Your CBILS or RLS loan is maturing. What now?
The Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme closed to new applications on 31 March 2021, and its term loans ran to a maximum of six years. That single pair of facts fixes the calendar: every CBILS term loan still outstanding matures by early 2027, and most of the book matures across 2026. The Recovery Loan Scheme cohort follows a year or two behind. If your company still carries a facility written under one of the 2020–22 schemes, the decision about what replaces it is not a form-filling exercise at the end of the term. It is a refinancing, with real choices about price, security and personal exposure, and the choices are wider the earlier you make them. This guide sets out what the scheme wrapper actually does, the four options at maturity, and how the decision fits into the rest of your debt.
Written for the borrower’s side of the table. This is general guidance, not advice on your specific facility. It deepens the shorter answers in our working guide.
The arithmetic was fixed the day you signed.
CBILS facilities were written between spring 2020 and the scheme’s close on 31 March 2021, on terms of up to six years for term loans and asset finance and up to three years for overdrafts and invoice finance. Gov.uk, CBILS guidance. A loan drawn in mid-2020 on the full six-year term matures in mid-2026; the last loans written before the close mature by March 2027; anything signed on a shorter term has matured already. There is no discretion in this. The maturities were set at signing, and 2026 is the year the bulk of them arrive.
The Recovery Loan Scheme runs the same arithmetic a step later. It launched on 6 April 2021 with facilities of up to £10m, was renewed in stages, and its final iteration closed at the end of June 2024, again on terms of up to six years. Gov.uk, Recovery Loan Scheme. The heavily-used first two iterations were written in 2021 and the first half of 2022, so RLS maturities concentrate in 2027 and 2028, with the later, smaller facilities running further out. Scheme debt is one of the vintages behind the wider 2026–28 refinancing wall: the charge register shows lending papered in 2020 and 2021 now ageing into its refinancing window alongside everything written since, which is why the queue at lenders’ doors is long precisely when your maturity lands. The full count is in our standing reference on the UK refinancing wall, 2026–2028.
One implication is worth drawing out before the options. A scheme loan that matures quietly in eight months is still a maturity, and everything our timing guide says about runway applies to it: the nearer the date, the fewer the options and the weaker the hand. The difference with scheme debt is that many borrowers stopped thinking about it in 2021, because it amortised gently in the background while the government paid the first year’s interest. The clock did not stop with the attention.
The guarantee protects the lender. You owe all of it.
The most persistent misunderstanding about Covid-era scheme debt is who the government guarantee protects. It sits between the government and the lender, not between the government and you. Under CBILS the government guaranteed 80% of the facility to the lender; under RLS 80%, reduced to 70% for facilities offered from 1 January 2022; under the Bounce Back scheme 100%. In every case the borrower remains fully liable for the whole debt. Gov.uk states it without qualification: the guarantee covers 80% of the finance to the lender, and “you’ll be responsible for repaying 100% of the amount borrowed”. Gov.uk, CBILS guidance. The wrapper made the lender comfortable writing the loan in 2020. It never reduced what you owe.
What the wrapper did change, materially, is personal exposure. CBILS barred personal guarantees entirely on facilities below £250,000. Above that line a lender could take one at its discretion, but recoveries under it were capped at 20% of the outstanding balance after business assets had been applied, and a principal private residence could not be taken as security. British Business Bank, CBILS FAQs. RLS allowed personal guarantees at the lender’s discretion at any size, but kept the home off the table. Gov.uk, Recovery Loan Scheme. Bounce Back Loans carried no personal guarantee at all. Gov.uk, Bounce Back Loans fact sheet. Those protections belong to the facility, not to you. They exist because the scheme rules required them, and they last exactly as long as the facility does.
Hold both halves of that picture when you weigh the options below. The guarantee never sheltered you from the debt, so there is nothing to lose on liability by refinancing. But the scheme’s security rules did shelter you, and directors who signed nothing personal in 2020 can find a guarantee on the table in 2026 without understanding why. That is the trade at the heart of this decision, and it deserves to be made deliberately rather than discovered in the documents.
Four options, and the right one depends on the rest of your debt.
The first option is the simplest: repay from cash and close the facility. For a residual scheme balance that has amortised down to a small figure, this is often the clean answer — it clears a registered charge, simplifies the next refinancing, and ends the amortisation drag on monthly cash. The discipline is to check what the cash would otherwise do. A Bounce Back Loan is the extreme case: it can be repaid early, in full or in part, at any time without an early repayment fee, but it carries a fixed rate of 2.5%, which is cheaper than any commercial money a business can raise in 2026. Gov.uk, Bounce Back Loans fact sheet. Paying off 2.5% fixed money early while borrowing elsewhere at three times that rate is sentiment, not finance. The usual honest reasons to clear one anyway are to tidy the register before a wider refinancing or a sale, not to save interest.
The second option is to refinance with the incumbent on commercial terms. This is the default path, the one the lender will propose, and often a perfectly good outcome — the relationship exists, the diligence is light, and the process is short. Its weakness is the same as any single-lender negotiation: without an alternative in the room, the pricing and the security package reflect the lender’s book, not the market. The third option is to take the maturity to the wider market as a proper refinancing, alone or folded into a larger facility. For a scheme loan that is your only material debt, a full process may be more machinery than the balance justifies; for a scheme loan sitting alongside other facilities, it is usually the strongest move, and section six takes it up in full.
The fourth option is the scheme routes that remain open. For Bounce Back Loans, Pay As You Grow lets a borrower extend the term from six years to ten at the same 2.5% fixed rate, take an interest-only period of six months up to three times over the life of the loan, or take a single six-month repayment holiday — options usable individually or in combination, at the cost of more total interest. British Business Bank, Pay As You Grow. For CBILS and RLS facilities there is no equivalent borrower-elected extension — a change of term is a negotiation with the lender under the scheme’s rules — but there is a successor scheme that can, in certain circumstances, refinance them, which is section five’s subject. What no option changes is the liability: all four routes carry the same 100% obligation you have had since 2020.
Outside the scheme, everything is negotiable again — both ways.
Refinance a scheme facility into an ordinary commercial loan and the guarantee falls away with it. The new lender carries 100% of the credit risk rather than 20% or 30%, and it prices and structures accordingly. That does not automatically mean dearer money — a business that has traded through five years since the scheme loan was written, deleveraged and rebuilt its margins may well be a better credit in 2026 than the guarantee ever made it in 2020, and competitive tension can price that strength in. It means the outcome is no longer set by scheme rules. Margin, fees, amortisation profile, covenants and security are all open again, and they will settle wherever your negotiating position puts them.
The sharpest change is personal. The scheme protections described in section three — no personal guarantee below £250,000 under CBILS, the 20% cap on recoveries above it, the principal private residence kept off the table under every scheme — were conditions of the guarantee, and a commercial refinancing carries none of them. A director who borrowed £200,000 under CBILS with no personal exposure at all can be asked for a full, uncapped guarantee on the facility that replaces it. Asked is the operative word: a personal guarantee on a commercial loan is a negotiated term like any other, and whether it is sought at all varies widely by lender, structure and the strength of the corporate security. But it is back in the negotiation, and a borrower who does not realise that until the term sheet arrives has given up the chance to shape it — to cap it, to time-limit it, to offer corporate security instead, or to take the terms to a lender who does not require one. What a guarantee commits you to, and what is negotiable before signature, is covered in full in our guide on personal guarantees on business borrowing.
The balanced way to see the wrapper, then: it is neither a subsidy you are losing nor a cage you are escaping. The guarantee’s pricing effect on your existing loan is already history — the Business Interruption Payment covered the first year’s interest and fees, and the years since have been paid at the contractual rate. What leaving actually costs is the scheme’s security discipline; what it buys is a facility shaped around the business you are now rather than the emergency you were. Whether that trade lands well or badly is mostly decided by how the refinancing is run.
A scheme successor exists, and it can refinance scheme debt.
The Growth Guarantee Scheme is the current successor to CBILS and RLS. It launched with accredited lenders on 1 July 2024, supports term loans, overdrafts, asset finance, invoice finance and asset-based lending, generally up to £2m per business group, and gives the lender a 70% government-backed guarantee. Term loans and asset finance run up to six years, overdrafts and invoice finance up to three. Following the 2025 Spending Review it has been extended to 31 March 2030. British Business Bank, Growth Guarantee Scheme. As with its predecessors, the guarantee protects the lender and the borrower remains 100% liable; personal guarantees can be taken at the lender’s discretion in line with its normal practice, though a principal private residence still cannot be taken as security within the scheme.
The fact that matters for this guide: a GGS facility can, in certain circumstances, be used to refinance existing debt — the British Business Bank’s example is a business seeking to put itself on a more stable financial footing or to improve its working capital position — provided the business meets the scheme’s eligibility criteria, and with or without an increase in the original borrowing. British Business Bank, GGS FAQs. In practice that means a maturing CBILS or RLS facility can be replaced by a new GGS facility with an accredited lender, treated as a new application against the lender’s ordinary credit criteria. The guarantee can make a lender comfortable with a term or a credit it would otherwise decline, which is exactly what it is for.
Its limits are equally concrete for a £3–15m borrower. The £2m ceiling means GGS can rarely be the whole answer at this end of the market — it is a component, a tranche that helps a structure clear, not a structure. It is lender-elected as much as borrower-elected: the lender decides whether to run a deal through the scheme, pays the scheme’s fee, and prices the facility itself, so a GGS loan is not automatically cheap money. And eligibility is genuinely tested — turnover caps, viability and subsidy-allowance rules all apply. The sensible use is to put it on the table as one of several structures when the numbers fit, priced against the commercial alternatives rather than assumed to beat them. Where a lender will offer the same money on similar terms without the wrapper, the comparison, not the scheme badge, should decide.
Refinance the balance sheet, not the loan.
For most companies in the £3–15m range, the scheme loan is not the debt stack — it is a slice of it, sitting beside a bank term loan, an asset-finance line, perhaps an invoice-discounting facility, each with its own charge on the register and its own maturity. Handled one at a time, each renewal is a small, weak negotiation: the balance is too small to attract competition, the incumbent holds the security, and the path of least resistance wins by default. Handled together, the same balances become a single refinancing of real size — and size is what buys attention, competitive tension and better terms in a market where lender bandwidth is the scarce resource.
A scheme maturity is often the natural trigger for exactly that consolidation. The facility has to be dealt with anyway; dealing with it alone renews a fragmented stack for another cycle, while dealing with it as part of the whole lets one facility replace several, one security package replace a layer of accumulated charges, and one covenant schedule replace the patchwork. The cleanup has value beyond price: satisfied charges come off the Companies House file, the next diligence process gets shorter, and the business presents as one deliberate structure rather than an archaeology of past borrowings. The reverse case deserves equal honesty — a cheap, amortising scheme balance with two years to run and a 2.5% Bounce Back Loan behind it may be worth leaving exactly where they are, carved out of the new facility’s security rather than swept into it at triple the coupon. Which balances to fold in and which to leave is a deal-by-deal judgment, and it is precisely the judgment a whole-book process is designed to surface.
How the wider market weighs a stretched structure, and what a competitive process changes, is covered in unitranche vs bank senior debt — though for most scheme-era borrowers the relevant spectrum is banks, challengers and asset-based lenders rather than fund debt. The point that carries over is the method: identical asks, parallel lenders, all-in cost to exit, whoever ends up cheapest.
For a 2026 scheme maturity, the runway rule says now.
The timing logic for scheme debt is the same as for any maturity, and it is set out in full in our guide on when to start a refinancing: begin twelve to eighteen months before the facility matures, because a properly run process takes twelve to sixteen weeks and the months before it are what buy competitive tension, structural options and the ability to walk away. Apply that rule to the scheme calendar and the conclusion is immediate. A CBILS loan maturing in late 2026 or early 2027 is inside the window today. An RLS facility maturing in 2027 is entering it. Waiting for the lender’s renewal letter is choosing the weakest version of option two by default.
Scheme debt adds one aggravating factor to the standard logic: the crowd. Because the schemes wrote a whole market’s worth of loans in two concentrated bursts, the maturities arrive in bursts too, onto the same credit desks that are clearing the wider 2026–28 wall. In a queue that long, the borrower who arrives early and prepared — with current numbers, a clear ask and a process that invites comparison — gets the attention and the pricing; the borrower who arrives six weeks out gets triage. The preparation is not elaborate for a facility this size. It is a current view of the whole debt stack and its charges, a decision about which of the four options fits, and enough runway to make that decision mean something.
Bring us the whole stack, not just the scheme loan.
If a CBILS or RLS facility on your book matures inside the next eighteen months, the first conversation is where we tell you plainly which of the four options fits — including where the honest answer is that repaying it and renewing with your incumbent is the right move and a process would be machinery for its own sake. It is confidential, without obligation, and more useful the earlier it happens. See how a mandate runs in how we work, or the full range of what we advise on in our services.