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Join Which? MoneyChallenging your council tax band? Two thirds saw no change in 2025-26
More than 71,000 council tax band challenges were resolved in England and Wales
With a background in financial journalism across national titles, Ruby loves helping people take control of their money and specialises in pensions, tax, banking and benefits.
Think you're paying too much council tax? Challenging your band could help you cut your bill, but new figures show that most challenges don't lead to a change.
HMRC figures reveal that 71,320 council tax band challenges were resolved in England and Wales in 2025-26, with 65% leaving households in the same band.
Just 15% of challenges in England and 18% in Wales resulted in a lower band.
Here, Which? looks at what the figures mean for your chances of success and explains how to check your council tax band and challenge it if you think it's wrong.
How many challenged their band in 2025-26?
According to the latest data, the Valuation Office (VO) resolved a record 71,320 challenges to council tax bands across England and Wales, up from 38,180 the year before.
This consisted of 69,120 resolved challenges in England and 2,200 in Wales.
In England, 65% of challenges resulted in no change to the council tax band – equivalent to 44,928 cases. In Wales, around 1,188 cases saw no change, representing 54% of resolved challenges.
In England, 15% of resolved challenges resulted in a reduction, equivalent to around 10,368 cases. In Wales, the success rate was 18%, equivalent to around 396 cases.
This means that roughly one in seven challenges in England were successful in reducing their council tax band, while in Wales the success rate was slightly higher, at roughly one in six.
However, challenging your council tax band does carry a risk. If the VO decides your property should be in a higher band, you could end up paying more council tax rather than less.
Fortunately, this was rare in 2025-26. Fewer than 1% of resolved challenges resulted in a higher band in either country – equivalent to fewer than 691 cases in England and fewer than 22 in Wales
- Find out more: Council tax rates 2026-27: how does your bill compare?
How does this compare to 2024-25?
In 2024-25, the VO received 47,030 council tax band challenges across England and Wales, compared with 43,820 in 2023-24.
A total of 38,180 challenges were resolved, including 35,870 in England and 2,310 in Wales.
As with the latest figures, most challenges didn't result in a change. In England, 63% of resolved cases left households in the same council tax band, compared with 47% in Wales.
Getting a reduction was less common. In England, 16% of resolved challenges resulted in a lower band, while the figure was higher in Wales, at 22%.
That meant roughly one in six challenges in England resulted in a reduction, compared with around one in five in Wales.
- Find out more: Council tax bands explained
What's behind the latest figures?
Previously, council tax challenges were submitted to the VO. However, this government department was merged under HMRC in April 2026.
Due to this, there was a delay in the publication of the council tax challenge data. The official publication highlighted that as the new data collection system is still being tested, these latest figures are provisional, and historical comparisons and detailed list changes have been left out for now.
Additionally, HMRC noted that because challenges are recorded by their registration date, administrative delays meant some cases weren't officially logged until April 2025. These were rolled into the 2025-26 data rather than 2024-25, which may have artificially inflated the number recorded as received in the past year.
Is the success rate going down?
Over the past six years, the proportion of council tax challenges resulting in a lower band across England and Wales has fallen from 31% to 15%.
Between 2020-21 and 2023-24, success rates remained fairly stable, moving gradually from 31% down to 27%, with the total resolved challenges ranging between 38,070 and 56,820 each year.
Success rates then dropped sharply over the following two years, falling to 16% in 2024-25 and 15% in 2025-26.
Across the entire six-year period, the majority of challenges resulted in no change, consistently making up between 60% and 66% of outcomes.
Despite the lower success rate in 2025-26, the total number of successful reductions rose to 10,764 because the total number of resolved challenges increased to 71,320 across both countries.
- Find out more: Council tax calculator 2026-27
Why are homes in the wrong council tax band?
Although there is no official figure, the common assumption is that hundreds of thousands of homes are in the wrong council tax band.
Council tax bands are based on property values from April 1991 in England and Scotland, or April 2003 in Wales. Northern Ireland uses a separate 'domestic rates' system based on capital value.
The original checks for council tax banding were completed quickly, which led to significant inconsistencies, where identical neighbouring houses were frequently placed in different bands. Building work also has an effect on your council tax banding, with extensions and partial demolitions causing bands to go up or down.
While Wales carried out a full revaluation in 2005, England and Scotland have never done so. No plan to do this has been brought forward by the government.
A recent Which? survey of 15,000 people found that 89% have never questioned their banding, while only a small 8% minority have actually taken action. We also spoke to three people who challenged their council tax bands, revealing the difficulties they faced, the outcomes and their tips for others considering a challenge.
How to challenge your council tax band
If you want to challenge your band, then you will need to contact HMRC in England and Wales, or the Scottish Assessors' Association (SAA) in Scotland.
Challenges in England and Wales are split into three categories: band reviews, proposals and appeals.
- A band review is an informal request made to HMRC to report a suspected inaccuracy. To get a review opened, you must provide strong supporting evidence upfront – such as lower-banded matching properties. Outcomes from a band review cannot be appealed to an independent tribunal.
- A proposal is a formal statutory challenge. You can only submit one under limited circumstances – most commonly within the first six months of becoming liable for council tax on a property. Although you aren't legally required to provide evidence upfront just to get a proposal accepted for review, you will need it to succeed.
- An appeal can be lodged with the independent Valuation Tribunal within three months in England if your formal proposal is rejected.
Does how you challenge affect success?
Yes, the route you take appears to affect your chances of getting a lower council tax band.
Informal reviews tend to have higher success rates than formal proposals, although this may partly reflect the evidence required before a review is considered.
In England, informal reviews were more than three times as likely to result in a lower band as formal proposals in both 2024-25 and 2025-26.
The most common route also differed by country: formal proposals accounted for most resolved challenges in England, while appeals made up the majority in Wales.
In Wales, 42% of informal reviews resulted in a lower band in both years, compared with 36% in 2024-25 and 34% in 2025-26 in England.
- Find out more: Paying council tax
