How a rates bill is actually built
Two numbers make your bill. The rateable value is the Valuation Office Agency’s estimate of the annual rent the property would fetch on the open market, and it was reset on 1 April 2026 on rental values as at 1 April 2024. The multiplier is pence in the pound, set by government. Multiply them together and you have the bill before any relief.
From April 2026 there are five multipliers rather than two: 38.2p and 43p for retail, hospitality and leisure property below and above a £51,000 rateable value, 43.2p and 48p for everything else, and 50.8p for any property at £500,000 or more whatever it is used for.
Why you do not get the retail rate
From 1 April 2026 there are two permanently lower multipliers for retail, hospitality and leisure property — 5p below the ordinary rates. Estate agents and letting agents do not get them. Both are excluded by name as professional services.
That is not an oversight to appeal. The published guidance excludes these uses by name, and the test is the use of the property rather than the size or type of the business. The shop two doors down pays 5p in the pound less than you do on the same rateable value, permanently.
What is worth your attention instead is the rateable value itself, and small business rate relief. This is the sharpest version of the rule anywhere in the high street: you can be between two shops, on the same parade, in a near-identical unit, and pay 5p in the pound more than both of them.
Small business rate relief is the one that matters most
Below a £12,000 rateable value there is nothing to pay. Between £12,000 and £15,000 relief tapers away in a straight line. Above £15,000 there is none. It applies to one property, with narrow exceptions for additional properties under £2,899 rateable value where the total stays under £20,000, or £28,000 in London — and if you took on a second property you keep relief on the first for twelve months, extended to thirty-six months where it was taken on from 27 November 2025.
Relief is not always applied automatically. If you believe you qualify and you are being billed, apply to the billing authority; it can usually be backdated.
It has always worked this way, and it now costs more
Estate agents were excluded from the old retail relief scheme too, so this is not new. What changed in April 2026 is that the advantage the shops around you get became permanent rather than an annual announcement, so the gap is now a structural feature of your cost base rather than something that might lapse.
Where a branch network actually saves
Small business rate relief is one property only, which is the binding constraint for any multi-branch agency. A single-branch independent under a £12,000 rateable value pays nothing; a three-branch agency gets relief on one of them at most, and only if the others are under £2,899 rateable value with a combined total under £20,000, or £28,000 in London.
The other thing worth checking is whether you are still being assessed on space you no longer use. Agencies have shed back-office floors since branch footprints shrank, and the rating list does not update itself.
If the assessment looks wrong
The rateable value is challengeable through the Check, Challenge and Appeal process, and the ground is that the valuation does not reflect the property. Floor areas measured wrongly, space you no longer occupy, or a layout from before the last refit are all ordinary reasons. Rates agents will cold-call you offering to do this on a contingent fee; some are good and some are not, and the ones that ask for money up front are not.