CCJs Rose 17% in Q1 2026 — Here's What the Numbers Actually Mean for Your Mortgage

The Headline Number

Registry Trust — the official body behind the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines — published its Q1 2026 figures this week, and the trend is clear: County Court Judgments are rising. 271,504 new consumer CCJs were registered in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in the first three months of 2026, up 17.4% on the same period last year and 5.4% on the previous quarter.

If you've had a CCJ registered recently, or you're worried one might be coming, the honest first thing to know is this: you are one of a genuinely large and growing group. This isn't a rare event happening to a handful of unlucky people — it's happening to hundreds of thousands of people every quarter, and the number is climbing.

The Part That Actually Matters if You're Buying or Remortgaging

Buried in the same data is the statistic that matters most for anyone worried about their mortgage prospects: the vast majority of these CCJs are small. 45% of new consumer judgments in England and Wales are for amounts under £500. The median value is just £607. Only 13% are for amounts over £3,000.

This matters directly for mortgage purposes because specialist lenders don't treat every CCJ the same way. Several lenders — Pepper Money, Kensington, Aldermore, Bluestone among them — disregard small CCJs entirely, particularly telecoms, utility and mail order judgments under £200–£500. Given that nearly half of all new CCJs fall into exactly this bracket, a meaningful proportion of the people driving this quarter's 17.4% increase may find their specific judgment barely affects their mortgage application at all, provided they go to a lender who actually looks at the detail rather than declining automatically on the headline fact of "a CCJ."

Why the Number Is Rising

Registry Trust's data doesn't explain the "why" — that's a wider economic question — but the pattern is consistent with what I'm seeing in my own casework: cost-of-living pressure translating into missed payments on smaller, everyday commitments — phone contracts, subscriptions, credit cards — rather than large-scale financial collapse. That's consistent with 45% of judgments sitting under £500. This isn't a story of people taking on unmanageable debt; it's a story of small bills going unpaid and escalating to a county court judgment because they went unaddressed, not because the amounts were large.

The Uncomfortable Statistic

One figure in the report is worth sitting with: 88.2% of all judgments currently on the Register are unsatisfied — meaning still unpaid. Given that a satisfied CCJ within 30 days of issue is removed from the register entirely, and a satisfied judgment generally opens up more lenders than an unsatisfied one at the same age, that 88.2% represents a genuinely large number of people who could improve their mortgage options simply by paying off a judgment they may have forgotten about or assumed didn't matter anymore.

If you have an old CCJ sitting unsatisfied and you're not sure why it's still there, checking your full credit report — not just your score — is worth doing before you assume it's a lost cause.

What This Means If You're Planning to Buy or Remortgage

Three things worth taking from this data if a CCJ is part of your situation:

The scale works in your favour. With 271,504 new consumer CCJs this quarter alone, lenders who specialise in adverse credit are dealing with cases like yours constantly — this isn't a niche or unusual situation for them.

Size matters more than existence. A £280 mobile phone default that became a CCJ is a fundamentally different case to a £4,000 unsecured loan default — treat them differently when you're assessing your own options, because lenders certainly do.

Satisfying it, where you can, genuinely helps. With over 88% of judgments on the register still unpaid, clearing yours — even an old, small one — is one of the few concrete, controllable steps you can take before applying.