What you need to lease a car with bad credit
Most companies in this market tell you they assess affordability rather than a credit score, and then stop. This page is the rest of it. Everything you need, what someone actually looks at, and what will stop an application, so you can work out where you stand before you send us anything.
Check if I qualifyWritten by Guy Prince, FCA-authorised credit broker, FRN 984955. Last updated 6 September 2026.
The complete list
- Three months of bank statements. Full PDFs, every page, for the account your income goes into.
- A copy of your driving licence. Front and back.
- Income from work of at least £1,500 a month after tax. Realistically £2,000 is where this starts to work properly.
- Around £900 to £1,200 available up front. That is the first three months' rental.
- Payments up to date right now. Past problems are fine. Current ones are not.
That is it. There is nothing else.
The two things that decide it before anything else
Everything below matters, but these two are the gate.
The money up front. Cars are £299 to £399 a month and the first payment is three months' rental, so you need somewhere between £900 and £1,200 available. There is no no-deposit version, there is no way of spreading it, and no amount of good history changes it. If that money is not there, nothing else on this page helps.
Income from work. £1,500 a month after tax is the floor, and £2,000 is where it becomes comfortable. Employed or self-employed both work. Benefits count on top of earned income, and they do not count on their own, so someone whose entire income is from benefits cannot be helped no matter how carefully they manage it.
If you clear both of those, keep reading. If you do not, the honest answer is not yet.
Your bank statements
This is the part people get wrong, and getting it wrong costs you days.
Full statements, not summaries. Download the PDF from your banking app or online banking. Not a screenshot, not a photograph of a screen, not the transaction list you can see in the app. The proper statement document.
Every page. Including the ones that are mostly blank. A statement with pages missing gets sent back, and missing pages look like something is being hidden even when nothing is.
Three consecutive months, the most recent three. If it is the 5th of the month, the previous three complete months is fine.
The account your income goes into. If your salary lands in one account and your bills come out of another, send both. This matters more than people realise: an underwriter looking at an account with large regular transfers out to somewhere they cannot see will assume the worst about what is happening there. Showing both accounts is always better than showing one.
If you are self-employed, send your business account as well as your personal one.
What someone actually looks at
Your statements are read by a person, not scanned by software. Broadly they are working out one thing: whether the monthly payment would sit comfortably alongside everything already going out.
The things that stand out to them:
- Income arriving regularly, and whether it is steady or lumpy
- What is already committed. Rent or mortgage, other finance, a debt management plan or IVA payment. None of these is a problem in itself. They are just numbers that have to be accounted for
- Whether the account recovers each month or gets slowly worse
- How the overdraft is used. An arranged overdraft dipped into occasionally is normal. Being in an unarranged one most months is not
- Whether direct debits are going through or bouncing
What is not being looked for is a reason to say no. This is the part people find hard to believe, having been declined repeatedly, but a lender in this market makes money by writing agreements rather than by declining them.
What stops an application
Being straight about this saves you the trouble of applying.
- Payments behind right now. Any of them. This is the big one
- Direct debits bouncing in the last three months
- Living in an unarranged overdraft most of the month
- Payday loans or short term high cost credit taken recently. Historic ones are fine. Ones from last month are not
- An undischarged bankruptcy. Discharged is fine, and normally happens twelve months after the order
- Income under £1,500 a month after tax, or income entirely from benefits
- No money for the three months up front
- More than 12,000 miles a year, because the agreements come with a ten thousand mile limit
Regular gambling transactions are also looked at, and it is better you hear that here than find out afterwards. It is not a moral judgment and one or two entries will not decide anything. It is that a lender assessing what you can genuinely afford has to account for money going out regularly, whatever it is going out on.
What we do not need
Worth listing, because people expect far more paperwork than this and put off applying because of it.
- No payslips. Your statements show your income arriving, which is better evidence than a payslip anyway
- No P60 or tax returns
- No proof of address
- No employer reference. We do not contact your employer
- No guarantor. We do not arrange guarantor agreements and we never will
- No deposit beyond the three months' rental
- No credit check at this stage. Nothing touches your file until much later, and only if the affordability side already works
Check yourself before you apply
Six questions. If you can answer yes to all six, it is worth sending your statements. If you cannot, you already know which one to work on.
- 1.Do you have £900 to £1,200 available now, not next month?
- 2.Is at least £1,500 a month after tax arriving from work?
- 3.Are all your payments up to date this month?
- 4.Have your direct debits all gone through for the last three months?
- 5.If you have been bankrupt, have you been discharged?
- 6.Do you drive under 12,000 miles a year?
Everything else, the CCJs, the defaults, the IVA, the missed payments from two years ago, is workable. Those six are not.
What happens after you send it
You will hear from us within two working days, either way.
If it looks positive, the next step is the lender's own application form and, after that, a credit check. Nothing touches your credit file before that point, so if the answer is no, you find out having lost nothing.
If we cannot help, we will tell you why rather than leaving you to guess. Usually it is one of the six questions above, and usually it is fixable given a few months.
Questions people ask
Where you stand
Send us three months of bank statements and a copy of your driving licence. We will tell you within two working days whether this is likely to work, before any credit check.
If you want to read about your particular situation first, there are pages on bad credit car leasing, leasing with an IVA, leasing after bankruptcy, leasing with a CCJ and leasing on a debt management plan.