FullWorkings UK tax and finance calculators

Business rates

England, 2026-27

The property

Rateable valueFrom the Valuation Office. Not the rent and not the market value. £
What you runRetail, hospitality and leisure use lower multipliers from 2026-27.
Your only propertySmall business rate relief needs a single property.

What you pay

Business rates £0.00 a year
Multiplier used—
Which one—
Before relief£0.00
Small business rate relief£0.00
Relief—
Payable£0.00
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How this is worked out

⚠ This is England only. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland set their own multipliers and their own reliefs, and the City of London has a supplement of its own.

⚠ The multiplier is a cliff, not a slide

A rateable value of £50,999 uses the small business multiplier; £51,000 uses the standard one — on the whole value, not on the part above the line. Nothing here is sliced the way Income Tax is, so one pound of rateable value can cost hundreds of pounds a year.

The same is true again at £500,000, where the largest multiplier takes over.

Retail, hospitality and leisure now have their own multipliers

They replace the relief that applied for 2025-26, which is a quieter change than it sounds: a relief is a discount off a bill and a multiplier is the bill. Anyone comparing this year's figure with last year's needs to compare after relief, not before.

Small business rate relief tapers

Full relief up to the first limit, then down to nothing by the second — and only on a single property. A business taking a second small unit can lose the relief on the first, which is a real cost of expanding that rarely appears in the plan.

⚠ Rateable value is not rent

It is the Valuation Office's estimate of the open market rent at a fixed valuation date, which may be years earlier and may bear little relation to what you actually pay. It is also the one figure you can challenge.

What this does not cover

Transitional relief, which phases in changes after a revaluation and can matter more than the multiplier. Supporting small business relief. Charitable, rural, hardship and empty property reliefs, most of which are administered by the council rather than set nationally — which is why this page shows the national part and says so. The pubs and live music venues relief. And any council's own discretionary scheme.

Where these figures come from

Every rate above is read from a dated rate file rather than written into the page, and each one is checked against the gov.uk page it came from. How these numbers are kept right sets out the whole process.

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