Abstract A stock loan is a contract whereby a stockholder uses shares as collateral to borrow money from a bank or financial institution. In Xia and Zhou (2007 Xia, J. and Zhou, X. Y. 2007. Stock loans. Mathematical Finance, 17(2): 307–317. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], Stock loans, Mathematical Finance, 17(2), pp. 307–317), this contract is modelled as a perpetual American option with a time-varying strike and analysed in detail within a risk-neutral framework. In this paper, we extend the valuation of such loans to an incomplete market setting, which takes into account the natural trading restrictions faced by the client. When the maturity of the loan is infinite, we use a time-homogeneous utility maximization problem to obtain an exact formula for the value of the loan fee to be charged by the bank. For loans of finite maturity, we characterize the fee using variational inequality techniques. In both cases, we show analytically how the fee varies with the model parameters and illustrate the results numerically.