Bank Statement Loans in Pennsylvania

What bank statement loans Pennsylvania lenders count as income

Three numbers decide everything on one of these files.

Total the eligible deposits into your business account across twelve or twenty-four months. Apply an expense factor, which is the lender’s assumption about how much of that money went back into the business rather than into your pocket. Divide by the number of months reviewed. The result is your income for underwriting purposes, and nothing else about your tax return enters the conversation.

An electrical contractor outside Allentown depositing $44,000 a month at a 45 percent factor qualifies at $24,200. The same deposits at a 30 percent factor qualify at $30,800. One assumption, $6,600 a month of buying power.

That gap is where the work is.

The factor is an assumption, and assumptions can be corrected

Lenders carry a default factor per business type. A consultancy with a laptop and a phone sits low. A paving company buying asphalt and running a crew sits high. The default is a guess made about an industry, not a measurement made of your company, and a borrower who never questions it is accepting someone else’s arithmetic about their own business.

A letter from your CPA stating your real expense ratio will override the default at most lenders, provided it is signed, on letterhead, and specific about the period. A signed profit and loss statement supports it.

This matters more in Pennsylvania than people expect, because so much of the self-employed economy here is trades and contracting, and trades carry the highest default factors in the book. A Lancaster County framer who subcontracts labor and bills materials separately may run a genuine expense ratio half what the lender assumes for construction.

Ask what factor applies before you send anything. It is a question, not a confrontation.

Deposits that get thrown out

One account for the business. One account for you. If your personal and business money share a checking account, an underwriter has to guess at every ambiguous line, and guesses go against you rather than for you. If you are mixed today, open the clean account anyway. Twelve months from now it becomes a twelve-month statement loan with nothing to argue about.

A Lancaster County file, start to finish

A cabinet shop owner, nine years in business, buying at $465,000 with 15 percent down.

• Twenty-four months of business statements, eligible deposits averaging $52,800 a month
• Three transfers from a savings account stripped out, $31,000 total
• An equipment line draw stripped out, $40,000
• Adjusted average: $49,840 a month
• CPA letter putting the real expense ratio at 38 percent against a 50 percent default
• Qualifying income: $30,900 a month

His last two returns showed a combined adjusted gross income that would have supported roughly half that purchase. The returns were accurate. They described his tax position, not his earnings.

Twelve months or twenty-four, and why Pennsylvania weather matters

Both are available nearly everywhere. Twenty-four months is standard and twelve usually prices slightly higher, since the lender is working from half the record.

Seasonality decides this, and Pennsylvania has real seasons. A paving contractor, a roofer, a landscaper or a pool company does the overwhelming majority of its billing between April and October, so a twelve-month window ending in March hands the underwriter two dead winters and one summer, while twenty-four months averages two of each and produces a materially higher number. For a year-round business with a strong recent year, twelve can win.

Add up both windows before you choose. Ten minutes, and it frequently changes the answer.

What actually sinks one of these files

Almost never the income. The declines cluster:

• A falling trend. If your last few months sit well below your first few, some underwriters read a contracting business and decline on that alone, whatever the two year average says. A short letter explaining a lost contract you have since replaced, or a low-margin line you deliberately wound down, does more work than borrowers expect.
• Overdrafts. Non-sufficient funds items read as a business with no cushion. A couple across two years is survivable. A monthly pattern is not.
• An entity that will not verify. Underwriters confirm the business exists and is active. A Pennsylvania LLC that has lapsed with the Department of State, or a registered fictitious name nobody renewed, stalls a file that was otherwise clean.
• Reserves eaten by the transfer tax. This one is specific to here. Non-QM lenders want months of payments still sitting in an account after closing, and a borrower who planned their cash around a down payment alone can clear the down payment and fail the reserve test. In Philadelphia especially, run the reserve number after the transfer tax, not before.

Personal statements, and when they beat business statements

Most lenders will read personal bank statements instead of business ones. The trade is that they typically count only the share of each deposit your ownership percentage justifies, and they often apply a different factor, so a half owner depositing revenue personally can see half of it counted before any expense factor is applied.

Sole owner with a clean business account: use business statements. Messy business account, tidy personal account: run both and compare. I have watched the personal version add thirty percent to a qualifying income and I have watched it cut one in half. It depends entirely on how the money actually moves, which is why guessing is a bad idea and adding it up is a good one.

Pennsylvania’s transfer tax is a buyer cost, and it changes your cash to close

This is the item that surprises people moving here, and it is worth understanding before you set a down payment.

Pennsylvania charges a 1 percent state realty transfer tax. Municipalities and school districts add their own on top, commonly another 1 percent, so most of the state runs about 2 percent all in. By custom the buyer and seller split it down the middle, though the agreement of sale can allocate it differently and state law makes both parties jointly and severally liable for the whole amount.

Philadelphia is the outlier, and not by a little. The city adds 3.278 percent to the state’s 1 percent for a combined 4.278 percent. On a $300,000 rowhome that is $12,834 in transfer tax, and a customary split still leaves the buyer finding roughly $6,400 on top of the down payment and ordinary closing costs.

Compare that with North Carolina, where the entire transfer cost is $1 per $500 and the seller pays all of it. A self-employed borrower who budgeted a Pennsylvania purchase using out-of-state intuition can arrive at the table several thousand dollars short, and on a non-QM file where reserves are already part of the approval, that is not a rounding error. Build it into the plan on day one.

No attorney is required here, which cuts both ways

Pennsylvania does not require a lawyer to buy a house. Settlement is normally run by a title and settlement agent the buyer chooses, and plenty of transactions close with no attorney involved at any point.

That makes closings here faster and cheaper than in an attorney state. It also means nobody in the room is paid to look out for you specifically. On a straightforward conventional purchase that is usually fine. On a non-QM file with lender conditions a general settlement agent has not seen before, I would rather work with an agent who has closed bank statement loans, and I keep a list across the Philadelphia, Lehigh Valley and Pittsburgh markets. No arrangement behind it.

One Pennsylvania county has a different loan limit

The 2026 conforming limit for a one unit property is $832,750 across Pennsylvania, with exactly one exception. Pike County sits in the New York metropolitan statistical area and carries a high-cost limit of $1,209,750.

If you are buying in Milford, Matamoros or anywhere else in Pike, you have roughly $377,000 more conforming room than a buyer forty minutes west in Wayne or Monroe County. Almost nobody knows this, including plenty of loan officers. It is the single most useful piece of Pennsylvania trivia in my business, and it occasionally turns a jumbo file back into a conforming one.

Where I work in Pennsylvania

I am licensed across Pennsylvania and originate statewide. The concentrations are Philadelphia and the collar counties of Montgomery, Bucks, Delaware and Chester; the Lehigh Valley at Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton; Pittsburgh and Allegheny County; and then Lancaster, Harrisburg, York, Reading, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Erie and the Pocono counties.

The two big markets price very differently. Philadelphia’s median sale price ran $294,805 in August 2026 and Pittsburgh’s $274,818, both well under the conforming ceiling, which means that for most Pennsylvania self-employed buyers the obstacle has never been loan size. It is the tax return.

If you want the wider view of what is available without tax returns, I keep a Pennsylvania overview at no income verification mortgages in Pennsylvania.

What I need to give you a real number

• Two or three recent business bank statements, enough to show the pattern
• One sentence on what the business does, because that sets the expense factor
• Roughly what you are buying, where, and what you plan to put down

I will come back with a qualifying income and the price range it supports, including the transfer tax in the cash to close so the number is real. No application and no credit pull to get there.

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Questions Pennsylvania business owners ask