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Half a million homeowners with tracker mortgages will have to wait nearly a year to benefit from the fall in the base rate.

Around 500,000 Barclays customers on tracker deals will have to wait until next October to benefit from the Bank of England's 2 point fall in interest rates in the past six weeks. Barclays is the only major lender to still review the repayments of new and existing customers on tracker mortgages on an annual basis.

Tracker mortgage rates are pegged to the base rate and most lenders vow to pass on cuts in the base rate to borrowers automatically the following month.

Tracker deals have been popular amongst homeowners in recent months as homeowners believe that their monthly repayments will fall as the Bank of England cuts interest rates. It is predicted that the base rate could fall to 1 per cent next year, benefiting 4.2 million borrowers, but Barclays customers on capital repayment deals have been told they will have to wait.

For these customers, Barclays' mortgage year begins on October 1, when homeowners have their monthly repayments fixed for the next 12 months.

A homeowner with a £150,000 mortgage would have saved £200 a month on their mortgage repayments if Barclays had passed on the cuts automatically.

Louise Cuming, of Moneysupermarket.com, a comparison website, said: “Borrowers are losing out because they are not getting the benefit straight away and instead will have to wait for it. This is very confusing for customers and I bet Barclays has been inundated with phone calls in recent days.”

Barclays' borrowers can benefit from the reductions before next October but only if they call and ask the lender to recalculate their mortgage repayments. However , if there is another cut, borrowers would have to ask Barclays to recalculate their repayments again.

In the past, other lenders, including Halifax, have operated similar annual review schemes. Few lenders include the condition in new mortgage deals but experts believe that hundreds of thousands of homeowners on older tracker deals with other lenders who could also be subject to an annual adjustment in their repayments.

Borrowers have been advised to check with their lender and to opt out of the scheme if they can.

Ray Boulger, of John Charcol, the broker, said: “New customers will not have thought about what this default condition means when they first took their mortgage deal and there will be borrowers who will be surprised to learn that their mortgage payments will not be falling until next year. People should be given the option at the beginning of the mortgage”.