490,000+ drivers found their agreements with us
You may be owed money under the FCA’s motor finance redress scheme, which covers agreements taken out between 2007 and 2024, with average payouts reported between £700 and £830. Check your old finance paperwork or lender statements first. Our site finds your car finance agreements for free in under 60 seconds, with no paperwork needed, so that’s the fastest way to see where you stand.
TL;DR:
- The scheme covers roughly 12.1 million agreements from 2007 to 2024, with average payouts around £700 to £830, depending on your specific case.
- Eligibility depends on whether your agreement involved discretionary or tied commission arrangements, especially if commissions exceeded 39% of credit cost or 10% of the loan.
- Most payouts are based on an APR adjustment, but high-impact Johnson-style cases can result in full commission repayment plus interest.
- Confirming eligibility can be quick and simple using your lender records or a free online check that requires no paperwork.
- Making a claim is free, and the final deadline to submit a manual complaint is August 31, 2027, with options to escalate to the Financial Ombudsman if needed.
The FCA’s redress scheme covers car finance agreements taken out between 6 April 2007 and 1 November 2024, an eighteen-year window that the regulator estimates affects around 12.1 million agreements. That figure was revised down from an earlier estimate of 14.2 million agreements during consultation, and the FCA expects total redress across the industry to reach roughly £7.5 billion.
The scheme runs two slightly different tracks depending on when you took out your agreement, because the commission rules dealers worked under changed in 2014:
What actually makes an agreement eligible comes down to the type of commission arrangement your dealer had with the lender. A discretionary commission arrangement, often shortened to DCA, let the dealer adjust your interest rate, and the higher the rate, the more commission the dealer earned. That’s a direct conflict of interest: the person selling you the car had a financial reason to charge you more. Alongside DCAs, the scheme also looks at tied arrangements, where a dealer had a right of first refusal or an exclusive relationship with a particular lender, because that arrangement could also distort the deal you were offered.
Specific thresholds matter here too. The scheme treats commission as potentially problematic where it made up 39% of the total cost of credit or more than 10% of the loan amount, figures set out in the FCA’s policy statement PS26/3. Not every agreement qualifies, though. Very small commission payments, zero-interest finance deals and claims that have already been settled or paid out are generally excluded from fresh compensation.
One detail catches a lot of people out: the word “discretionary” is a legal threshold, not a label your dealer needed to use. Arrangements that worked the same way in substance, even if the paperwork never used the term “discretionary commission”, can still qualify, according to analysis from Grant Thornton. That means plenty of older dealer arrangements that look unremarkable on paper may still fall inside the scheme.
It’s also worth knowing that the scheme has not had a smooth ride. Parts of it were suspended by the Upper Tribunal in July 2026 following legal challenges, meaning firms don’t currently have to calculate or pay compensation while that suspension is in effect. Firms still have to follow the rest of the scheme’s rules, though, and the FCA’s guidance is clear: consumers should keep complaining regardless of the suspension, since complaints lodged now will still be assessed once the legal position settles.
Most people want one number: what might I actually get? The honest answer is that it depends heavily on which type of mis-selling applied to your agreement, because the scheme uses what’s called a hybrid remedy rather than a single flat payout.
For the bulk of cases, the FCA’s redress scheme applies an APR adjustment as a way of estimating how much extra interest you paid because of the commission arrangement. In practice, this means the lender recalculates what your interest rate should have been without the inflated commission, then works out the difference you overpaid, plus compensatory interest.
A smaller group of cases get a more generous outcome. Where your agreement closely resembles the circumstances behind the Supreme Court’s Johnson decision, meaning an undisclosed tie between dealer and lender combined with a very high commission, you’re likely to receive full repayment of the commission itself plus interest, rather than just the APR-based adjustment. The FCA estimates this applies to around 90,000 cases, a relatively small slice of the 12.1 million agreements in scope.
The average payout being reported across the industry is around £700 to £830 per agreement, according to figures reported by the BBC based on FCA modelling. That’s an average, not a guarantee: some agreements, particularly those closer to the Johnson pattern, will see considerably more, while others with smaller commission amounts will see less.
A few other numbers worth knowing before you complain:
None of this is small change relative to what you likely paid in interest. But it’s also not a windfall. Treat the £700 to £830 figure as a realistic midpoint rather than a target, and let the lender’s own commission records determine your actual number.
Finding out whether you’re owed anything starts with working out which lender was involved and roughly when your agreement ran, because the scheme is built around lenders searching their own records rather than you digging through years of paperwork.
Under the scheme, lenders are required to retrieve their own internal commission data rather than relying on you to produce it, according to analysis from Mayer Brown. That’s a genuinely useful feature of how this scheme works: even a complaint with minimal supporting documents can usually be properly assessed once a lender searches its own systems.
If your contact details have changed since you took out the finance (a different address, a different surname, a closed email account), it’s worth updating the lender directly before or alongside your complaint, so any offer or correspondence actually reaches you. Missing paperwork doesn’t bar you from the scheme, but it can slow things down if the lender struggles to match your identity to an old account.
Pro Tip: Search your bank statements by amount rather than payee name first. Finance payments often show a generic reference code that’s easier to spot by matching the regular monthly figure than by hunting for a company name you’ve half-forgotten.
Making the complaint itself isn’t complicated, though the scheme’s timetable has a few dates worth knowing so you don’t miss a window.
When you write to your lender, include:
The Citizens Advice website provides free guidance and template wording for this kind of letter, and you don’t need legal training to put one together. Our own guide to claiming car finance compensation walks through the same steps in more detail if you’d rather follow a worked example.
On timing, a few dates matter:
Once your complaint is in, the lender will assess it against the scheme’s criteria and either make you an offer or explain why your agreement doesn’t qualify. If you’re happy with an offer, accepting it typically closes the matter, and payment follows within the lender’s standard timescales.
If you disagree with the outcome, whether that’s a refusal or an offer you think is too low, you can take the complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service once you’ve exhausted the lender’s own complaints process. The Ombudsman is free to use and independent of both the lender and the regulator, and it exists precisely for situations like this one, where a consumer and a financial firm can’t agree on a fair outcome.
You don’t need to pay anyone to make this complaint. The FCA and Citizens Advice are both clear that the scheme and the Ombudsman route are free, and that using a claims management company is unnecessary for the vast majority of consumers.
The real cost of going through a CMC is worth understanding before you sign anything. The FCA has also removed misleading adverts from circulation and set up a taskforce specifically focused on motor finance scam activity.
A few things to watch for:
Paid help can occasionally make sense, particularly for genuinely complex cases involving disputed liability or litigation beyond the scheme’s scope, but that’s the exception rather than the rule for most straightforward motor finance complaints.
Pro Tip: Before signing with any firm, ask three questions: what percentage of my payout will you take, what happens if my claim is unsuccessful, and can I complain for free through the FCA scheme instead?
Once a lender has your complaint, the usual sequence is an acknowledgement, an internal review of their commission records, and then a decision letter setting out whether you’re owed anything and how much.
Three broad outcomes are possible:
If you receive an offer you’re satisfied with, accepting it closes the complaint and payment generally follows on the lender’s standard timescale. If you’re refused, or you think the offer undervalues your case, your next step is the Financial Ombudsman Service, which will independently review the lender’s decision.
Evidence that tends to strengthen a case at this stage includes the original finance agreement showing the APR charged, any correspondence from the dealer mentioning commission, and bank statements confirming the loan term and payments made. None of these are mandatory given that lenders must search their own records, but they help if your case ends up disputed or escalated.
Having worked through the scheme’s rules in detail, the thing that stands out most is how little effort checking your eligibility actually requires compared with the amount some people seem to assume it takes. A lot of readers put this off because they imagine they need box files of old paperwork, when in reality a rough date and a lender name is often enough to get started.
The scheme’s legal wrangling, including the Upper Tribunal suspension, has understandably made some people nervous about whether it’s worth bothering at all. It is. Complaints lodged now still get assessed once the picture settles, and the deadline of 31 August 2027 is closer than it feels.
Our free check exists for exactly this moment: we locate your agreements quickly with no paperwork required, then refer eligible cases to partner law firms who handle the claim itself. Stick to official FCA and Financial Ombudsman pages for anything you’re unsure about, and be wary of anyone asking for money before they’ve done any work.
— Jake
Finding out whether you’re one of the millions of people affected by this scandal shouldn’t mean digging through a loft full of old paperwork. Our site finds your car finance agreements for free in under 60 seconds, with no car registration or lender documents required, which makes it a genuinely hands-off option if your records are incomplete or long gone.
Once we’ve located a potentially eligible agreement, we refer your case to a partner law firm, who manage the claim on a contingency basis, meaning you pay nothing upfront and any fee only comes out of money actually recovered. That’s a different route to the same outcome you’d get from a DIY complaint or the Financial Ombudsman Service, and it suits people who would rather hand the process to someone else than manage lender correspondence themselves.
Before going ahead with any route, it’s worth weighing a few options:
Whichever you choose, read the terms carefully first. If a hands-off approach suits you better, you can start your free check today and see what we find.
Payments are being processed under the FCA’s redress scheme, though the exact pace has been affected by the Upper Tribunal’s partial suspension of the scheme in July 2026. Reported average payouts sit between £700 and £830 per agreement where redress is due.
Start by identifying which lender financed your car and roughly when the agreement ran, using old statements, dealer paperwork or bank records. You can also use our free check, which finds your agreements with no paperwork required, or contact your lender directly to ask them to search their internal commission records.
The scandal covers agreements across the UK motor finance industry between 6 April 2007 and 1 November 2024, involving a wide range of lenders and dealerships that used discretionary commission arrangements. The scheme applies to any eligible lender rather than naming specific firms, so the right step is checking your own agreement rather than looking for a company list.
The FCA’s redress scheme was confirmed in 2026 through policy statement PS26/3, but parts of it were suspended by the Upper Tribunal in July 2026 following legal challenges. Firms don’t currently have to calculate or pay compensation during the suspension, though consumers are still advised to complain, with a final manual complaint deadline of 31 August 2027.
No. The FCA and Citizens Advice both confirm that complaining directly to your lender or the Financial Ombudsman Service is free, and using a claims management company can reduce your recovery by around 30% in fees.