two decades. What changed dramatically was the other side of the market. Mortgage sales to second and subsequent buyers fell from 699,001 to 327,045 over the same period, while total mortgage sales in 2025 remained around a third below their 2006 level.
That is the more important and less-reported story in the data. The mortgaged market for people who already own, and would once have moved up, down or sideways in much greater numbers, has undergone a structural contraction. Higher mortgage rates since 2022 have made moving harder again, but the decline began long before that. It has changed the mix of homes coming to market, the formation of chains, the evidence available for valuation and the volume of repeat business flowing through the property industry.
Share and volume are different questions
A rising first-time buyer share can reflect more first-time buyers, fewer other buyers, or both. The only way to tell which is happening is to look at volumes as well as percentages. On that measure, the ONS data is striking: first-time buyer mortgage sales in 2025 were only about 2.6% above their 2006 level, while second and subsequent buyer sales had fallen by more than half.
There is an important definition behind those figures. In this ONS series, a first-time buyer is someone who is not selling another residential property as part of the purchase, so the category can include some people who have owned before. “Second or subsequent” buyers include existing owners moving home and people purchasing another residential property with a mortgage. Cash purchases are excluded. The ONS data therefore gives a strong long-term picture of how mortgage-backed buying has changed, but it is not a pure home-mover series.
The regional spread makes the shift harder to dismiss as a single national affordability story. Across most parts of the UK, second and subsequent buyer activity in 2025 was still around half its pre-financial-crisis level. The smallest decline since 2006 was in the East Midlands, at 46.2%; the largest was in London, at 66.5%. Whatever is suppressing repeat buying is not affecting every local market equally.
That distinction matters because market share alone can flatter the apparent strength of one group when another is disappearing. First-time buyers have recovered to roughly their old absolute level. Existing mortgaged buyers have not.
Separate research by the Council of Mortgage Lenders reached much the same conclusion from a different dataset years earlier. Its 2017 Missing Movers study found that mortgaged movers accounted for 43% of all UK residential transactions in 2006 but only 29% in 2016. The researchers estimated that the fall in mortgaged movers explained nearly 80% of the overall transaction shortfall from the pre-financial-crisis peak. That study included the wider housing market rather than the regulated mortgage sales measured by the ONS, so the two series should not be joined together. But they point in the same direction. Council of Mortgage Lenders — Missing Movers
What actually happened to movers
Some of the apparent fall in mortgaged mover activity is a change in how older owners finance moves. The CML work estimated that around 6% of its “missing movers” could be explained by equity-rich older homeowners who, in earlier periods, might have moved with a mortgage but were increasingly buying with cash instead. That matters because a mortgage dataset will not see an outright owner who sells a family house and buys a smaller home without borrowing.
But that explains only a small part of the gap. The more important issue is the combination of housing equity, borrowing capacity and the price of the home someone wants to move into. The CML analysis found that the ability of potential second steppers to move was closely linked to how much equity they had accumulated and how much additional borrowing they could support. Even during the period of very low mortgage rates after the financial crisis, mover activity did not simply return to its old level.
The arithmetic helps explain why. Suppose an owner has a £300,000 home and wants to move to a £500,000 one. The gap is £200,000. If both properties rise by 10%, the owner’s home is worth £330,000, but the target property is now £550,000. The owner has gained £30,000 in nominal housing wealth, yet the cash price gap to the next home has widened by £20,000. Rising prices can therefore increase equity and still make trading up harder.
For mortgaged owners, that gap then meets the lending side of the equation. Moving does not necessarily mean throwing away an existing mortgage deal: many mortgages can be ported to another property. But porting is still subject to a new affordability assessment, and where the next home requires extra borrowing, that additional amount may be on a different rate. For an owner whose next move requires substantially more debt, the relevant question is not simply whether their present home has risen in value but whether their equity, income and borrowing capacity have risen enough to bridge the next step. MoneyHelper guidance on remortgaging and porting
That is why the headline mortgage rate is only one part of the decision. Two otherwise similar households can receive different outcomes depending on income, expenditure, loan-to-value, lender criteria and the amount of additional borrowing needed. Property Front Page examines that issue separately in Why Will One Mortgage Lender Say Yes When Another Says No? and How Much Mortgage Can You Really Afford?.
Higher mortgage rates since 2022 made that calculation more difficult, but they landed on top of a problem that was already well established. The long-run mover decline survived years of unusually cheap borrowing because the forces underneath it were broader: fewer mortgaged homeowners, an ageing owner population, changes in housing equity, tighter lending conditions than before the financial crisis and house prices that had run ahead of incomes in many parts of the country.
The more recent UK Finance data shows the same imbalance surviving the post-2023 recovery:
| Year | First-time buyer loans | Homemover loans |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 304,000 | 310,000 |
| 2021 | 405,000 | 444,000 |
| 2022 | 370,000 | 339,000 |
| 2023 | 287,000 | 251,000 |
| 2024 | 332,000 | 287,000 |
| 2025 | 391,000 | 329,000 |
Source: UK Finance, Household Finance Review, Q4 2025. This is UK Finance’s own regulated lending series and is not directly comparable with the ONS/FCA series above.
Both groups recovered strongly from 2023. The difference is where that recovery has taken them. By 2025, first-time buyer lending was only around 3.5% below its 2021 level; homemover lending was still about 26% lower. Homemover loans had also recovered above their 2020 level, so this is not a story of continuous year-on-year decline. It is a story of a part of the market that has recovered from the latest downturn without regaining the scale it had even a few years earlier, let alone before the financial crisis.
Why a shrinking mover market matters beyond the mortgage statistics
A market where fewer existing owners move does not just produce a smaller transaction count. It changes how the market functions.
Chain formation. A homemover is usually both a seller and a buyer. Their purchase may depend on the sale of their existing home, while the person selling to them may be making another purchase in turn. First-time buyers are normally chain-free at the bottom of that sequence because they have no property to sell. With proportionally fewer movers, there is reason to expect fewer long chains to form, all else being equal, although there is no simple national measure proving that chains have shortened in direct proportion to the fall in mover lending. What is clearer is that fewer movers means fewer owner-occupied homes being released and repurchased through the same sequence.
The supply of family homes. A three or four-bedroom house often reaches the resale market because its current owner is moving on — upsizing, downsizing, relocating or separating. If existing owners transact less often, the flow of those homes back onto the market slows even though the housing stock itself has not changed. For someone trying to buy a family home, that can mean less choice; for someone selling one, it can mean fewer directly competing listings but also fewer suitable properties to move on to. It also helps explain why some households choose to reconfigure or extend the home they already have rather than make a move that no longer produces enough improvement for the additional debt and transaction cost. The CML study itself identified evidence of a shift from “move” to “improve” under some market conditions.
Prices and price discovery. Lower turnover does not automatically mean falling house prices. If fewer owners list their homes at the same time as affordability limits the number of buyers able to trade up, both effective supply and effective demand can be constrained. Prices can therefore remain comparatively resilient even while transaction volumes are weak. What does become harder to observe is the current clearing price of a particular type of property. Fewer completed sales mean fewer fresh comparables, and RICS guidance recognises that relatively infrequent transactions can leave limited or outdated comparable evidence, placing greater weight on wider evidence and professional judgement. For agents, surveyors, valuers and investors, the distinction between a market with falling prices and a market with thin price evidence matters. RICS — Comparable evidence in real estate valuation
Agency pipelines. For estate agents, the commercial effect is more direct than simply having fewer repeat clients. A homemover creates both an instruction and a purchase requirement: one property comes to market while that household searches for another. A first-time buyer creates demand but does not simultaneously release an existing owner-occupied property for sale. When the market becomes more heavily weighted towards buyers entering without a related sale, the relationship between buyer demand, available instructions and onward chains changes. That can affect stock levels, pipeline conversion and the number of transactions generated from a given pool of active buyers.
The same turnover problem can spill into new-build sales. A buyer who wants a new home but must first sell an existing property is still exposed to resale-market liquidity and chain risk. Historical CML analysis also found a close correlation between residential transactions and private-sector housing completions, while cautioning that the mechanism was not proven and might not persist indefinitely. The broader point is more durable: developers selling to existing homeowners do not operate separately from the liquidity of the resale market.
The investor and analyst angle
For anyone using local transaction data as evidence — to value a comparable, assess liquidity in a particular price band or judge how easily a future exit sale might complete — a structurally smaller mover market is a reason for caution rather than alarm. Fewer transactions in the segments historically dominated by movers do not, by themselves, prove weaker values. They do mean that a headline average can be based on a thinner set of actual transactions and that local market composition matters more.
This is particularly important because the national picture hides very different regional histories. A market in which second and subsequent mortgage sales remain 46% below 2006 levels is not behaving in the same way as one where they are down more than 66%. For investors, developers and property businesses, turnover can be as important as price direction: a property can hold its value on paper while taking part in a market with fewer potential buyers, fewer comparable sales and fewer households able or willing to make the next step.
Nor does the latest growth in headline mortgage lending show that this structural problem has gone away. UK Finance’s September 2026 assessment still described house-purchase activity as broadly flat, with its forecast for modest growth in total gross lending driven primarily by refinancing rather than a surge in purchases. That is a useful distinction. More mortgage lending does not necessarily mean more people moving home. UK Finance — Mortgage lending in 2026: a mid-year health check
The mover market has not vanished, and it can recover further if affordability improves. But the long comparison suggests that another small fall in mortgage rates is unlikely, on its own, to recreate the trading-up market of the 2000s. A much larger question sits underneath the rate cycle: whether existing owners have enough equity, enough borrowing capacity and enough financial reason to exchange the home they already have for the one they actually want next. Until more of them do, the UK can have plenty of people who would like to move without having anything like the volume of movers it once did.
This article provides general property-market information and analysis, not financial or investment advice. Different mortgage datasets use different definitions and coverage, so figures from the Office for National Statistics, UK Finance and historical Council of Mortgage Lenders research should not be treated as a single continuous statistical series.
