The 2026 revaluation was sold to the country as relief. A permanently lower multiplier for the high street, a 5p discount for retail, hospitality and leisure, the end of a decade of stop-gap reliefs. For occupied premises, much of that is true. But every penny of the new help is attached to a condition almost no one said out loud: the building has to be open. Leave it empty, and you do not just lose the discount. You are quietly moved onto a higher rung of the ladder and billed at the full rate, on a rateable value that has just gone up 19.2%.
That is the squeeze. It does not show up in the headline numbers, because the headline numbers describe the occupied world. For anyone holding a void, the maths runs the other way.
The squeeze in three lines
- Occupied retail, hospitality and leisure is cushioned by the new RHL multipliers (38.2p and 43.0p).
- Empty property cannot qualify for those multipliers. It sits on the standard rate of 48.0p, or the higher rate of 50.8p above £500,000 RV.
- And the base has grown. Rateable values rose by an average of 19.2% in the revaluation, so the full rate is now charged on a bigger number.
What actually changed on 1 April
Three things happened at once on 1 April 2026, and they are easy to blur together. A national revaluation reset every rateable value in England to reflect April 2024 rental evidence. The old two-tier multiplier system was replaced with five distinct rates. And the temporary 40% RHL relief that had propped up the high street since the pandemic finally expired, swapped for two permanent, lower RHL multipliers baked into the structure itself.
The result is a ladder of five multipliers. Where you land on it depends on two questions: how much your property is worth, and crucially, what is happening inside it.
The 2026 multiplier ladder
Occupied premises were cushioned. Empty property pays the full rate, with none of the relief.
Vacant property receives no RHL discount. A small empty unit below £51,000 RV is billed on the 43.2p small business multiplier; everything above that lands on 48.0p or, beyond £500,000, on 50.8p. Source: England 2026/27 non-domestic rating multipliers.
The relief is a reward for being open
The two lowest rates on the ladder, 38.2p and 43.0p, are the Retail, Hospitality and Leisure multipliers. They are the centrepiece of the government’s “permanent support for the high street” messaging, and for a trading shop or pub they are genuinely good news compared with the old standard rate of 55.5p.
But an RHL multiplier is not a property attribute. It is a use attribute. To qualify, the premises must be occupied and used wholly or mainly for a qualifying retail, hospitality or leisure purpose. An empty unit, by definition, has no qualifying use. There is no shop, no covers, no cinema screen, nothing to assess. So the moment the tenant’s lease ends and the keys come back, the property is no longer eligible for the rate that made the high street story work. It drops to the standard non-RHL multiplier, or to the higher multiplier if its rateable value reaches £500,000.
This is the part landlords keep getting caught by. The 5p “high-street discount” they read about in the Budget coverage was never available to them on a void. It belonged to their tenant, and it left with the tenant.
For larger assets the picture is starker still. Above £500,000 of rateable value there is no RHL multiplier at all, occupied or empty: every property on that rung pays the 50.8p higher multiplier, a 2.8p premium introduced specifically to help fund the discounts handed to smaller, occupied premises. So the owner of a large void is, in a very literal sense, paying a surcharge that subsidises someone else’s relief.
It is worse than a lower headline suggests
Here is the genuinely counter-intuitive bit. The standard multiplier actually fell, from 55.5p in 2025/26 to 48.0p in 2026/27. On the face of it, empty rates got cheaper. They did not, because the multiplier is only half of the calculation. The other half is the rateable value, and the revaluation pushed that up across the board.
The Valuation Office Agency’s 2026 list raised total rateable value in England from roughly £70.8bn to £84.4bn, an average increase of 19.2%, with some locations and sectors well beyond that. Critically, the new values are pegged to April 2024 rents, a point at which many markets were at or near their cyclical peak. A unit that has since seen its real letting value soften can still carry a rateable value set at the top of the last cycle.
The two numbers move in opposite directions, and the base wins. A £100,000 RV unit on the old 55.5p standard rate cost £55,500 a year empty. If that same unit was revalued up 19.2% to £119,000, the new 48.0p rate produces £57,120, more than before, despite the “lower” multiplier. A falling headline rate on a rising base is not a saving. It is a re-label.
What a void actually costs in 2026/27
Strip out the relief that never applied and the arithmetic is brutally simple: rateable value multiplied by the empty-property multiplier, payable in full once the initial relief window closes. Here is what that looks like across a range of values.
| Rateable value | Multiplier when empty | Annual empty-rates bill | Per month of void |
|---|---|---|---|
| £30,000 | 43.2p · small business | £12,960 | £1,080 |
| £75,000 | 48.0p · standard | £36,000 | £3,000 |
| £150,000 | 48.0p · standard | £72,000 | £6,000 |
| £500,000 | 50.8p · higher | £254,000 | £21,167 |
| £600,000 | 50.8p · higher | £304,800 | £25,400 |
These are not edge cases. A mid-sized high-street unit, a suburban office floor, a trade-counter warehouse, all sit comfortably in the £75,000 to £150,000 band, where a single year of vacancy after relief costs a five-figure sum that produces no income, no occupier and no community value whatsoever.
The clock you are racing: empty property relief
There is a short grace period, and it is the only part of the empty-property regime working in the landlord’s favour. Most commercial property gets three months of 100% empty property relief from the date it becomes vacant; qualifying industrial and warehouse property gets six. After that, the full bill lands.
The catch, in place since April 2024, is the 13-week reset rule. To earn a fresh relief period, the property must be genuinely re-occupied for a continuous 13 weeks, not the six weeks that used to suffice. The reform was aimed squarely at “box-shifting” schemes that flicked a unit in and out of nominal occupation to reset the clock. It raised the operational bar for occupation-based mitigation, but, importantly, it did not abolish it. The statutory test for rateable occupation, that it be actual, beneficial, exclusive and non-transient, is exactly what it was. What changed is how long you have to sustain it.
Why “just leave it empty” stopped being a plan
Vacancy is no longer a neutral holding state. Between the higher revalued base, the loss of every RHL discount, and a relief window that closes in 90 days, an empty unit becomes one of the most expensive things on a balance sheet, a liability that bills you every month for producing nothing. The strategic question is no longer “can we afford to wait for a tenant?” It is “what is this void costing us every month we do?”
The way out is the thing the relief rewards: occupation
Step back and the structure of the 2026 system is internally consistent. It rewards occupation and penalises vacancy. The cheapest rungs of the ladder require a genuine, beneficial occupier doing something real in the building. The most expensive rungs are reserved for space sitting dark.
That is precisely the gap VacatAd is built to close. Our model places a genuine beneficial occupier into the premises under a properly-constituted arrangement, delivering free public Wi-Fi and local advertising through a plug-and-play unit. It is real, exclusive, non-transient use with a demonstrable purpose and a clean evidential trail, router logs, uptime records, usage data and campaign analytics, rather than a stack of boxes and a hopeful interpretation. The occupation satisfies the rateable-occupation test on its own facts, which is exactly the ground the courts protected in the 2025 48th Street / Principled Offsite Logistics judgment.
The symmetry worth noticing
The same logic that penalises your empty unit, that rates follow real, beneficial occupation, is the logic that makes a properly-structured occupation arrangement work. The system is telling owners to put genuine activity back into the building. That is not a loophole. It is the policy operating as designed.
What to do this quarter
Three moves are worth an afternoon of your time before the next quarter’s bills settle.
First, re-run every void on the 2026 figures. Use the actual new rateable value, the correct empty-property multiplier (43.2p, 48.0p or 50.8p, not an RHL rate), and the real date your three- or six-month relief expires. Last year’s numbers will understate the exposure.
Second, sense-check the new rateable values. Because the 2026 list is pegged to April 2024 rents, some valuations sit above what the unit would let for today. Where that is the case, a Challenge on the 2026 list is worth taking, but remember it does not pause your liability: you keep paying the billed figure while it works through the VOA queue.
Third, decide what happens to the units that come out looking expensive. For some, re-letting is realistic and near. For the rest, where the void will outrun the market’s appetite, the monthly bleed is the trigger for a conversation about compliant beneficial occupation. We can typically deploy within two to three weeks.
The information in this piece is general guidance on UK business rates and is not tax, legal or valuation advice. Multipliers and reliefs cited are the England 2026/27 figures; specific liability and mitigation should be reviewed against your portfolio by a qualified rating surveyor and your advisers.
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