Licensing when your properties sit in different council areas

There is no national landlord licence. Whether a scheme exists at all, what it costs, how long it lasts, how it is banded and what conditions come attached are each decided by the individual council.

One property, one council, one set of rules. Properties in three councils and you are running three regimes at once, with three renewal dates that have nothing to do with each other.

The figures below are from 26 councils' own published fee schedules, 63 exact amounts with no estimates among them.

The same licence, 3.8 times the price

Bristol sits outside those mandatory rows with its own structure: £1,886 for a new mandatory HMO licence and £1,861 for its citywide additional scheme.

A landlord with the same kind of HMO in Luton and in Redbridge pays £488 for one and £1,865.34 for the other. Nothing about the properties has to differ. The council does.

Four things that differ besides the price

1. Whether a scheme exists at all. Mandatory HMO licensing is national, but additional and selective schemes are local and time-limited. 12 of the 26 councils here run all three types. The rest run one or two, and a scheme can begin or lapse without anything changing at your property: Croydon's selective scheme covers fourteen wards from 25 September 2026, and applications cannot be made before that date.

2. How the fee is banded. Councils measure the same house differently, which is why comparing headline prices understates the problem:

• Redbridge bands by households: £696.14 then £1,169.20 for two households, rising to £2,185.95 at five.
• Sheffield bands by bedrooms: £1,185 up to five, £1,390 for six to nine.
• Liverpool bands by units of accommodation: £1,328 up to five, £1,449 at six, £1,570 at seven.
• Newham bands by lettings: £1,400 up to five, £1,550 for six to nine, and £750 more for each additional ten above eighty.

3. When you pay. Most of these are split into two parts, and the split is not uniform. Liverpool takes £489.10 with the application, which is not refunded, and £838.90 on grant. Sheffield takes £725 up front and £460 within fourteen days of the draft licence. Tower Hamlets charges £977 online and £1,147 by post for the same licence, and £1,037 if you pay in two instalments rather than one.

4. How long it runs. 61 of the 63 licences here run five years. Two run one year, offered as a cheaper short option: Croydon's selective licence is £800 for five years or £544 for one, and its additional HMO licence £1,250 or £850.

The discount that is not a portfolio discount

Several councils reduce the fee for a second and later property, which reads like a volume discount until you check the condition. In most cases it is the same building, not the same landlord:

• Waltham Forest: a second and later dwelling in the same building is £125 cheaper.
• Croydon: £100 off for a second flat in the same block.
• Hackney: £100 off Part A where the property is one of several dwellings in the same building.
• Nottingham: a block of flats is licensed together, from £2,841 plus £560 a dwelling.

So a landlord with eight flats in one converted house saves on all of them. A landlord with eight houses spread across the same borough saves nothing. The discount rewards the shape of the building, not the size of the portfolio.

Two exceptions worth knowing:

• Newham: on the selective scheme, "a second property onwards is £700" against £750, with no same-building condition.
• Salford: a second and later application is £945 against £970.

The discount that does scale

Accreditation is the one that pays back across a whole portfolio, because it attaches to you rather than to a building:

• Nottingham: an accredited holder pays £759 where the standard fee is £950, and a less compliant landlord pays £1,318.
• Salford: an accredited landlord pays £945 first time and £910 after.
• Hackney: £100 off Part B for an accredited landlord, on top of £100 for an EPC of B or above and £50 for a C.
• Croydon: £100 for accreditation, £50 for an EPC of B or above.
• Newham: £50 off for membership of a recognised landlord association.

Energy performance turns up repeatedly in the same lists, which is the other discount that follows the property rather than the building. Newham charges £400 rather than £750 for a home never let before with an EPC of C or above.

Across ten or twelve licences those are not rounding errors. They are also the sort of thing that has to be claimed at application, not afterwards.

What it actually costs you to be in three councils

Money is the visible part and the smaller one. The rest:

• Three renewal dates, each five years from its own grant, none aligned. A licence that lapses is an offence, not a late fee.
• Three sets of conditions. Councils attach their own requirements about room sizes, amenities, waste, fire precautions and management. They are not the same, so a standard operating procedure that satisfies one council can fall short in another.
• Three fee schedules that change independently. A council can revise its fees without reference to anything you are doing.
• Three definitions of the thing you own. As above: households, bedrooms, units or lettings. A property that sits in one band in Sheffield can sit in another in Redbridge.

None of this is complicated in isolation. It is only unmanageable as a memory exercise, which is what it becomes at the point when the properties are in different places and the dates are years apart.

We publish each council's schedule, taken from the council's own page, in the landlord licence fees hub, and LetCompliance holds each licence against its property with its own expiry, alongside the certificates and deposit dates that sit on their own separate clocks.

Source: the fees above are each council's own published schedule, recorded in our licence fees dataset and last reviewed on 20 September 2026. Every figure quoted is an exact published amount rather than an estimate. Fees change; the council's own page is always the authority for the amount that applies to you.