FCA mortgage adviser fees to rise 67% to £2,500

In a consultation paper, the FCA is proposing ten new fee-paying categories, with fees running from £250 for category one to £200,000 for category ten.

Mortgage advisers would join investment, corporate finance, and general insurance intermediaries in category four, paying a flat fee of £2,500.

In the consultation paper, the FCA said: "Many of our charges have not changed since our predecessor, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), set them nearly 20 years ago."

At that time, the FSA envisaged that application fees would recover 50% to 90% of the costs of processing different permissions, with deposit takers paying the highest share.

The total cost of Authorisations in 2019 was £19.0m and application fees raised revenue of £6.2m, equivalent to 33% of the cost.

The new proposals would have raised the revenue from application fees to £12.8m in 2019, raising the cost recovery rate to 67% and representing an increase in fee rates of 103%.

The FCA said: “We have identified 83 FCA charges for applications. We believe that such a large number of different charges is confusing and may complicate our communication with prospective applicants. As well as revalorising the current fees, we propose to condense them into a simple table of ten pricing categories.

"We believe that the simplified structure of application fees will help to make the costs of authorisation more transparent."