®
Yes. A UK limited liability partnership can apply for a business loan with us on exactly the same footing as a limited company. LLPs sometimes assume business lending is a companies-only club — it is not, but the application has a few LLP-specific wrinkles around who signs and what we check. Here is the full picture for members.
Why an LLP qualifies
An LLP, like a limited company, is a body corporate: a legal person separate from its members, incorporated at Companies House with its own registration number (typically beginning OC), able to own assets and owe debts in its own name. That separate legal personality is precisely what makes our lending work — we lend to the entity, the entity owes the money, and the members are not personally liable for it, just as shareholders and directors are not for a company's borrowing. The concept is unpacked in what is a body corporate. Partnership-style tax treatment makes no difference here; what matters to a lender is legal personality, and an LLP has it.
Who applies and who signs
Where a company acts through a director, an LLP acts through a member — and every LLP must have at least two designated members, who carry the compliance duties (filing accounts, maintaining the register). For a loan application, the person applying should be a member with authority to borrow on the LLP's behalf. Practical points:
- The applying member goes through the same identity and anti-money-laundering check as a company director would — an ID check, not a personal credit search, with no effect on the member's personal credit file.
- Check your LLP agreement before applying. Many agreements require member consent, or a decision of designated members, for borrowing above a threshold. That is internal governance — we will take your authority at face value in the same way we do a director's — but signing without it creates a problem between you and your fellow members that no lender can fix.
- Members' agreement matters, but the borrower is the LLP: the Business Loan Agreement is in the LLP's name, and the money lands in the LLP's business bank account.
How the LLP is assessed
Identically to a company: the entity's own trading, roughly six months of its business bank activity via Open Banking or PDF statements, and a business credit check on the LLP's file. Nothing about members' personal finances enters the assessment, no personal guarantee is taken from any member, and the borrowing is not reported on any member's consumer credit file. One structural note: because LLP profits are drawn by members rather than retained as salary costs, an LLP's account can show large, irregular member drawings — that is normal and expected, but an account drained to its floor by drawings immediately before an application reads the same way heavy dividends would for a company. The signals we read are set out in what affordability signals matter.
The trap: ordinary partnerships are different
Do not confuse an LLP with a general (ordinary) partnership or with two sole traders working together. An ordinary partnership has no separate legal personality in England and Wales — a loan to "the partnership" is a loan to the individual partners, which is a different legal category (and, for small partnerships, one that falls within consumer-credit regulation). We cannot lend to ordinary partnerships or sole traders, however solid the business; the eligibility line is explained in limited company, LLP or sole trader eligibility. If your letterhead says "Partners" but Companies House has never heard of you, you are an ordinary partnership, not an LLP.
Lending to an LLP for business purposes sits outside FCA consumer-credit regulation under Article 60B FSMA RAO 2001 and is not covered by the Financial Ombudsman Service or the FSCS. Current amounts, terms and costs are on our business loans page.