Empty Property Rates and Transitional Relief

As part of our professional service we will ensure that any relief eligible to you will be received.

If you pay business rates, your property may be eligible for business rates relief. Business rates are taxes to help pay for local services. They’re charged on most non-domestic properties.

You don’t have to pay business rates on empty buildings for 3 months. After this time, most businesses must pay full business rates.

Some properties can get extended empty property relief:

• industrial premises (eg warehouses) are exempt for a further 3 months
• listed buildings – until they are reoccupied
• buildings with a rateable value under £2,900 – until they are reoccupied
• properties owned by charities (only if the property’s next use will be mostly for charitable purposes)
• community amateur sports clubs buildings (only if the next use will be mostly as a sports club)

If the rateable value of your property changes significantly as a result of revaluation, your rates will change gradually. This is called ‘transitional relief’.
If you get transitional relief, your local council will include this automatically when working out what business rates you should pay.

You will qualify for small business rate relief if:

• your property’s rateable value is less than £15,000
• your business occupies one property

(you may still be able to get relief if you have multiple sites)

How it works

You won’t pay business rates at all on a property with a rateable value of £12,000 or less.

For properties with a rateable value of £12,001 to £15,000, the rate of relief is a sliding scale from 100% to 0%.

For example

If your rateable value is £13,500, you’ll get 50% of your bill.

If your rateable value is £14,000, you’ll get 33% off.

If you occupy more than one property

When you get a second property, you’ll keep getting any existing relief on your main property for 12 months.

You can still get small business rate relief on your main property after this if both the following apply:

• none of your other properties have a rateable value above £2,899
• the total rateable value of all your properties is less than £20,000 (£28,000 in London) 

You’ll get £1,000 off your business rates bill if you’re a pub in England with a rateable value of less than £100,000.

The relief is available for the 2017 to 2018 and 2018 to 2019 tax years.

If you’re starting up or relocating to an enterprise zone you could qualify for business rates relief.

The council works out how the relief is applied. You could get up to £55,000 a year over 5 years.