The Building Safety Levy

The Building Safety Levy applies to building control applications made on or after 1 October 2026. Applications made before that date are out of scope entirely. The application date is the whole test, and for anyone with live schemes it is now the most consequential date on the programme.

This page is read from the regulations themselves rather than from summaries of them. Every figure below sits in SI 2025/1236, with the regulation or schedule cited so you can check it against the source.

The date test

The regulations do not apply to a building control application made before commencement. They also do not apply to variation applications or commencement notices made on or after that date where these relate to a pre-commencement original application.

That is a cliff edge, not a taper. Two otherwise identical schemes submitted a fortnight apart either side of 1 October carry entirely different cost bases. If you have schemes approaching submission, the submission date deserves a deliberate decision now, and that decision deserves to be written down, because it is exactly the kind of judgement that gets revisited eighteen months later when someone asks why the levy was payable.

The corollary matters just as much. There is no advantage in pushing a defective application in to beat the date. A rejected application is not a made application, and the corrective work will land on the wrong side of commencement.

What is chargeable

A building control application is chargeable where the work creates a new building with residential floorspace, creates residential floorspace where there was none, or increases residential floorspace, and the work is, or forms part of a wider development that is, a major residential development.

Note the second limb. A building that would not meet the threshold on its own can still be caught where it forms part of a wider development that does. Phasing a scheme does not by itself take it out of charge.

What is not chargeable

Three separate exemption routes run through the regulations and they operate differently. Getting the right one is worth the effort, because they are tested at different points.

• Exempt buildings, Schedule 1. The building itself falls outside the definition of a residential building.
• Exempt dwellings, Schedule 2. Particular dwellings are taken out of the definition of an ordinary residential dwelling, which affects both the threshold count and the chargeable floorspace.
• Exempt persons, regulation 13. An application is exempt where every named client is an exempt person. Non-profit registered providers of social housing are exempt persons. The word every is doing real work here: a joint venture with one non-exempt party does not qualify.

Schedule 1 exempts a building designed or adapted, or in the process of being constructed or adapted, for primary use as any of the following.

• Residential accommodation provided by a school for its students
• A care home within section 3 of the Care Standards Act 2000
• Secure residential institutions, including prisons, young offender institutions, detention centres, secure training centres, custody centres, short-term holding centres and secure local authority accommodation
• A hospital within the National Health Service Act 2006 definition, with at least one bed intended for a patient overnight stay
• Domestic abuse accommodation meeting the 2021 Domestic Abuse Support Regulations
• A children’s home within the Care Standards Act 2000
• A residential family centre within the Care Standards Act 2000
• Supported accommodation for children within the 2022 extension regulations
• A hotel or hostel
• A monastery, nunnery, seminary or almshouse
• Temporary accommodation for homeless people secured under Part 7 of the Housing Act 1996

How the charge is calculated

Regulation 16 sets the formula. For each relevant residential building to which the application relates, take the chargeable accommodation floorspace, add the chargeable communal floorspace, and multiply by the applicable area rate. Where the application relates to more than one relevant residential building, the amounts are added together. A negative result is treated as nil.

Two points do most of the work in practice. Communal space for residents is not charged in full: regulation 19 applies a relevant percentage, so the apportionment between accommodation and communal areas has a direct cash consequence. And floorspace is measured as gross internal area under regulation 12, which is not the same basis as a sales area or a net internal figure. If your cost plan carries one and your levy calculation carries another, the difference will surface at exactly the wrong moment.

Regulation 21 gives a lower rate for previously developed sites, broadly where at least 75% of the land in the planning permission has been previously developed since 1 July 1948, with exceptions including agricultural and forestry land. This is a single binary test applied to the whole permission, so a site sitting near the 75% line is worth establishing properly rather than assuming.

What the rates actually look like

Schedule 3 sets an area rate for every collecting authority in England, in two columns: one for previously developed land and one for everything else. The spread is wide, and the undeveloped-land rate runs at double the previously developed rate.

That is close to an eightfold difference between the cheapest and most expensive authority on the same land classification, and a sixteenfold difference between the cheapest previously developed rate and the most expensive greenfield one. For a housebuilder operating across regions, the levy is not a uniform national cost line. It is a geographic variable that belongs in appraisal alongside land value, and it interacts with the previously developed test rather than sitting independently of it.

Who pays, and when

• Who: the named client for the application, defined per application type in Schedule 4.
• When: the earlier of the completion notice date and the first date of occupation. For higher-risk buildings, the completion notice date is the date of the completion or partial completion certificate application to the regulator.

The liability therefore crystallises at the end of the job, not the start, but it is fixed by decisions taken at the beginning. That gap is where the commercial risk sits, particularly on schemes where the named client changes hands during construction. Regulation 34 contemplates exactly that, requiring new named client information to be passed on.

If the scheme changes after you apply

Part 8 deals with variation applications. A variation can change the levy position, and regulation 43 provides for the cancellation and reinstatement of levy determination notices where it does. Change control on a higher-risk building and an amendment notice under the registered building control approver route both feed into this, through regulations 44 and 45.

The practical consequence is that the levy figure you receive early is not necessarily the figure you pay. Design development that moves floorspace, changes the dwelling count, or alters the accommodation to communal split can move it, and there is no mechanism that quietly absorbs the difference.

Spot checks and levy updates

Part 9 creates a levy information spot check regime. Regulations 47 and 48 set out two categories of circumstance in which a collecting authority is required to carry one out. Regulation 49 requires the named client to be notified, regulation 50 allows further information to be demanded and requires notice of the outcome, and regulation 51 deals with inaccurate building safety levy information. Where a check changes the position, regulations 52 to 54 provide for levy update notices and for a revised determination to be requested.

In other words the information you submit is auditable after the fact, by an authority with a statutory duty to audit some of it. The floorspace schedule behind your levy return is a record you should expect to have to produce and defend, not a working calculation that gets discarded once the notice arrives.

If you think the figure is wrong

Regulation 71 gives the named client, and only the named client, the right to request a review of three categories of decision: the issue of a levy liability notice and the amount determined in it, the revision of a notice and the revised amount, and a refusal to issue a refund or the amount of one.

Refunds

Regulations 65 and 66 provide for refunds of levy payments against a set of conditions labelled A to K, and regulation 67 deals with the knock-on effect on the levy liability amount, the liability notice and the payment certificate. A refund is therefore a defined statutory route rather than a discretionary concession, which is worth knowing before writing an overpayment off.

The enforcement lever is the certificate

The regulations amend the building control rules so that completion certificates and final certificates can be withheld or rejected where the levy is unpaid. Regulations 57 to 62 do this across all three routes: local authority building control, the registered building control approver route, and the higher-risk building regime.

There is no separate penalty machinery because none is needed. The levy is enforced by blocking the one document you cannot occupy the building without. On a scheme with sales or lettings dependent on practical completion, an unpaid levy is not a finance problem, it is a programme problem.

What to do before 1 October 2026

• List every scheme with an application not yet made and record a deliberate submission-date decision for each, with the reasoning.
• Establish the previously developed position for each site against the 75% test now, while the evidence is still to hand.
• Check your Schedule 3 rate for each collecting authority you build in, and put it into appraisal rather than carrying a national average.
• Fix the floorspace basis. Agree one gross internal area schedule, with the accommodation and communal split identified, and keep the working.
• Confirm the named client for each application type against Schedule 4, and check whether any exempt-person route applies to every named client, not just the lead one.
• Put the 28-day review window into your process so a levy liability notice is checked on arrival rather than filed.