The multiplier is fixed and the reliefs are set by statute. What is not fixed is the rateable value underneath it — the floor areas, the description, the zoning, the plant that should never have been in the assessment — and whether you are claiming everything you are entitled to. Rateable values rose 19.6% at the April 2026 revaluation. If the survey was wrong before, it is now wrong by more.
Five of them now, where there used to be two. Pence in the pound of rateable value.
Add 1p for 2026/27 if you are not receiving transitional relief. The 40% retail, hospitality and leisure relief was abolished on 31 March 2026 and replaced by the lower multipliers above — if your accountant has budgeted for it this year, that is a problem worth finding now.
On 29 July 2026 the Court of Appeal decided City of London v 48th Street Holdings. It held that short-term occupation carried out solely to reset the empty rates period is not rateable occupation at all, because it has no use, value or benefit independent of the rating scheme itself. It expressly overruled the 2018 decision that the whole box-shifting industry was built on.
If you have been sold a scheme involving boxes, Bluetooth transmitters, snail farming, property guardians or a lease to a company that is then liquidated — it does not work. Most of those were already dead: Hurstwood in 2021 for the special purpose vehicles, Ludgate House in 2020 for guardians, Public Safety Charitable Trust in 2013 for the charity shells. The judgment also says nothing about past periods, so if you ran these cycles before July there is a real question about retrospective recovery. Ask us about that before your council does.
Put in the rateable value from your bill and this works out the liability using the 2026/27 multipliers, then screens every relief and challenge route against your situation. It is deliberately honest about which ones are entitlements you can claim yourself for nothing. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no form in front of it.
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There are only really three kinds of saving: reliefs you are entitled to and are not claiming, a rateable value that is simply wrong, and a property that legally should not be assessed as it is. Everything else on the market is either one of these dressed up, or something a court has already killed.
The dullest route and the most reliable one. Floor areas measured wrong, a mezzanine counted twice, the wrong zone applied to a shop frontage, an outbuilding that was demolished in 2019, the wrong use description. The VOA valued around two million properties for the 2026 list, largely from records. Get the valuation summary — it is free — and read it against the actual building.
Only the classes prescribed by the 2000 regulations are rateable. Tenant’s trade equipment, redundant process plant and non-prescribed items should not be in the assessment at all — and on plant-heavy industrial property they frequently are, because nobody has walked the site since the equipment was decommissioned.
The biggest single lever on a development. In Newbigin v Monk the Supreme Court reduced an office from £102,000 to £1 because it was genuinely being reconstructed — the reality of the building beats the assumption that it is in repair. Still good law, and the Upper Tribunal later confirmed you do not need a signed contract or an end date. You do need real, substantial works and the evidence of them.
Small business rate relief, the new 15% pubs and live music venues relief introduced in January 2026, charitable relief, rural relief, improvement relief on works completed since April 2024. Several are not automatic. The pubs relief in particular is new enough that a lot of eligible operators have never heard of it, and it has no cash cap and no rateable value limit.
Where parts of a building are genuinely in separate occupation they may be separate hereditaments. Where part is genuinely unused for a period, section 44A part-occupation relief apportions the value — but it is discretionary, the council will normally inspect, and it cannot be applied for retrospectively, so it is worth knowing about before rather than after.
Three months rate free, six for qualifying industrial and warehouse. Then indefinite exemption for listed buildings, for property in genuine insolvency, where occupation is prohibited by law, and below a rateable value threshold. These are entitlements rather than schemes, and they are the only part of the empty rates picture that has not been litigated to death.
You asked about loopholes, so here they are, with the case that closed each one. We are listing them because they are still being sold, and because if you bought one you may have a problem rather than a saving.
Short-term occupation to reset the empty period. City of London v 48th Street Holdings held that occupation with no purpose beyond rate saving is not occupation at all, and overruled the 2018 case the industry relied on. The 13-week reset is not a safe harbour — the reasoning is about the character of the occupation, not its length.
Hurstwood v Rossendale in the Supreme Court. The court did not pierce the corporate veil — it read the statute purposively instead, holding that the person entitled to possession is whoever has the real practical ability to control occupation. Which is still you.
Public Safety Charitable Trust. Putting a token charitable presence into an empty unit does not attract the 80% relief, because the property must be wholly or mainly used for charitable purposes. A genuine charity genuinely using the space still qualifies. A transmitter in a cupboard does not.
Southwark v Ludgate House. Thirty-two guardians in a 173,000 square foot office block did not displace the owner’s rateable occupation, because the owner retained control over where they went. To make it work you would have to give up that control, and risk creating tenancies instead.
Fabricated agricultural use to claim the agricultural exemption. Treated as a sham in Isle Investments v Leeds, where leases restricted use to heliciculture in ordinary offices and the judge found a dishonest approach had been formulated. This one has been investigated as fraud.
Still available for genuine physical changes to the property or the locality. But section 14 of the Non-Domestic Rating Act 2023 removed changes in legislation, licensing regimes and public body guidance as grounds. A lot of advisers have not caught up with this and are still pitching it.
The commonest rip-off is being charged for a relief you would have got anyway. A percentage of your small business rate relief, when the council applies it automatically once you have claimed once. A fee for “securing” a discount that is an entitlement on the face of your bill. We do not charge on anything that was already yours or that the council applies without being asked — our fee is on the reduction we actually obtain, and if the answer is that you should ring the council yourself and claim it, that is what we will tell you. It takes ten minutes and it costs nothing.
And be careful who you sign with. The VOA has publicly warned about firms making false claims about what they can achieve, and the sector has a long tail of agents who take an upfront fee, tie you into multi-year auto-renewing contracts, or lodge speculative challenges that go nowhere. Ask any agent three questions: is the fee only on savings actually received, is there any tie-in beyond this instruction, and are you RICS or IRRV regulated. We are happy to answer all three in writing before you commit to anything.
The percentage is on the reduction we actually obtain, once it reaches your account. Not on reliefs the council applies automatically, not on anything that was already yours, and not on a projection.
We do not sell mitigation schemes. Box shifting was closed by the Court of Appeal on 29 July 2026, shell company leases by the Supreme Court in 2021, property guardians in 2020 and charity shell occupation in 2013. If you have been offered one of these, the honest advice is to ask what happens when the council looks at it — and if you already bought one, ask us about the retrospective exposure. Rating is a regulated profession and we will tell you where our limits are. Formal valuation evidence for a tribunal is work for a RICS registered valuer, and where a matter needs one we will say so rather than stretching. Figures stated as at August 2026. Multipliers change every April, reliefs change more often, and this area moved twice in the fourteen months before we wrote this page. Check the date before you rely on anything here.
The rateable value, what the property is and roughly what you are paying. We will tell you whether there is anything worth pursuing, what we think it is worth, and where you can simply claim it yourself for nothing — which is the answer more often than the industry admits.
Four questions. We come back with whether there is anything in it, what we think it is worth and how we would charge — including telling you to claim it yourself where that is the answer.
If you have several, tell us about the biggest one and we will look at the rest.
Choose as many as apply.
Rateable value and roughly what you are paying is plenty at this stage.
If there is nothing worth doing we will say so, and it will not have cost you anything. We will also tell you where the saving is something you can claim yourself in ten minutes.
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What the law will cost you over a ten-year hold, before you commit to buying.
Ten-year capex forecaster with the yield impactfrom £450 →Benchmark the block line by line, retender the contracts, and use the costs that are simply not payable.
Service charge benchmarker with the legal leversfrom £1,750 →A costed, sequenced route to the 2030 standard against the £10,000 cap — then the works run.
Retrofit pathway planner, domestic and commercialfrom £250 →Two things at once, pulling in opposite directions. The 2026 revaluation took effect on 1 April 2026, based on rental values as at 1 April 2024, and it put rateable values up by 19.6% across England — industrial worst hit at around 21%, offices around 14.5%, retail around 9.8%. Against that, the multipliers came down sharply: the small business multiplier fell 6.7p to 43.2p and the standard fell 7.5p to 48.0p, with new lower multipliers of 38.2p and 43.0p for retail, hospitality and leisure. Whether you are better or worse off depends on whether your rateable value rose by more or less than the multiplier fell. The other thing that changed is that the 40% retail, hospitality and leisure relief ended on 31 March 2026 and was not renewed — it was replaced by the lower multipliers. If your budget assumed it was still there, that is where a chunk of the jump has come from.
The ones that get marketed, yes, and the most recent one died eleven days before we wrote this. On 29 July 2026 the Court of Appeal decided City of London v 48th Street Holdings, holding that short-term occupation carried out solely to reset the empty rates period is not rateable occupation at all — because it has no use, value or benefit independent of the rating scheme. It expressly overruled the 2018 decision the box-shifting industry was built on. Before that: Hurstwood in the Supreme Court in 2021 killed the shell company leases, not by piercing the corporate veil but by reading the statute purposively, so that whoever really controls occupation remains the owner. Ludgate House in 2020 killed property guardians. Public Safety Charitable Trust in 2013 killed charity shell occupation. And note that the 13-week reset period is not a safe harbour, because the reasoning is about the character of the occupation rather than its length.
Possibly, and it is worth finding out on your own timetable rather than the council’s. The Court of Appeal judgment says nothing about periods that have already passed, which leaves a genuine open question about whether billing authorities can go back and recover rates for cycles already run. Councils have every incentive to try — the City of London alone put its losses from this at around £3.5m a year. What we would do is establish what was actually done, over what periods, under what contractual structure, and whether the occupation had any independent purpose at all, because Makro and one later case survived on the basis that the storage there was genuinely necessary. That is a factual assessment rather than a scheme, and it is better done before a demand arrives than after.
Three things, and they are unglamorous. First, the valuation itself is often wrong — the VOA assessed around two million properties for the 2026 list largely from records, and floor areas, zoning, descriptions and demolished outbuildings all get carried forward for years. Second, reliefs go unclaimed: small business rate relief, the new 15% pubs and live music venues relief introduced in January 2026 with no cash cap and no rateable value limit, improvement relief on works since April 2024, charitable and rural relief. Third, on a development, Newbigin v Monk remains good law — a building genuinely undergoing reconstruction is valued as exactly that, and the Supreme Court took one from £102,000 to £1. None of these is a loophole. They are the rules working properly, which is why they survive.
We charge 25% of the reduction we actually obtain, payable once the saving is credited to your account, plus an optional fixed-fee desktop review at £395 if you would rather pay for the analysis and act on it yourself. The catch to watch for elsewhere is being billed a percentage of a relief you would have received anyway — small business rate relief that the council applies automatically once you have claimed it once is the classic. We do not charge on anything that was already yours or that the council applies without being asked, and where the answer is that you should ring the council and claim it, that is what we will tell you. The VOA has publicly warned about firms making false claims about what they can achieve. Ask any agent whether the fee is only on savings actually received, whether there is a tie-in beyond the instruction, and whether they are RICS or IRRV regulated. We will answer all three in writing.
Only if there is a reason, and “it went up” is not one. A challenge has to be based on the valuation being wrong — a factual error in the survey, the wrong basis of valuation, or rental evidence that does not support the figure at the April 2024 valuation date. Speculative challenges waste your time and ours, and the Check and Challenge process is slow enough that a weak one ties up capacity that could go on a good one. What we would do first is pull the detailed valuation summary from the VOA, which is free and which most ratepayers have never looked at, and read it against the actual building. If the areas, zones, description and plant all check out and the rental evidence stacks up, we will tell you there is nothing here. That happens often.
Talk to us before the works start, not after. The reconstruction argument under Newbigin v Monk is the single largest saving available on a development project, but it is evidence-led and the VOA contests it hard: you need to show the building is genuinely incapable of beneficial occupation, with planning consents, contracts, invoices and dated photographs of the strip-out. The Upper Tribunal later confirmed you do not need a signed contract or a fixed end date, which helps. What does not work is calling a vacancy a refurbishment, or stripping out services purely to get the assessment deleted with no development in mind — that is contested, carries planning, listed building and insurance exposure of its own, and courts now have a purposive approach available to them that they did not have five years ago. The saving is real. It has to be a real refurbishment.
Yes, and it is where the arithmetic works best, because the fixed cost of understanding your estate is spread across every property in it. On a portfolio we would start with a desk review of every assessment against the 2026 list at £95 per property, which flags the ones worth looking at properly, and then work the exceptions. That approach usually finds more than a property-by-property instruction does, because the errors cluster — the same measuring convention applied wrongly across a group of units, or a relief claimed at one site and not the identical one next door. It also produces something your finance team can budget from, which on a portfolio is often worth more than the saving itself.
The VOA publishes the detailed valuation summary for every property — the areas, the zones, the adjustments, the plant. Sign in, download yours, and walk round the building with it. Half the savings on this page are found by somebody noticing that a floor was measured twice or a building that was knocked down is still in the assessment. If you would rather we did it, that is what we are for.
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