Verifying Income: Benefits

To verify your benefits income without Open Banking, you'll need to enter your income details and provide evidence for our referencing team.

You can provide evidence of this income by uploading one of the following:

• Entitlement/award letter
• Latest 3 months’ fully itemised bank statements
• For Universal Credit, we only accept the latest 3 months’ pay statements

Please see the criteria for these documents below:

Entitlement/award letter:

This must be dated for the most recent tax year. If you do not have a letter for the most recent tax year, please contact the referencing team to check if we can accept the available documents.

What we are looking for:

• The letter must be addressed to you.
• The date the letter was issued must be visible.
• This must confirm when you started receiving/will start receiving the benefit.
• This must confirm the amount you are receiving and the payment frequency.

Bank Statements:

We require your 3 most recent fully itemised bank statements. If this is a joint bank account we may ask for additional evidence that the benefit payment is solely your pension payments. You can speed this up by uploading another benefit document.

What we are looking for:

• Details of your bank.
• Must be in your name.
• Account number (this is to ensure all statements are from the same account).
• Date the bank statement was provided and the dates of the transactions.
• All incoming and outgoing payments.

Universal Credit Statements:

We require your 3 most recent full universal pay statements. We can only accept these as proof of universal credit as these can be for a couple or an individual.

What we are looking for:

• The need to be from your online government portal. We need to see the government logo.
• Your full name.
• The payment date and pay period.
• The full payment amount.
• The breakdown of the payments.

Please note if you are receiving Universal Credit, you need to have received this for at least 3 months for us to verify this income.