A lease ending, or rent going up, puts a decision in front of you: keep renting, or buy the building instead.

A lease comes up for renewal, or the rent goes up, and a business that has been renting its premises for years suddenly has a choice to make. Keep paying rent to someone else, or buy the building and start paying off a mortgage instead.

It is not a simple swap of one payment for another. Buying the premises a business trades from changes how the company holds its assets, who signs for the borrowing, and what happens if the business ever struggles to pay. A director weighing this up is usually asking a second question too: whether the company should buy the building, the director should buy it personally, or a pension scheme should buy it and lease the building back to the business.

Who faces this choice

Most readers are a director of a limited company, sometimes a sole trader or a partner, whose lease is ending or whose rent has gone up, and who wants to work through the decision before speaking to a lender, a broker or a regulated adviser. Some arrive already partway through, told that a pension scheme could buy the building, and wanting to understand what that commits them to before the conversation goes any further.

SMBMortgages.co.uk sets out each ownership route for the premises, so you can decide with a regulated adviser.

A rate, a threshold or a rule on this site is never stated on its own. Each one is paired with the body that publishes it and the date that publication was read: HMRC's Pensions Tax Manual for pension borrowing limits, GOV.UK for current tax rules, the British Business Bank and UK Finance for what lenders publish as typical practice.

Why the date is given

A loan-to-value figure a lender publishes this year can be withdrawn or changed the next. A pension borrowing limit set out in the Pensions Tax Manual can be revised by HMRC. Showing the date a source was read lets you see how current that figure is, and go back to the source yourself to check whether it still stands.

Property tax named by nation

Where a tax rule differs across the UK, the nation is named alongside it: Stamp Duty Land Tax in England and Northern Ireland, Land and Buildings Transaction Tax in Scotland, Land Transaction Tax in Wales. Each is sourced separately rather than folded into a single figure that would not hold across all four nations.

What a source citation gives you

Naming the source is not a claim that a figure is correct or current at the moment you read it. It is a way of showing where a figure came from, so you can check it against the published source, your lender or a regulated adviser before relying on it.

Everything on this site is information. Reading a comparison here, or putting numbers through the calculator, does not amount to financial advice, mortgage advice, pension advice, tax advice or legal advice, and nothing on the site is a recommendation to buy, to borrow, or to structure ownership one way rather than another.

The site does not arrange mortgages. There is no form to fill in, no enquiry box and no way to apply for anything through it, and it does not put a reader in touch with a lender, a broker or a pension provider.

SMBMortgages.co.uk is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Where a route a reader is weighing up, such as buying the premises personally and occupying part of the building, may involve a regulated mortgage contract, that is said plainly at the point it comes up, and the reader is pointed toward a regulated adviser rather than toward any particular firm.

Where a decision turns on a pension rule or a tax position, the reader is directed to the pension scheme's administrator and to a regulated adviser before acting on anything worked through on the site.