Chief Executive, Paul Thwaite, commented:
“NatWest Group’s strong performance in the first half of the year shows that our strategy is consistently delivering for customers and shareholders. We are growing all three of our customer businesses, becoming even more efficient and delivering market leading returns, with a Return on Tangible Equity of 19.7%.
Our performance is grounded in the support we provide to more than 20 million customers throughout the UK, helping them to plan, save and invest, to get on the housing ladder and to scale and grow their businesses. As a result, deposits, lending and assets under management all continued to grow over the past six months.
We are confident in the scale and capabilities we’re building and the opportunities ahead. Through our long-standing relationships, deep regional presence, and responsible adoption of AI, we are well placed to accelerate our progress by doing even more to meet our customers’ needs, as well as helping to generate growth in every nation and region of the UK.
The consistency of our performance, coupled with the completion of our Evelyn Partners acquisition, has given us the confidence to strengthen our guidance for 2026, whilst our continued capital generation means we have today announced an interim dividend of 12.0p per share and that we will consider share-buybacks from full year 2026, six months earlier than previously planned.”
Strong financial performance
We delivered a strong financial performance in H1 2026, with attributable profit of £3.0 billion and Return on Tangible Equity (RoTE) of 19.7%. Capital generation pre-distributions was 137 basis points, before the impact of the acquisition of Evelyn Partners, and earnings per share was 38.1 pence, up 23.3% on prior year.
Strong growth as we deepen customer relationships
We are progressing well against our strategic priorities, expanding capabilities to meet more of our customers’ needs. We have three growing customer businesses, delivering strong returns, underpinned by trusted customer relationships and a proven track record of customer assets and liabilities (CAL) expansion.
- CAL increased by £95.2 billion, or 10.7%, in H1 2026 including £71.7 billion of assets under management and administration (AUMA) balances relating to the acquisition of Evelyn Partners and £23.5 billion, or 2.6%, of growth in our existing business.
- In Retail Banking we are growing our share in savings and investments and have supported customers with 20% more Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) opened, and 32% more customers now invest with us than in H1 2025. We delivered £8.2 billion of mortgage lending to First Time Buyers and continue to broaden our mortgage proposition through partnerships with Rightmove and Landbay.
- In Private Banking & Wealth Management our focus on deepening customer relationships delivered record AUM net inflows of £2.0 billion, equivalent to 9.2% of opening balances on an annualised basis. These inflows were supported by over 45,000 customers across the Group investing with us for the first time, up more than 60% compared with H1 2025.
- In Commercial & Institutional we continued to support long-term economic growth and maintained our leading position in UK infrastructure and project finance. We provided over £1.9 billion to the social housing sector(1) in H1 2026, keeping us on track to meet our £10 billion ambition by the end of 2028. We continue to be one of the leading banks for UK start-ups, helping 1 in 5 new businesses get started. We are strengthening the UK innovation ecosystem by expanding our Accelerator network, opening new university hubs in Brighton and York, and increasing our Venture Banking customers.
We continue to leverage simplification to drive efficiency
We continue to simplify the bank and improve productivity, delivering a 2.8 percentage point improvement in our cost:income ratio (excl. litigation and conduct) to 46.0% compared with prior year, driven by around £250 million in gross cost reductions in H1 2026.
This has been driven by ongoing structural simplification and sustained investment in our technology platforms to improve productivity and deliver simpler, faster and better customer experiences. We’re continuing to improve operational leverage, with
7.1 million conversations handled by our digital assistant Cora in H1 2026, of which
3.8 million were fulfilled entirely digitally, up by 23% compared with H1 2025. We also expanded AI-enabled capabilities across Commercial & Institutional onboarding, operations and customer servicing and our first customer-facing generative AI capability launched in Bankline.
Active balance sheet management to drive strong capital generation
We continued to actively manage risk through dynamic capital allocation and agile pricing, which is demonstrated in our low and stable cost of risk at 19 basis points in H1 2026.
We continue to manage lower returning capital to create capacity for redeployment, delivering £3.9 billion of benefits from RWA management actions. Increased capital
velocity supports capital generation pre-distributions of 137 basis points, before the impact of the acquisition of Evelyn Partners. Our Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) ratio of 13.2% was c.80 basis points lower than Q4 2025, c.140 basis points of which related to the acquisition of Evelyn Partners.
We continue to maintain stable and diversified sources of funding with a strong loan:deposit ratio (excl. repos and reverse repos), up one percentage point in the quarter to 90%, and liquidity position, with an average Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) of 140%.
(1) Social finance and facilitation represents only a relatively small proportion of our overall financing and facilitation activities.
Outlook(1)
Based on our latest expectations for interest rates and economic conditions and including the impact of the Evelyn Partners acquisition,
In 2026 we expect:
- Total income excluding notable items to be around £17.9 billion, including around £275 million relating to Evelyn Partners.
- Operating expenses, excluding litigation and conduct costs, of around £8.5 billion, including around £300 million relating to Evelyn Partners.
- Loan impairment rate below 25 basis points.
- Return on Tangible Equity greater than 19%.
- Capital generation pre-distributions of greater than 240 basis points, excluding the impact of the Evelyn Partners acquisition on 30 June 2026, equivalent to greater than 100 basis points on a reported basis.
In 2028 we continue to expect:
- Customer assets and liabilities to grow at a compound annual rate of greater than 4% from the end of 2025 to end of 2028.
- Cost:income ratio, excluding litigation and conduct costs, below 45%.
- Return on Tangible Equity greater than 18%.
- Capital generation pre-distributions of greater than 200 basis points.
Capital:
- We continue to target a CET1 ratio of around 13.0%.
- We continue to expect to pay ordinary dividends of around 50% of attributable profit and now expect our next share buyback announcement to be with our FY 2026 results.
- We expect Basel 3.1 to increase RWAs by around £10 billion on 1 January 2027.
(1) The guidance, targets, expectations and trends discussed in this section represent NatWest Group plc management’s current expectations and are subject to change, including as a result of the factors described in the NatWest Group plc Risk Factors in the 2025 Annual Report and Accounts and Form 20-F and the Summary Risk Factors in this document. These statements constitute forward-looking statements. Refer to Forward-looking statements in this document.