Parents Are Charging an Average £303 a Month in Rent, and 54% Hand It Back

Parents who charge their adult children rent are charging an average of £303 a month, and 54% of them give some or all of it back to help build a deposit. That comes from research Nationwide Building Society published on 26 September 2026, carried out by Censuswide among more than 2,000 UK parents during July and August 2026.

The regional spread is wide. London averaged £414.97 a month, Yorkshire and the Humber £187.08 (same source).

Living at home is doing most of the saving

34% of the adult children covered by the survey were living at home specifically to build a deposit, and 40% said they could not afford to move out. 82% of parents expected rising housing costs to keep their children at home for longer (Nationwide, 26 September 2026).

The arrangements are mostly unwritten. 20% of parents had a formal agreement in place. Half said the money had caused tension at home.

What it looks like when it reaches a purchase

A deposit built this way is a run of transfers between two people's accounts, spread over three or four years, with nothing in writing behind it. There is nothing irregular about that. It is how a good share of first purchases are now funded.

A purchase does eventually reach the point where the deposit has to be accounted for, though, and reconstructing several years of informal payments after an offer has been accepted takes longer than keeping a note of them as they happen.

There is also the question of whether the money was a gift or a loan. Those are not the same thing, and a returned rent arrangement can read either way depending on how it was set up. The difference has tax consequences, which a broker is not the person to answer. That one goes to a qualified tax adviser, and it is worth asking before the deposit is committed rather than after.

Building a deposit from overseas

From overseas the number is larger before anything else is considered. In our experience an expat residential purchase generally calls for a deposit of around 20%, and expat or non resident buy to let sits higher, in the 25% to 35% range. So there is more to assemble, and it is often being assembled across more than one country. Earnings in one currency, savings held in a second jurisdiction, family help arriving from a third.

None of that is unusual among our clients and none of it is a lending problem in itself. It is a paperwork job, and paperwork takes calendar time. A standard purchase runs 12 weeks or more depending on complexity, and how readily the money behind the deposit can be explained is one of the things that decides where in that range a case lands.

Worth saying as well that the rent a parent charges a child at home has nothing to do with how a let property is assessed. A buy to let loan is sized on the rent the property produces, not on the owner's income, and that holds for expat and non resident applications too. People often arrive assuming the opposite.

If you are putting a deposit together out of an arrangement like this, or helping a child buy while you are living abroad, get in touch and we can look at how it is likely to present by the time it reaches an application.

Sources

• Nationwide Building Society, research carried out by Censuswide among more than 2,000 UK parents during July and August 2026, published 26 September 2026
• ITV News, report of the Nationwide research, 26 September 2026
• The Intermediary, report of the Nationwide research, 26 September 2026