Can you get an Irish mortgage as a non-resident?

What the Central Bank changed

The Central Bank of Ireland limits mortgage lending through two ratios: loan to income and loan to value. For first-time buyers the income limit is four times gross annual income, for later buyers three and a half times; the deposit is ten per cent for owner-occupiers and at least thirty per cent for investors.

On 8 April 2026 the Central Bank exempted certain bridging loans for a home you live in from the income limit. The reasoning is plain: a bridging loan is repaid from the sale of the old property, not from ongoing income. For someone moving from a large house to a smaller one, the income limit was a hurdle without a purpose.

Why it means little for you

These rules are prudential regulation. They tell banks the most they may do, and they say nothing about what a given bank actually offers a given applicant. Between the Central Bank's ceiling and a bank's approval lies that bank's entire credit policy, and that is where a non-resident's case is decided.

Put another way: no rule forbids lending to non-residents, and no rule guarantees it. If you read online that a particular deposit applies to non-residents, you are reading about bank practice, not law, and bank practice changes faster than law.

What banks ask for in practice

Here we tread deliberately carefully. The following points come from bank information and reports from practice, not from a legal source, and we label them as what they are: secondary evidence, to be checked case by case.

• A much larger deposit than the Central Bank's ten per cent, in the region of a third.
• A haircut on income earned in another currency, because the bank prices in exchange rate risk. That hits applicants paid in sterling or another non-euro currency directly.
• Minimum incomes above those that apply to residents.
• At some lenders, restrictions to certain property types or to applicants with a connection to Ireland.

One claim that is often repeated and that we expressly do not stand behind: that at least one applicant must be an Irish citizen or resident in Ireland. Put that generally, it does not hold; some banks assess applications regardless of nationality. What is true is that an application without Irish income and without Irish banking history takes more work and longer.

Why many readers need not ask the question at all

The reason this post could be short: a substantial share of our readers buy without a mortgage. Coming from the sale of a home in your old country, you often have enough to pay for a family house in the south-east outright, because the price levels are so far apart.

And paying cash is more than a convenience in the Irish process. In a phase in which nobody is bound until contracts are signed, speed is an argument with the seller. A buyer without a finance condition closes faster, and in a tight market that is worth hard money. The process is under buying.

If you do want a mortgage

Four practical points.

The order. First approval in principle, then the offer on a house. A seller whose buyer has no approval yet gets nervous, and nerves cost houses in a non-binding phase.

The local bank. Irish lenders work heavily through branches and appointments in person. An application run entirely by email from abroad moves more slowly than one where you have been in once.

The currency. A euro loan against a sterling income means the repayment fluctuates measured against what you earn. That rules nothing out, but it belongs in your own calculation, not just the bank's.

The documents. Proof of income, tax assessments, account history, proof of the source of funds for the deposit. All in English, all complete, and better gathered too early than too late. The anti-money-laundering check is the most common cause of delay where assets are held abroad.

What we cannot say yet

This site still treats lending to non-residents as an open point. The individual lenders' terms are hard to obtain in the original from abroad, they change, and a wrong figure costs you more here than a missing figure helps. So we write down no percentages we have not read in the original.

What we can do is describe the structure, name the sources of error and say where the limit of our knowledge lies. The current position is under mortgages, and once we have reliable original terms we will report them here.

What else an Irish mortgage brings

Even once approval is in place, the product differs from what many readers know from home. Four points that regularly surprise.

Fixed periods are short. Rates fixed for twenty or thirty years practically do not exist in Ireland. The usual fix runs a few years, followed by a new agreement or a variable rate. If you are used to a repayment you can plan for decades, recalculate.

Two insurances are a condition. For a mortgage on a home you live in, Irish banks almost always require mortgage protection life cover on the borrowers and buildings insurance. Both are a condition of drawdown, both cost money, and both can become the real bottleneck with a pre-existing condition or a property in a flood-risk location.

The bank does the valuation. It instructs its own valuer, and that valuation sets the lending, not the purchase price. If it comes in below the agreed price, the difference has to come from your own funds.

The energy rating counts. Several lenders offer better terms for homes with a good energy rating. With an older Irish house rated poorly, that advantage falls away, and the retrofit that would earn it is exactly what you would need the money for.

The order that works

All of this leads to a recommendation that has less to do with interest than with time. If you need finance, treat the mortgage as a project of its own and put it before the house search, not beside it. Approval in principle, then search, then offer. A cash buyer has no such strand and gains speed in the process too, which in a phase without commitment is a real argument.

And if you are selling a home in your old country to buy in Ireland, separate the two in time if you possibly can. An Irish purchase whose closing hangs on a sale date in the UK or elsewhere has a breaking point in a process that is non-binding to begin with. Bridging finance is expensive; a purchase that collapses is more expensive.

What to take from this

Three sentences. The Central Bank's rules are a ceiling for banks, not a promise to you, and the change of 8 April affects people trading down, not people moving in. What non-residents actually get is set in each lender's own terms, is stricter than for residents and has to be checked in the original. And if you can buy for cash, you buy in Ireland not only more simply but faster, and in a process without commitment speed is a price argument.

The special case: buying through a company

A route people ask about regularly, and one that deserves a clear answer here: buy a home to live in through a company and in Ireland you create more problems than you solve. Finance gets harder, because residential mortgages are designed for private individuals. Tax gets more complicated, because use by the shareholder has consequences. And transaction costs rise, because different rates can apply to certain purchases by companies.

We deliberately go no further here, because the substance of structuring questions on this site is not researched but comes from the firm. What we can say: for the family home you live in in the south-east, buying directly as a private individual is the norm, and if you want to depart from that you should have a reason that goes beyond a rule of thumb from a forum. What we take on, and where advice begins, is under services.

Finally, the note that stands above all of this: this site gives no investment and no mortgage advice, and it deliberately names no individual bank's terms. What is here is the structure of the market and the list of points where applications from abroad fail. Get the terms from the lenders themselves, and get them in writing.