Am I eligible for a payday loan?

The requirements are short, and none of them is about your credit score.

What you need

• An Ontario address. Our payday lender licence is issued by Ontario and covers Ontario residents only. If you live in another province you need a lender licensed where you live — the rules, the caps and the borrower protections differ from province to province, and a lender who ignores that is not one you want.
• To be 18 or over. The age of majority in Ontario. There is no upper limit.
• Regular income. Employment income is the usual case, but it is not the only one. What matters is that money arrives on a predictable schedule and lands in your account.
• An active Canadian chequing account in your own name, and one your income is actually deposited into. Not a prepaid card, not someone else’s account.
• A way to reach you — a mobile number and an email address that works, because that is where the agreement and the e-Transfer go.

What we look at after that

Ontario law requires us to assess every application. Nobody is entitled to a payday loan, and no licensed lender can promise you one in advance. All credit welcome — approval is based on your income and banking history.

In practice that means we look at:

• Whether your income is regular, and how much of it actually lands after deductions
• Your recent account history: the pattern of deposits, and whether payments have been bouncing
• What you already owe on other short-term credit
• Whether the repayment we would be asking for fits inside the pay period it falls in

That last point is a legal ceiling as well as good sense. A single payday loan cannot advance you more than 50% of your net pay for the period, so what you take home sets the maximum before anything else is considered.

Things that will stop an application

• You already have a payday loan with us. Ontario prohibits a lender from making a new payday loan to a borrower who still owes on an existing one, and for seven days after it is paid off. There is more in Can I have two payday loans at once?
• The account is not yours. The income has to be paid to the person applying.
• We cannot verify your banking. No verification, no assessment.
• You live outside Ontario. No exceptions on that one; it is the scope of our licence.

What you do not need

You do not need a guarantor, collateral, a home, a fax machine or a stack of paperwork. You do not need a perfect credit file. You do not need to explain what the money is for.

Before you apply

A payday loan is short-term credit for a gap that closes on your next payday. It is expensive — $14 per $100 — and it is a poor fit for an ongoing shortfall, because the repayment lands on the same pay that was already short. If the gap is structural rather than one-off, the honest answer is that something else will serve you better, and we would rather say so now than lend you money that makes next month harder.