Mortgage Misery Warning — Bond Market Turmoil to Send Rates Climbing. Quoted in This Is Money.

The Story So Far, Now Complete

Sky News flagged it first. The Daily Mirror confirmed Barclays, Santander and TSB. Wales Online confirmed Halifax and tipped Nationwide as next. This week, This Is Money confirmed the full picture: Nationwide and Halifax have both now raised rates — by 0.2 and 0.18 percentage points respectively — with Nottingham and Skipton building societies following too. Every lender named as "likely to move" over the past fortnight has now moved.

The average two-year fixed rate now stands at 5.67%, with five-year deals at 5.71%. Both have been climbing steadily as five-year gilt yields pushed above 4.9% — a genuinely significant level, and the reason mortgage pricing keeps moving even though the Bank of England's own base rate hasn't changed.

Why This Isn't Over

Other brokers quoted alongside me made the same point from different angles: smaller, regional lenders tend to move faster and further when funding costs rise, since they have less capacity to absorb volatility than the largest banks. Larger lenders can sometimes hold their pricing a little longer — but "longer" isn't "indefinitely," and the broader view across the market is that any lender who hasn't yet repriced is under real pressure to do so soon.

Swap rates — what lenders actually use to price fixed mortgages — move in step with gilt yields, not the Bank of England's base rate. That's the disconnect worth understanding: the base rate has been steady, but fixed mortgage pricing has moved four times in the space of two weeks, purely because of what's happening in the bond market.

What This Means If You're Fixing Soon

The best deals are the first ones to disappear when this kind of repricing happens — lenders pull their most competitive rates first, then reprice everyone else. If your current deal ends in the next six months, most lenders let you secure a new rate now and still switch to something cheaper later if the market genuinely improves before you complete. Given the direction of the last two weeks, that protection is worth having rather than gambling on a reversal that hasn't shown any sign of arriving yet.

What This Means If You Have Adverse Credit

The same wholesale funding pressure that's pushing up mainstream rates affects specialist and adverse-credit lending too — sometimes faster, since specialist lenders often reprice first. If you've got a CCJ, default, or other credit issue and you've been waiting for calmer conditions before applying, this run of consecutive rate rises is a clear signal that the calm hasn't arrived. Getting a proper assessment now means knowing exactly where you stand before pricing moves again, rather than after.