Guidance: Support for Mortgage Interest statistics: background and methodology

The Support for Mortgage Interest statistics have been developed to provide the primary official source of information about households in receipt of Support for Mortgage Interest (SMI) loans.

The statistics were published quarterly up to September 2025 and moved to a biannual publication schedule from there onwards.  All releases are published on Stat-Xplore. The statistics enable a variety of users to be informed about the number of households who are currently in receipt of the support as well as the number who have received loans so far. Geographic information is also available as well as information on the benefit that has qualified the household for SMI.

SMI helps protect claimants on qualifying benefits with mortgages from possession by contributing towards the interest payments on the claimant’s mortgage and other eligible loans. SMI stopped being a benefit and became an interest-bearing loan on 6 April 2018.

Claimants are usually eligible for SMI if they have a mortgage and get one of the following benefits:

When loan payments start depends on what benefit a claimant gets:

For more information about claiming SMI, please see the GOV.UK page.

SMI is a loan offer rather than an automatic entitlement. The SMI statistics only reflect the number of claimants who have accepted the loan offer and received an SMI payment.