You did not sign a rent. You signed a total.

Larger than almost any SME expects, and the number that shocks people is the per-square-foot rate rather than the total. Surveying practices publishing their own experience put London office dilapidations at roughly £12 to £18 a square foot for a well-maintained space with no alterations, £15 to £25 for a standard fit-out, and £40 to £65 or more where the space is heavily altered or high specification. On 3,000 square feet that is a schedule somewhere between £45,000 and £195,000. Those are practitioner figures rather than a published dataset and they are London-weighted — regional rates are materially lower and we could not find a reliable regional series. What is not in doubt is the shape: on a ten-year lease the dilapidations bill is frequently a significant fraction of a year’s rent, it arrives when you are least able to absorb it, and it is the one line that never appears in the board paper approving the lease.

Yes, reliably, though we are going to be careful about the number. Practitioners commonly describe settlements landing 40 to 60% below the served schedule, and reported cases support the direction: in Latimer v Carney the Court of Appeal discounted a costed schedule by 60% because the landlord led no valuation evidence, and in Sunlife v Tiger Aspect a £2.17m claim produced an award of about £1.35m. We went looking for an authoritative dataset on average settlement rates and could not find one — the nearest thing was a large consultancy’s published series that is no longer available. So treat 40 to 60% as practitioner experience, not a statistic. The reliable lesson is narrower and more useful: the first number you receive is a negotiating position prepared by the other side’s surveyor, and it should never be paid on receipt.

Section 18(1) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927, and it is the reason dilapidations claims collapse. It provides that damages for breach of a repairing covenant cannot exceed the amount by which the value of the landlord’s reversion has actually been diminished by the disrepair. So the landlord does not automatically recover the cost of the works — they recover the lower of that cost and the real loss in value, and the burden of proving the loss is theirs. The second limb is more powerful still: if the premises were going to be pulled down or so structurally altered that your repairs would be valueless, no damages are recoverable at all. In practice that means the first question on any claim is what the landlord is actually doing with the building next. Planning applications, marketing material and building contracts are all public or discoverable, and a landlord refurbishing anyway has a much weaker claim than their schedule suggests. One caution: this is a defence you have to raise and evidence. A tenant who never commissions a diminution valuation cannot usually rely fully on the cap.

Almost always, and it is the cheapest thing on this page — roughly £500 to £1,500 for small premises, £2,000 to £4,000 for standard offices, more for anything complex. It works by limiting the repair covenant so you need not hand the property back in better repair and condition than the schedule evidences, which removes every pre-existing defect from the claim at the end. Three things make the difference between one that works and one that does not. It must be narrative and photographic — dated, located photographs cross-referenced to a written description of each element. It must be agreed by both parties, not filed unilaterally. And it must be annexed to and expressly referenced in the lease, with wording covering repair and condition, not repair alone. A schedule sitting in your solicitor’s file is worth nothing. We should also say plainly that no published study quantifies the saving, so anyone telling you it returns a specific multiple of its cost is guessing.

More than you could a year ago. Office service charges rose 9% in a single year after 15% the year before, shopping centres 11% and retail parks 14% — so this is not your building being unusual. Start with the benchmark: the median London office service charge is about £13.83 a square foot and the upper quartile £17.11, against £8.86 outside London. If you are materially above that, ask why. Then use the second edition of the RICS service charge standard, which took effect for service charge periods starting on or after 31 December 2025 and makes several things mandatory: budgets at least a month before the year starts, year-end accounts within four months of the year end, an apportionment matrix showing how your share was calculated, service charge and sinking fund money held in discrete accounts with interest credited, and recovery of no more than 100% of actual costs. Percentage-of-spend management fees are no longer considered appropriate and apportionment by rateable value is no longer recommended. The uncomfortable part is that there is no statutory control of commercial service charges at all — no tribunal, no reasonableness test, no consultation requirement, none of the residential protections. Your leverage is the lease, the RICS standard, and a complaint to RICS about the managing agent.

The most immediately actionable thing on this page. In London Trocadero (2-15) LLP v Picture House Cinemas, decided in 2025, a landlord was receiving 45 to 55% commission from its broker and charging it on to tenants inside the insurance rent. The High Court held the tenants were not liable for it — the recoverable sum was what was actually payable to keep the building insured — and read in a term that insurance rent must represent the market rate negotiated at arm’s length in the ordinary course of business. The judgment noted a normal commission of around 29% against the landlord’s 45 to 55%. Hundreds of thousands of pounds were ordered repaid. Separately, the RICS standard now makes disclosure of commission, rebates and other benefits mandatory. So: write and ask what commission is being taken on your buildings insurance. Two honest caveats — the landlord has indicated an intention to appeal, so the case is not finally settled, and you still cannot challenge the premium itself or require the landlord to shop around unless your lease says so.

Extremely, and earlier than you think. Break clauses fail on their conditions rather than their dates, and the courts construe them strictly because the consequence of a valid break is that the landlord loses the rest of the term. The usual conditions are vacant possession, payment of all sums due, and compliance with covenants — and each of those has generated litigation. Vacant possession has been defeated by leaving furniture and by leaving partitions in place. “All sums due” can be defeated by an underpayment of a few pounds of service charge that nobody had demanded. There is also a trap that catches people even when the break works: rent paid in advance covering a period after the break date is generally not apportioned back to you, so breaking a day after a quarter day can cost you three months’ rent. Our advice is always the same — start twelve months out, get the conditions read by someone whose job it is, and treat the date as immovable.

Pre-signing work is a fixed fee at £1,250, deliberately, so that telling you the deal is fine costs us money rather than making us money. A full occupancy cost audit on an existing lease is £2,950, and defending a served dilapidations claim is £1,850. We will take 20% of a saving where the saving is verifiable against a served claim or a documented before and after — a dilapidations schedule reduced from a stated figure, a service charge item credited back, a rateable value corrected. There the arithmetic is checkable and a percentage is honest. What we will not do is take a percentage measured against what we assert you would otherwise have paid, because on an unsigned lease that number is whatever the adviser chooses to make it, and manufacturing it is the standard way fees are inflated in this market. If another firm offers you a success fee on a projection, ask them to show you the counterfactual in writing.