Marriage value has not been abolished. Anyone telling you otherwise is costing you money.

No. This is the most repeated error about leasehold in the country and it is costing people money, because it persuades them to wait for something that has not happened. The precise position is that abolition is enacted but not commenced. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 received Royal Assent on 24 May 2024, and section 37 with Schedule 4 would remove marriage value — but section 124 provides that almost the whole Act comes into force only by regulations, and no such regulations have been made for the valuation provisions. There have been exactly three commencement orders in over two years. They brought into force: some building safety provisions (31 October 2024); the abolition of the two-year ownership requirement (31 January 2025); and the Right to Manage package (3 March 2025). That is the complete list. So today, Schedule 13 paragraph 4(2A) of the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993 still applies in full: marriage value is nil only where the unexpired term exceeds eighty years, and where it does not, the landlord takes fifty per cent. Note the word exceeds — at exactly 80.00 years marriage value is payable. Why has it stalled? The government has stated that the Act contains “a small number of specific but serious flaws” requiring fresh primary legislation to fix. The rates the new method depends on are out for consultation until 23 September 2026. A draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill was published in January 2026 but has not been introduced, and the government missed its own deadline to respond to the committee that scrutinised it. And the freeholders who lost their judicial review in October 2025 have permission to appeal.

There is a real answer and it depends almost entirely on your unexpired term, not on anyone's opinion about politics. If your lease is already below eighty years, you are paying marriage value now and it grows every year as relativity falls and the reversion draws nearer. Waiting has a cost you can calculate against a saving with no date attached. If you are just above eighty — say eighty to eighty-five years — this is the worst possible position to gamble from. You have no marriage value today, so reform would save you comparatively little; but crossing eighty while you wait adds the whole of it at once. The asymmetry is stark: the saving is uncertain in size and timing, the cost of crossing the line is certain in both. If you are comfortably above ninety years, waiting is genuinely defensible. The cost of a few more years is modest and the potential saving is real, and we will say so rather than sell you a valuation. Three things to weigh in the timing. There is no transitional provision and no ability to elect — the law that applies is the law in force when your section 42 notice is served, so you cannot start now and switch. Nobody can give you a commencement date; the honest answer requires a consultation to close, secondary legislation to be made, and a new Act to fix the defects in the last one, and the earliest realistic point is 2027. And the prescribed rates could cut both ways: the government's own actuarial analysis suggests deferment rates as high as 6.05% for houses and 6.30% for flats against today's 4.75% and 5%, and a higher deferment rate reduces the premium — so the reforms may be worth more than just the marriage value.

It is a statutory cliff rather than a slope, and it is the single most important date in your lease. Schedule 13 paragraph 4(2A) provides that marriage value is taken to be nil where, at the valuation date, the unexpired term exceeds eighty years. One day either side of that line the arithmetic is completely different. At 80.01 years you pay nothing for marriage value. At 80.00 years you pay half of it — and by then the economic marriage value is already substantial, because relativity at eighty years sits around 90.5% on the published curve, meaning roughly nine and a half per cent of the freehold value is sitting in the gap between what your lease is worth and what the freehold is worth. On a flat worth £400,000 with a £200 ground rent, the premium roughly doubles across that boundary — a step of around £11,000, or close to three per cent of the value of the flat, crossed in a single day. It scales roughly with the value, so on an £800,000 flat the step is about £22,000. Two practical points follow. First, the valuation date is the date your section 42 notice is served, not the date the extension completes — so what matters is getting the notice in, not finishing the process. Second, the cost does not stop at the cliff. Below eighty it keeps climbing, because relativity continues to fall and the reversion draws nearer every year, so marriage value grows on both sides of the equation. If you are within a couple of years of eighty, that date is the deadline that is actually knowable, as against a reform timetable that is not.

Under Schedule 13 paragraph 2 it has three components, and in practice two of them do all the work. First, the diminution in the value of the landlord's interest (paragraph 3). This has two parts. The term is the ground rent you would otherwise have paid for the rest of the lease, capitalised — the government's own analysis of tribunal decisions found rates from 4.5% to 9%, with 88% of cases falling between 6% and 7% and a median around 6.5%. The reversion is the freehold vacant possession value of the flat, deferred over the unexpired term at the deferment rate — 5% for flats since Earl Cadogan v Sportelli in 2008, built up as a 2.25% risk-free rate plus a 4.75% risk premium less 2% growth. After the extension the landlord's residual interest is deferred by a further ninety years, which makes it nearly nil. Second, marriage value (paragraph 4), where the term does not exceed eighty years: the uplift in total value created by merging the two interests, of which the landlord takes fifty per cent by statute. Calculating it requires relativity — the value of your existing lease as a percentage of the freehold on the assumption the 1993 Act was never passed — and that is the most contested number in the whole field. Third, compensation (paragraph 5) for loss to the landlord's other property, which is rarely engaged on a flat but matters in collective claims. On top of the premium you pay your own valuer and solicitor and, under section 60, the landlord's reasonable costs of investigating your right, valuing, and granting the lease — typically £2,000 to £4,000 for everything.

Because it requires valuing something that cannot be observed. Relativity is the value of your existing short lease as a percentage of the freehold vacant possession value, on the statutory assumption that the 1993 Act had never been passed and you therefore had no right to extend. Every actual transaction in the market happens in a world where that right exists and is priced in — buyers of short-lease flats know they can extend, and pay accordingly. So valuers are inferring a counterfactual market, and the graphs they use are built from their own settlement records, which were themselves negotiated using the graphs. The circularity is real and acknowledged. The Court of Appeal addressed it in 2018 in Mundy v Trustees of the Sloane Stanley Estate. A statistical model called Parthenia, built from pre-1993 transactions, was rejected outright — it produced a higher value for a lease without Act rights than the agreed price of the same lease with them, which the Upper Tribunal memorably described as “a clock which strikes 13”. The graphs survived, but the court held that real market evidence is preferred where it exists, and that there is no true no-Act world to retreat to: the open market may be a false market, said Lewison LJ, but it is still the open market. The practical consequences for you are two. There is no single approved curve — tribunals commonly work from a blend, and one first-tier tribunal rejected a landlord's bespoke graph outright for lacking any analysis of actual transactions. And every published curve, including the one used on this page, is derived from prime central London. A separate curve exists specifically for mortgage-dependent markets because relativity behaves differently outside the centre. Anywhere else, treat a graph figure as an opening position, not an answer.

Be very careful, and have a solicitor read it before you sign anything. Informal extensions are sometimes fine and frequently not, and the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership's assessment — “pure poison” — reflects how badly they can go. The Leasehold Advisory Service sets out the risks plainly. The ground rent usually survives. A statutory extension extinguishes it to a peppercorn for the whole of the new term. An informal deal typically removes it only for the period after the original expiry date, so you carry on paying — including any increases already built into the lease — for decades. The term is often shorter than the ninety years the statute gives you: twenty-five, thirty or fifty-year top-ups are common. Other clauses can be rewritten, including service charge machinery and forfeiture provisions. There is no tribunal to determine the price if you disagree, no statutory timetable, and no reasonableness test on the landlord's costs — and the landlord can walk away at any point, leaving you to pay their valuation fees anyway. The worst outcome is one people do not see coming: an informal extension that retains or introduces an escalating ground rent can make the flat unmortgageable. Major lenders publish criteria declining ground rents above 0.5% of property value, doubling more often than every twenty years, or compounded RPI escalation. You would then have a long lease that nobody can buy, and you would have to serve a statutory notice anyway and pay a second premium to strip the rent out. A shorter informal term also pushes you back under eighty years sooner, re-triggering marriage value.

An extension gives you ninety more years at a peppercorn on your own flat. Collective enfranchisement gives the participating leaseholders the freehold of the whole building — and with it control of the management, the insurance and the service charge, and the ability to grant yourselves 999-year leases at a peppercorn afterwards for no further premium. To qualify: the building must be self-contained; at least two-thirds of the flats must be held by qualifying tenants; qualifying tenants of at least half of all the flats must participate; and not more than 25% of the internal floor area may be in non-residential use. That last figure is important and widely misreported: the 2024 Act raises it to 50%, but section 29 is not in force. The change to 50% that has commenced is section 49, which applies to Right to Manage only. Conflating the two is the single commonest error in published guidance, and it is the difference between having a claim and not having one. The valuation works under Schedule 6 rather than Schedule 13, and two extra heads of value appear. Hope value — the prospect that non-participating leaseholders will later buy extensions — is payable in a collective claim, on the House of Lords' decision in Sportelli, even though it is not payable on an individual extension. And development value in the roof space, cellar or airspace is recoverable, which is often the largest and most contested number in the whole claim. So collective enfranchisement usually costs more per flat in gross terms, and buys something an extension cannot. If you are weighing them, weigh control as well as price.

£750 for a lease extension valuation on the statutory Schedule 13 basis, with the comparable evidence attached, a realistic range rather than a single figure, and a recommended opening premium for your notice. Negotiation with the freeholder's valuer is included — that is where most of the difference is actually won, and freeholders' opening demands routinely run twenty to forty per cent above where cases settle. £1,950 for a collective enfranchisement valuation, which is a bigger job: the landlord's interest across every flat participating and not, plus hope value and any development value. What you need a solicitor for is the section 42 notice and the conveyancing. That is not us and we will not pretend otherwise. It is genuinely specialist and the deadline structure is unforgiving: if you miss the window to apply to the tribunal your claim is deemed withdrawn, with a twelve-month bar before you can try again — at a new valuation date, on a shorter lease, at a higher price. Get an enfranchisement solicitor rather than a general conveyancer. Two more things worth knowing. Free, independent guidance is available from the Leasehold Advisory Service, and we would rather you started there than with us. And if we look at your figures and think you should wait, that is what we will tell you — at which point we have talked ourselves out of a fee, which is rather the point.

Three to twelve months where it is uncontested, longer if it goes to the tribunal, and the statutory minimum is about four months whatever happens. The sequence: your solicitor serves a section 42 notice stating the premium you propose and the date by which the landlord must reply, which must be at least two months away. The valuation date is the date that notice is given — that is what locks in your relativity and your position relative to the eighty-year line, so if you are close to eighty it is the notice date that matters, not completion. The landlord may demand a deposit of £250 or 10% of your proposed premium, whichever is greater, payable within fourteen days. They then serve a counter-notice by the stated date, admitting or denying the right and countering on price. If terms are not agreed you may apply to the tribunal — but not until two months after the counter-notice, and not later than six months after it. That six-month window is the one that catches people: miss it and the notice is deemed withdrawn, with a twelve-month bar on serving another. The deadline asymmetry runs the other way too, and strongly in your favour. If the landlord misses their counter-notice date, you can apply to the court for a lease on your own proposed terms, at your own proposed premium. That is precisely why the figure in the notice should be realistic-but-favourable rather than a token number — because there is a real chance you get it.