The full answer
What actually decides it.
Every lender has heard of dentistry. There is no lender that needs the profession explained to it, and no meaningful sense in which one is a dental lender and another is not.
The useful version of the question is different: which lenders have criteria that fit how a dental career is actually paid? That is a real question with a real answer, and it has almost nothing to do with familiarity and everything to do with the arithmetic a lender applies to your accounts.
The thing that separates them is how they handle a rising income. A dentist in the first years of self-employment usually earns much less in year one than in year two, because year one is part training, part building up. A lender that averages the two years lends against the middle of that climb. A lender that takes the most recent year lends against the top of it.
The illustration Joe uses is a first year at around £30,000 and a second at £80,000 or £90,000 – figures given here only to show the mechanism, not drawn from a client. Averaged, that is roughly £60,000 of assessable income. Taken on the most recent year, it is £90,000. Nothing about the dentist changed between those two answers; only the lender did.
Which of the two suits you depends on how much you are trying to borrow and how much your income has moved over the last year or two. That is the assessment worth doing first, because it decides which lenders to approach rather than merely how to present the case to them.
Where lenders differ
- On awareness of the profession, there is nothing to choose between them.
- On the arithmetic, the split is significant. Some lenders average your last two years of income. Some use the most recent year alone, which where your income is climbing will allow you to borrow considerably more.
- How much you are trying to borrow decides how much that difference matters. Where the amount needed sits comfortably inside both calculations, the criteria question loses most of its force and other things – rate, term, flexibility – start to matter more.
Written from Colin Wallace’s recorded interview with Joe Wallace, 26 August 2026 and reviewed by Colin Wallace.