®
"How long does my company need to have been trading?" is one of the most-searched business lending questions, and most answers are a number pulled out of the air. Here is our actual position: we do not publish a fixed minimum trading time. But that is not the same as "any company, any age" — the assessment itself creates a practical benchmark, and it is more useful to understand the mechanism than to memorise a number.
Why the practical benchmark is about six months
Our affordability assessment reads roughly the last six months of the company's business bank activity, provided through read-only Open Banking or PDF statements. That window is where a repayment decision comes from: income regularity, balance headroom, returned payments, existing commitments — the signals set out in what affordability signals matter. A company that has been trading for around six months can fill that window with real data. A company trading for six weeks cannot, and no document substitutes for the missing months — not forecasts, not a business plan, not the director's own income. So the honest framing is: the closer your trading history gets to six months of genuine account activity, the more there is to assess; materially less than that, and an application usually cannot demonstrate affordability yet.
Trading time is quality as well as length
Two companies can both show six months and read completely differently. What makes a trading history assessable:
- The activity sits in the business account. Trading that happened in cash, or through a personal account, is invisible to the assessment. The clock effectively starts when the business bank account starts carrying the real activity.
- Continuity counts. Six months containing four dormant ones is really two months of history.
- Arm's-length activity only. Genuine customer receipts are what carry weight. Money the director simply circulates through the account adds nothing, and the pattern is far more visible than people assume.
Common situations
- Newly incorporated, not yet trading: too early — the groundwork that shortens the wait is covered in can a newly incorporated company get a business loan.
- New company, established trade (a sole trader who incorporated): the company is assessed as new, since a new legal person carries none of the sole trader’s own history. See switching from sole trader to limited company before finance.
- Old company, recently revived: incorporation date flatters it — a company registered in 2015 that restarted trading in January has months, not years, of relevant history. The account activity decides, not the birthday.
- Seasonal business: six months capturing only the low season can understate the company; where the account shows last year's pattern too, the fuller cycle is visible.
Why we do not just publish a number
A hard threshold would be simpler to advertise and worse at lending. It would refuse a company with eleven strong months because it wanted twelve, and wave through a two-year-old company whose recent trading has collapsed. Reading the actual account avoids both mistakes. It also means the answer to "am I too early?" is genuinely checkable by you: open the business account, look at the last six months, and ask whether a stranger could see steady income and room for the repayment. If yes, apply — the full process is in how to apply, step by step. If no, a few more months of clean trading is the strongest application-improver there is.
Because we lend to limited companies and LLPs for business purposes, the borrowing 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.