I am on a fixed-term training contract. Does that count as secure income?

A fixed-term contract is not the obstacle it is usually presented as. What a lender is assessing is not the end date on the page but what happens after it.

Every foundation post is fixed-term. That is how the training year is built and no lender is surprised by it. The question an underwriter is really asking is whether your income stops when the contract does. For a dentist it does not. You finish training, you take an associate post, and your earnings typically go up. The role does not change, the register you are on does not change, and the skills you spent the year acquiring carry straight forward.

A lender that understands that reads your contract as a stage in a career. A lender that does not reads the word temporary and stops there – particularly where the next step is self-employment, because it is then looking at an end date with no guaranteed income written after it. Both are looking at exactly the same contract.

So a fixed-term training contract is not a barrier to borrowing. It is a reason to be careful about where the application goes. In front of a lender that recognises the dental career path it is unremarkable. In front of one that does not it produces a decline that has nothing to do with your ability to pay, and declined applications are not free to collect.

The evidence that makes the difference is whatever shows continuity rather than an ending: your contract, your payslips, and where you have one, the arrangement you are moving into next.