What is a charging order?

A charging order is a court order that secures an unpaid debt, usually a CCJ, against your home. It doesn’t force you to sell straight away, but it does mean the debt has to be repaid from the property, typically when you sell or remortgage, before you can pass clear title to a buyer or a new lender is willing to lend behind it.

How a charging order is made

A charging order is generally the next step for a creditor when a CCJ has gone unpaid and other, simpler enforcement hasn’t worked or isn’t suitable. The creditor applies to the court, which can grant an interim charging order first, followed by a hearing where the court decides whether to make it final. Once final, it’s registered against the property, usually with the Land Registry or Land Charges Department in England and Wales, so it becomes visible to anyone checking the title, including a mortgage lender.

What a charging order actually secures

A charging order doesn’t create a new debt. It takes an existing, unpaid CCJ and attaches it to your property, meaning the debt now has to be dealt with when the property changes hands or is remortgaged, in a similar way to how a mortgage itself is secured. It sits behind your main mortgage in order of priority, so your mortgage lender is repaid first from any sale proceeds, then the charging order, then anything left over goes to you.

Does a charging order force a sale?

Not by itself. Having a charging order registered doesn’t mean the creditor can immediately force you out of your home. A creditor who wants to force a sale generally has to make a separate application for an order for sale, which the court considers on its own merits and doesn’t grant automatically. In practice, many charging orders are simply repaid when the homeowner eventually sells or remortgages for other reasons, rather than leading to a forced sale. If you’re worried about this happening, getting free advice from MoneyHelper, StepChange or National Debtline as early as possible gives you the most options.

Charging orders and council tax or other debts

While charging orders are most commonly associated with unpaid CCJs, similar security can sometimes be used for other debts in certain circumstances, including council tax arrears in serious, longstanding cases. Our guide on council tax arrears and remortgaging looks at how council tax enforcement generally works and where it can, in some circumstances, lead to something similar being secured against a home.

Can you remortgage or sell with a charging order in place?

Yes, though it needs to be dealt with as part of the process. A solicitor acting on a sale or remortgage will carry out searches that reveal any charging order registered against the property, and it will usually need repaying from the proceeds of the sale, or from funds raised through the remortgage, before completion can go ahead. If you’re remortgaging specifically to deal with a charging order, our page on paying off a CCJ through a remortgage explains how that process generally works, including getting an up-to-date figure from the creditor first.

Because this turns what was originally a court debt into borrowing secured against your home, it’s worth thinking carefully about the alternatives too, including paying it off through other means, negotiating directly with the creditor, or seeking free debt advice if the debt is part of a wider pattern of financial difficulty.

Can a charging order be removed?

Once the underlying debt is paid in full, you (or your solicitor) can apply to the court for the charging order to be removed from the register, sometimes called an application to discharge the order. Until that’s done formally, it can continue to show up on property searches even after the debt has technically been settled, which is why it’s worth confirming removal has gone through, not just that you’ve paid. Our guide on how to pay a CCJ covers getting confirmation from a creditor once a debt behind a charging order is cleared.

How this differs from an unsecured CCJ

An ordinary, unsecured CCJ is a personal debt: the creditor can pursue various enforcement routes, but nothing is automatically attached to a specific asset like your home. Once a charging order is made, the debt becomes tied to the property itself, which is a more serious step for a homeowner, since it follows the property rather than just you personally, at least while you continue to own it. Our guide on what happens if you don’t pay a CCJ? sets out the range of enforcement options a creditor can use, of which a charging order is one.

What this means if you’re remortgaging

If you have a charging order registered against your home, an adviser will need the details early on, including the amount outstanding and who the creditor is, since it directly affects how much can be released or refinanced and how completion will work. It doesn’t automatically rule out a remortgage, but it does need factoring into the numbers from the start rather than being discovered during the legal process. Our main page on remortgaging with a CCJ explains what an adviser typically wants to know, and getting your free statutory credit report from Experian, Equifax and TransUnion is a sensible step before you apply, so you know exactly what’s showing before a lender does.