How to check a car finance claim free, and when payouts start

Where the scheme stands right now

The FCA confirmed its motor finance redress scheme on 30 March 2026 in a policy statement called PS26/3. It set two timetables: one for agreements that started between 1 April 2014 and 1 November 2024, where the period for lenders to get set up ended on 30 June 2026, and one for older agreements from 6 April 2007 to 31 March 2014, where that period ends on 31 August 2026.

Then, on 2 July 2026, it stopped. Four firms went to the Upper Tribunal, the court that hears challenges to FCA decisions, and the court suspended part of the scheme. The FCA's own description is that the tribunal prevented lenders “from calculating or paying redress according to the original timetable while legal challenges proceed”.

The four challengers named in the court's directions order of 1 July 2026 are CA Auto Finance UK Ltd, Consumer Voice Ltd, Mercedes-Benz Financial Services UK Ltd and Volkswagen Financial Services (UK) Ltd.

Two things are worth separating, because coverage keeps blurring them. The scheme has not been cancelled, and the rules that were not suspended still bind lenders. They must still identify the complaints and agreements that are relevant, gather the commission and disclosure records behind them, tell anyone who is not owed compensation that they are not, deal with the parts of a mixed complaint that sit outside the scheme, and co-operate with brokers and with the Financial Ombudsman Service.

The FCA last updated its own advice for the public on 18 August 2026. It confirms the suspension and says that until the legal process ends, lenders do not need to calculate or pay compensation to people owed money under the scheme. In the same breath it says the best thing you can do, if you have concerns, is to complain to your lender. It does not tell anyone to wait.

If you want the underlying rules, who qualifies and which commission arrangements make an agreement eligible, that is a separate piece: car finance compensation, who can claim and by when.

How to check whether you are affected, free

Start with the honest version: the FCA does not run an eligibility checker. There is no official page where you type in a registration number and learn whether you are owed money. What it runs is a searchable list of the lenders covered by the scheme, with contact details and the complaint procedure for each one.

That list is at fca.org.uk/consumers/car-finance-complaints/list-lenders. If your lender is on it, your route is the complaint procedure printed against its name. If you are ever unsure whether a phone number you have been given is genuine, the FCA's own general line is 0300 124 8899 and it will put you through.

The awkward part for most people is not the list. It is remembering who the lender was, because the finance was arranged at a dealership years ago and the paperwork is long gone. The dealer is not the lender, and the dealer may not even exist any more. These are the free ways to get the name back.

Once you have a lender name and a rough date, you know enough to complain. You do not need the agreement number, the interest rate, or a view on which commission arrangement applied. Working that out is the lender's job under the scheme, not yours.

How to complain, free, today

Complaining is free, it takes one email or one form, and it is the thing the suspension does not touch. Go to the lender direct using the complaint route on the FCA list.

Give them enough to find the agreement:

• Your name, your address now, and your address when you took the finance out
• The vehicle, and roughly when the agreement started and ended
• The agreement number, if you still have anything with it on
• A line saying you are complaining about commission that was not disclosed to you, and that you want your complaint treated under the FCA's motor finance redress scheme

What happens next is shaped by the suspension. Your lender does not have to work out a figure or pay you while the challenge runs. It does have to log your complaint as relevant, gather the commission and disclosure records, and tell you if the answer turns out to be that you are owed nothing.

For agreements that began before 1 April 2014, the FCA says a lender should contact you by 18 January 2027 if you complained by 31 August 2026. Read that as a date that depends on the suspension lifting, not a promise standing today.

The long-stop matters more. If you have never complained, you have until 31 August 2027. Lenders only have to go looking for people who have not complained where those people are potentially owed money, and anyone contacted that way has to respond within six months to join the scheme. Complaining yourself removes all of that uncertainty.

What it might be worth

The FCA published its own estimate on 30 March 2026 when it confirmed the scheme. It expects 12.1 million agreements made between 2007 and 2024 to be eligible, with an average payout of around £830 per agreement, and total redress of £7.5 billion if roughly three quarters of eligible people claim.

Read the £830 as arithmetic, not as a forecast for you. It is a total divided by a count. What lands in an individual case depends on the size of the loan, the rate paid, the rate that should have applied and the length of the agreement, so plenty of people will see less than £830 and some will see considerably more. Anyone selling you a service on the strength of an average is selling you a division sum.

If you had several agreements in the window, each is assessed on its own.

What a claims firm or a law firm costs

You can pay someone to send the complaint for you. It is worth seeing the fee in pounds first, because percentages of a number you have not received yet are easy to nod through.

The ceiling is set by the FCA's fee cap for claims management companies, in force since 1 March 2022 and applying to contracts entered into from that date. It works in bands, and the smaller the payout the larger the percentage.

Courmacs Legal Ltd publishes a tiered success fee on its own frequently asked questions page that follows those bands, with VAT added on top. Its worked example is £1,000 of compensation producing a fee of £300 plus £60 of VAT, so £360 in total. The firm states that it is authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority under registration number 819044.

Sentinel Legal states that it is authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority under number 811792. Neither its car finance claims page nor its homepage stated a fee percentage when we checked them on 20 August 2026, so there is no published figure to put in the table. Numbers circulating for it on other websites are not on the firm's own pages, so we have left them out.

The FCA has been blunt about the choice. It says you do not need a law firm or a claims management company to take part in the scheme, that such firms may charge over 30 per cent of any compensation, and that fees can reach up to 36 per cent once VAT is included. It also warns about signing up twice: appointing a second firm can leave you paying to get out of the first agreement, or paying two success fees out of the same money.

The point that decides it is this. The lender does the calculation under rules the FCA wrote, and the figure does not change according to who sent the complaint. A firm cannot get you more. It can only take a share of what was coming anyway. We have written up the same arithmetic for flights in what claims companies charge, where the fees are larger and the case for paying one is occasionally real.

The calls and texts to ignore

Car finance is the most heavily targeted compensation story in the UK right now, and the fraud has followed the headlines. The FCA has warned about callers impersonating car finance lenders, telling people they are owed compensation, in some reports as much as £16,000, and asking for name, address, date of birth and bank details. Its advice is direct: if you receive a call like this, hang up immediately and do not share any information.

That warning page was last updated in December 2025 and describes the state of the scheme as it stood then, so read its account of the scheme alongside the dates at the top of this page. Its account of how the scams work still stands.

• Nobody is paying redress at the moment, so an unsolicited call or text offering you a car finance payout is not what it says it is
• You should never pay a fee to access compensation, and never share a PIN or online banking details with anyone who contacts you about it
• Forward scam texts to 7726, free, which reports them to Ofcom
• Adverts are not advice. The FCA has banned adverts from a claims firm that used edited, unauthorised clips of Martin Lewis to make misleading claims about compensation
• Go to the lender yourself using the FCA list rather than through anyone who found you first

How Untap helps

Untap does not look at your agreements, and it does not search anyone's records for you. What our one-off wizard does is ask a few questions about when your finance ran and what you have already done, then tell you whether you are in scope and what the next step is. The complaint stays yours to send, free, and we never take a percentage of anything you get back.

Sources

• FCA, Motor finance scheme partially suspended, 2 July 2026
• FCA, Car finance complaints, last updated 18 August 2026
• FCA, PS26/3, the motor finance consumer redress scheme, 30 March 2026
• FCA, Claims management companies fees cap, 1 March 2022
• FCA, Beware car finance scam calls, updated 3 December 2025

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