Bank statement mortgage questions, answered.

A bank statement mortgage is a home loan underwritten on your bank deposits instead of tax returns. Lenders who offer them typically ask for 12 or 24 consecutive months of statements and calculate a monthly income figure from the deposits. They exist because self-employed borrowers often show low net income on a tax return after deductions, even when their deposits are steady. These loans sit outside the qualified-mortgage rules, so terms vary by lender.

You can, and it costs nothing. The statements are yours, and you can download them from your bank. SoloSteady is for the next part. It adds up every deposit in the period and leaves out transfers between your own accounts, refunds and loan money when they can be identified, so they don't inflate the total. It shows your monthly average with and without flagged deposits, with the totals left out and why, and it points out things that can turn into conditions later, like a month your bank did not return or a deposit over half your monthly average from a payer that appears in no other month. Before you pay, you see the months, deposits and income sources it found. After you pay, your PDFs show the monthly averages and each flagged deposit (up to twelve named), before you send anything. Your lender will still want the statements and will run its own math. This is about knowing your number, and any problems, first.

SoloSteady reads 12 consecutive months of deposits from the checking and savings accounts you connect through Plaid. Transfers, refunds, loan money and peer-to-peer payments are set aside by fixed rules so they do not inflate the total. The remaining deposits are totaled by month and averaged over the period. Every figure in the summary is labeled with its source and date range. The deposit history lists every counted deposit, and the summary states how many deposits were set aside and their total.

The deposits are read through a read-only bank connection rather than a file, so there is nothing in between for anyone to edit. Only deposit accounts are counted, so borrowed money from a credit card or loan account is not read as income. Transfers, refunds and loan proceeds are separated out by fixed rules when they can be identified, and the account holder name your bank reports is matched against your verified ID. A missing month, the deposits that were set aside, any deposit over half your monthly average from a payer that does not appear in any other month, and any month carrying an overdraft fee are all stated on the document, so you see them while you can still explain them rather than after an underwriter does.

Only you. SoloSteady prepares the summary, you download the PDF, and you submit it yourself with your loan application. SoloSteady does not send it to a lender, a broker, or anyone else, and there is no page where a third party can look up your income.

No. This income summary is prepared for you, for your own use. It is not a consumer report, credit report, or tenant screening report, and SoloSteady is not a consumer reporting agency. SoloSteady does not send it to anyone. It is a compilation of your own bank transaction data, not an audited financial statement, and it has not been reviewed by a CPA. Nothing in it is tax advice or a lending decision.

$79, one time. That covers the full 12-month analysis and four documents, each in English and Spanish: the income summary, a deposit history, an income and expense summary, and a document checklist with its sources. There is no subscription and no per-document fee. Your income summary is emailed to you as a PDF attachment as soon as it is ready; that copy is yours to keep and does not expire. All four download from the results page, in the browser you bought in for 24 hours, and after that from any browser with a one-time code sent to the address you paid with, until they are deleted 13 months after purchase. If we fail to deliver your summary, or its figures do not match your bank data and a re-run cannot fix them, write to us within 14 days and we refund the full charge. The full terms are on the refund policy page.

Yes. Gig platform payouts arrive as bank deposits, so they are analyzed the same way as any other deposit. That is structural rather than a special feature: if the money reached your account, it is in the deposits. Workers earning across several platforms at once are covered by the same 12-month analysis, with each payer broken out separately.

You confirm your email, connect your bank, check your ID, review what was found, pay, and download. Confirming your email, connecting your bank, the ID check and the analysis usually take a few minutes. You see the months and income sources before you pay, then download the PDFs.

Raw transaction data and Plaid access tokens are encrypted in transit and at rest, and deleted about 24 hours after you connect. Plaid handles bank credentials directly, so your login never touches SoloSteady's servers. Account numbers and routing numbers never appear in the documents. The deposit history lists each counted deposit (date, amount and your bank's description), and the summary lists any flagged deposits. SoloSteady keeps those counted deposits and monthly spending totals by category for 13 months to produce your documents, then deletes them.

No. SoloSteady does not run credit checks, query credit bureaus, or affect your credit score. It only analyzes the bank transaction data returned by the account you connect through Plaid.

Not today. The summary documents 12 consecutive months. Bank statement programs commonly run on either 12 or 24 months, and lenders that offer both will tell you which one your file is being underwritten on. If yours is a 24-month program, a 12-month summary still describes the most recent year of deposits accurately, but it does not cover the full period your lender is reviewing. If your lender's program reads 24 months, ask them whether a 12-month summary is useful before you buy.

Yes, in one narrow place. Your income is calculated and your deposits are categorized by fixed rules on our own servers, not by AI. Anthropic Claude drafts only the plain-language notes, from derived totals, income-source labels (cut to 128 characters) and the date and amount of up to twelve flagged deposits; never account numbers, routing numbers, balances, withdrawals or your full transaction list. Every figure in the summary is computed by rule, and you can check each one with a calculator.

They are different documents and one does not replace the other. A third-party expense letter is what lowers the expense factor a program applies to your deposits, and published programs put it as low as 10% with one. SoloSteady does not lower anything. It totals your real deposits, applies the published default factors, and shows you the figure and the problems before you file. Some CPAs decline these requests: the AICPA's professional liability program advises members that the safest response to a third-party verification request is no response at all, and the letters that are written are narrow by design. If your CPA will write one, the two documents answer different questions, and this one costs $79.

You can use the same income summary; whether a lender accepts it is the lender's decision. Some lenders publish home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) and closed-end second mortgages for self-employed borrowers that calculate income from bank statements instead of tax returns, including 12-month options. Some of those programs read business account statements only, so check which account yours asks for before you connect one. The summary covers 12 consecutive months of deposits in the account you connect. The expense factors and the document checklist in the package come from first-mortgage underwriting guides, so ask your lender how its program reads deposits. You download the summary and submit it yourself.

Each summary is prepared for one person: the one whose ID is checked, and whose name must match an account holder name the bank reports. If you are the self-employed borrower on a joint application, at least one published underwriting guide we read lets the self-employed borrower document income with bank statements while a co-borrower with a salary uses pay stubs or W-2s. If you are both self-employed, one summary covers only one of you. Your lender decides how each borrower's income is documented, so ask yours.