The welcome bonus is small, and it is not cash
Lendermarket credits EUR 10 to new investors and puts it straight to work through Auto Invest. The distinction from a cash bonus matters: you cannot withdraw it on arrival, it becomes part of your invested balance, and it is exposed to the same credit risk as everything else in your portfolio from the moment it lands.
On a EUR 1,000 first investment, EUR 10 is the same headline figure Robocash pays in withdrawable cash and half of what Hive5 pays. It is not the reason anyone opens a Lendermarket account, and the platform does not pretend otherwise - its acquisition budget is aimed almost entirely at referrals.
The referral ladder is where the money is
Lendermarket runs the most generous per-head referral programme in our bonus comparison, tiered by what the invited investor puts to work:
| Friend invests | Referral payment |
|---|---|
| EUR 500+ | EUR 50 |
| EUR 2,500+ | EUR 100 |
| EUR 7,500+ | EUR 300 |
| EUR 10,000+ | EUR 500 |
On top of the tier payment, a 1 per cent cashback on the friend's invested amount over the first 90 days is paid to both sides. Campaigns lift the numbers further - a EUR 75 per friend promotion ran through May 2026, and a deposit campaign earlier that year paid up to 2 per cent on deposits of EUR 3,000 or more.
Set against Crowdpear's flat EUR 20 or Robocash's EUR 10 cap, the difference is an order of magnitude. When a platform is paying EUR 500 to acquire one investor, the sensible question is what that investor is worth to it - and the answer is always the same: enough that the platform needs the funding badly.
How to qualify, step by step
Register - use a referral link if you have one
The EUR 10 welcome credit applies to new accounts automatically. The 1 per cent cashback on your own investment only applies if you registered through someone's referral link, so if a friend or a blogger has offered one, using it costs you nothing and adds roughly EUR 10 on a EUR 1,000 investment.
Complete verification under the Irish ECSP regime
Lendermarket moved its operations under an Irish ECSP licence, so onboarding includes the appropriateness assessment that regime requires - a short questionnaire on your investment knowledge and capacity to bear loss. It is not a formality you can skip.
Deposit and let Auto Invest allocate
The welcome credit is invested automatically rather than paid out, so Auto Invest needs to be configured for it to be deployed sensibly. Set your term and originator preferences before the deposit clears rather than after.
Watch the pending-payments figure, not the bonus
Once invested, the number that matters on your dashboard is how much of your portfolio sits in extended or pending status. Creditstar's repayment extensions show up there first, and it is the metric that should drive whether you add more money - not the referral tier you might reach.
What it is worth on EUR 1,000
EUR 10 as a new investor arriving on your own - the auto-invested welcome credit, nothing else. If you arrive through someone's referral link, the 1 per cent cashback on your own investment over 90 days adds roughly another EUR 10, and your referrer collects EUR 50.
That is the structure worth understanding: the person inviting you is paid five times more than you are. Lendermarket referral links are consequently everywhere - in YouTube descriptions, blog sidebars and comparison tables, ours included in the sense that we list the platform. Nothing about that is improper, but it is the reason Lendermarket appears in more «best P2P platform» lists than its 3.0-star rating would otherwise justify. Read any recommendation of this platform with the referral economics in mind.
No loyalty programme
There is no volume ladder of the kind Crowdpear or Hive5 publish - no Silver, Gold or Platinum tier, no rate uplift for portfolio size. What Lendermarket offers long-term investors is simply its headline yield: 15.6 to 18 per cent advertised, among the highest in Europe. Whether that number arrives is the substance of the review, and it is where the platform's rating comes from.
Conditions worth reading twice
- The EUR 10 is auto-invested, not withdrawable. It carries the same credit risk as the rest of your portfolio from day one.
- Referral tiers are set by the friend's investment, not their deposit, and are assessed within the qualifying window rather than over the lifetime of the account.
- The 1 per cent cashback runs for 90 days from the invited investor's first investment and is paid to both sides.
- Campaign figures expire. The EUR 75 per friend promotion was a May 2026 campaign; the standing ladder is EUR 50 to EUR 500. Check what is live before planning around a number.
- No loyalty programme exists - portfolio size earns you nothing beyond the listed rates.
Is the bonus a reason to invest?
No, and here the answer needs more than the usual caveat. Lendermarket scores 3.0 stars - the lowest-rated platform in this comparison apart from Hive5. It holds an ECSP licence in Ireland, which is a genuine positive, and the loans on it are issued almost entirely by Creditstar group companies.
That concentration is the problem. Creditstar has repeatedly extended repayment terms on loans held by Lendermarket investors - pending payments rolled forward rather than repaid on schedule - which is precisely the pattern that precedes trouble at consumer-lending groups, and precisely what our delivery-track-record check is designed to catch. High advertised yields and a EUR 500 referral bounty are what a platform in that position pays to keep new money coming in.
None of which makes the bonus a trap on its own. It makes it a bonus attached to a platform whose main risk is concentrated in one borrower group. Read the full Lendermarket review before the offer, not after, and see how the payout compares with better-rated platforms on the bonus comparison page.