The full answer
What actually decides it.
Less than most dentists assume. The more useful question is what each level of deposit buys you, because the difference between the minimum and the comfortable figure is not mainly about the rate.
Five per cent is the working floor. A good number of lenders will lend at ninety-five per cent of the purchase price, and a foundation dentist with a clean file and a signed contract is a reasonable applicant to them. Products below five per cent do exist from time to time; whether one is available to you on the day you apply is something to ask rather than assume, because they come and go.
Twenty per cent is where the picture changes character. At around twenty per cent down essentially the whole market opens up, including the lenders who are most flexible about the shape of a dental career – the ones who will work from a signed contract, and the ones who will look past a short trading history. That is the real argument for a larger deposit, and it is not the one people expect. It is less about the rate than about how many lenders will consider you at all, and therefore how closely your circumstances have to fit somebody’s box.
In between, lenders price in bands rather than on a sliding scale. A few thousand pounds more deposit sometimes moves you into a cheaper band and sometimes does nothing at all, so it is worth checking where the next band actually starts before you delay a purchase in order to reach a round number.
And where the deposit comes from matters as much as how big it is. Saved, gifted and lent are three different things to a lender, each with its own evidence trail. If any part of yours is coming from family, read the gifted deposit answer alongside this one.
Where lenders differ
- The floor differs. Most lenders stop at five per cent and a few go below it, and the products that do are the ones most likely to have changed since the last time anybody looked. This is one to check on the day.
- What a small deposit is allowed to sit alongside differs much more. Some lenders will lend at a high loan-to-value to a foundation dentist on a signed contract with almost no payslip history behind it. Others will lend at that level only to somebody with a longer employment record. High loan-to-value combined with a short contract is where foundation dentists actually get declined.
- Above roughly twenty per cent the differences largely stop mattering, because by then essentially every lender will consider you.
Written from Colin Wallace’s recorded interview with Joe Wallace, 24 August 2026 and reviewed by Colin Wallace.