A fairer council tax
bill starts here.

Enter your postcode in the council tax band checker above. It reads the Valuation Office list, the same data as the gov.uk band search, and shows the band of every home in your postcode, free and without an account. Scotland is not covered: use the Scottish Assessors' search at saa.gov.uk.

The same postcode search lists your neighbours' bands next to yours, and our free comparison picks out the homes most like yours by type, size and age. If similar homes sit a band lower, check whether your council tax band is wrong before you do anything else.

A formal request to the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) to review the band assigned to your property. Bands were set in 1991 based on estimated property values, and many were set incorrectly. If successful, your band is lowered, you pay less council tax going forward, and you may receive a refund for years of overpayment.

Three steps: (1) check that your band is higher than comparable properties, which is what Council Tax Challenger does in seconds; (2) build an evidence pack with those comparables and an estimated 1991 valuation; (3) submit it for free through the official VOA challenge service on gov.uk. The VOA typically responds within 2 to 4 months, though some cases take considerably longer. Our full guide covers each step: how to challenge your council tax band.

Yes. Submitting a challenge to the VOA (via gov.uk) is completely free: no fees, no solicitor needed. Our £9.99 evidence pack is optional, but the VOA expects you to back your challenge with comparable-property evidence, and 65% of the 39,590 challenges it resolved in 2023-24 ended in no change.

The challenge form is free, but it asks you to provide the evidence, and the VOA won't tell you what good evidence looks like. Pulling comparable bands, sales history and EPC records for every neighbouring property by hand takes hours. We automate that and package it as a PDF the VOA reviewer can actually use.

A PDF with your full property profile, comparable neighbours and their bands, an estimated 1991 valuation, a band-threshold analysis, a case-strength score, identified risk factors, and a case-summary paragraph you can paste straight into the VOA challenge form. Everything is sourced from official VOA, Land Registry and EPC data.

We do not publish a success rate of our own. The service is new and the VOA takes 2 to 4 months to answer a challenge, so any figure we quoted would rest on too few resolved cases to mean anything. What is published is the VOA's own record: of the 39,590 challenges it resolved in 2023-24 it lowered the band in 27% of cases, and only 30 cases (0.08%) ended in a higher band. What we can tell you about the pack is what it does: it builds a like-for-like comparison against your neighbours from official data, and when the comparables do not support a challenge it tells you not to submit.

Yes, in rare cases. The VOA can move you up a band as well as down. That's exactly why the evidence pack scores your case before you submit. If the case is weak, we tell you not to submit. Building the evidence first lets you make an informed decision rather than rolling the dice on a blank form.

The band lookup and evidence pack take under 3 minutes. Submitting through gov.uk takes about 5 minutes once you have the pack to paste from. The VOA typically responds to challenges within 2 to 4 months, though some cases take longer.

Yes. If your challenge succeeds, your council issues a refund for past overpayment, typically applied as a credit against future bills, though you can usually request cash. Refunds can run into thousands of pounds depending on how long you've been in the wrong band.

MoneySavingExpert estimates up to 400,000 homes in England and Scotland are in the wrong band. Bands were set in bulk in 1991 from estimated values. Not every property was surveyed, and many original estimates were wrong. The VOA doesn't proactively review them; you have to spot the mismatch yourself.

Council tax replaced the poll tax in 1993. Properties were banded by their estimated value as of 1 April 1991, and English bands have never been revalued. Your band is still tied to a 30+ year old estimate. That is why the neighbours test based on 1991 thresholds is the right way to challenge.