Maybe a dumb mortgage question about childcare costs

[LizzieMint]

If your childcare costs are totally or mostly covered by childcare vouchers, do you still have to declare it in a mortgage application? Or do they literally want the amount that comes out of your bank account? Do they request nursery invoices for example?

We had to fill in a sheet with all our ourgoings and there was a space for childcare costs. We dont have any but I think it would still need to be declared but provide proof of your childcare viuchers etc alongside? I read alot about rhe tough mortgage interviews, but we filled in the form, sent the documents, had to send a few extra in..but it was fairly pain free we never spoke to anyone other than our broker. They requested 3 month bank statementz so we made sure those 3 months were 'extra tidy!'

We have a big backlog of childcare vouchers from while I was solely looking after the kids at home, now my DD goes 1.5 days a week and while some months the cost is more than the £243 max amount of childcare vouchers, it's always covered by the backlog IYSWIM.
We dont have a mortgage broker and wasn't particularly planning on getting/using one - is there a particular benefit to them? Does it speed up the whole process? We've always gone direct to get previous mortgages. We (in theory!) shouldn't find it hard to get a mortgage, we won't be anywhere near the max we could borrow.

We had to declare the vouchers as they were on DHs payslips. We were asked about nursery fees and they would have wanted invoices if I was back at work.

Interesting, as I'm not at work! Ah well, maybe easiest to put the nursery fees plus the childcare vouchers and not worry about the small discrepancy as it hopefully shouldn't affect the mortgage offer.

sorry to hijack your thread but I have a related question! we claim the cc vouchers t through work and get 124 gross amount. We don't pay the 40% tax so we pay 75 for 124 worth of childcare. Which figure do I have to use?

Gross amount as that's the cash equivalent you can spend on childcare so is the amount forming part of your income.

We had to declare how much salary I sacrifice for CCVs (they will show on your payslips anyway) but we reminded them as part of the application that I save 80 on tax each month because of them.

We have used a broker partly because we were concerned about affordability assesments and partly because I was finding it hard to get anywhere fast with Natwest (2 week wait to see a proper mortgage advisor and our application has been much faster than our buyers has with the same lender), I do think it has been worthwhile. We provided 3 months bank statements (not especially tidy if I'm honest) and 3 months payslips. Our payslips show our salary sacrifice for childcare, pensions and healthcare so fairly obvious. We were never asked for nursery invoices so I guess it depends how honest you want to be about your back log of vouchers, you have to be confident you can afford it and it sounds like you are. We were also asked to explain our direct debits, especially non essentials, and provide a budget.