London Council Tax Calculator 2026/27: All 32 Boroughs Compared

London Council Tax 2026/27: Why a Flat Above Marble Arch Can Cost Less Than a Flat in Croydon

Every London council tax bill for 2026/27 is built from the same two layers regardless of postcode: a borough element that each of the 32 boroughs (plus the City of London) sets independently, and a Greater London Authority precept that is fixed at £510.51 at Band D across all 32 boroughs, or £176.38 in the City of London. The borough element is where almost the entire difference between London's cheapest and most expensive bills comes from: Wandsworth's total Band D bill of £1,020 sits £1,588 below Kingston upon Thames's £2,608, even though both households pay the identical £510.51 towards the Mayor, the Metropolitan Police, Transport for London, and the London Fire Brigade.

The Greater London Authority's own decision documents reveal a structural detail that almost no comparison site publishes: the £510.51 GLA precept is not one number, it is two. The Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) element — the part that funds the Metropolitan Police specifically — is calculated separately at £334.13 for the 32 boroughs. The remaining £176.38 funds the Mayor's office, the London Fire Brigade, and core GLA and transport-related functions, and this is precisely the amount the City of London pays on its own, because the City funds its own police force and does not contribute to MOPAC. In other words, the City of London's discounted GLA precept is not a rounded-down approximation — it is the exact non-police component of everyone else's bill, made visible because the City opts out of the Met Police funding line entirely.

All 32 London boroughs compared: Band D total and 2026/27 increase

The table below shows each borough's confirmed total Band D bill for 2026/27, including the GLA precept, alongside the percentage increase applied. Subtracting £510.51 from any total gives you that borough's own element in isolation.

The City of London is excluded from the ranked list above because its GLA precept (£176.38) is structurally different from every other borough's, making a direct Band D comparison misleading without also adjusting for the missing MOPAC element. As the smallest billing authority in England by resident population, with a tiny council tax base relative to its enormous commercial footprint, the City's own element has historically tracked close to Westminster's, but you should confirm the exact current figure directly with the City of London Corporation rather than assume it from this table.

The councils given permission to charge more, and chose not to

Five London boroughs were granted special government permission to raise council tax above the standard 4.99% referendum threshold for 2026/27. None of them used it. More strikingly, at least three of that group — Wandsworth, Westminster, and Merton — went in the opposite direction entirely, freezing the main element of their council tax and applying only the 2% Adult Social Care precept that every social-care authority in England is separately permitted to charge. The practical result: the boroughs with the most room to raise bills delivered the smallest increases in London for 2026/27, while boroughs with no special dispensation at all applied close to the full 4.99% as a matter of routine.

This is worth sitting with for a moment, because it inverts the pattern seen almost everywhere else in England, where special flexibility to exceed the standard cap (as granted to authorities like Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, Trafford, Warrington, and Windsor and Maidenhead) has typically been requested because a council needs the extra headroom, not despite not needing it. Wandsworth and Westminster's decision reflects their unusually large non-council-tax income base — commercial property rents, parking revenue, and a historically low-cost service delivery model — rather than any newly discovered efficiency. If you are choosing between renting in a borough with a frozen main element versus one applying the full 4.99%, the frozen-rate borough is not necessarily the better-run one; it may simply have a fundamentally different revenue structure that most London boroughs cannot replicate.

Inner versus Outer London: why banding, not just rates, drives your real bill

Comparison tables built purely on Band D rates understate a second and equally important variable: which band your actual property sits in. Inner London boroughs — Camden, Islington, Hackney, Lambeth, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, and Newham among them — have a housing stock dominated by converted Victorian terraces split into flats, which were valued lower in the 1991 valuation exercise than an equivalent-sized house, pulling a large share of Inner London's stock into Bands B and C even where current market values are extremely high. Outer London boroughs such as Bromley, Croydon, and Havering have proportionally more standalone Band D-F houses that were already larger, standalone properties in 1991.

The consequence is a genuine banding-versus-price disconnect unique to London's property market: a converted one-bedroom flat in Zone 2 worth £550,000 today might sit in Band C, while a three-bedroom semi in Zone 5 worth £480,000 might sit in Band E, paying meaningfully more council tax on a cheaper asset. This is a direct legacy of the 1991 valuation date rather than a reflection of current relative value, and it means that comparing "London council tax" purely by borough headline rate, without checking your specific property's band, can be actively misleading when deciding where to live.

Second homes and empty properties: London's buy-to-leave problem is different from the rest of England

The national empty property premium story that applies everywhere in England from 1 April 2026 — a 100% premium after just one year of vacancy, down from two — matters more acutely in London than almost anywhere else in the country, because of the scale of foreign-owned investment property left deliberately unoccupied, commonly described as "buy-to-leave." Kensington and Chelsea has proposed doubling council tax bills specifically for second home owners, following Wandsworth, Westminster, and Hackney, each of which has already introduced or extended a 100% second-home premium.

The financial logic differs from a seaside town's second-home problem. In a coastal authority, a second-home premium is primarily about redistributing housing supply back to local buyers. In prime central London boroughs, a meaningful share of premium-eligible properties are held by owners for whom an additional £1,000 to £3,000 a year in council tax is immaterial relative to a multi-million-pound asset, meaning the premium functions more as targeted revenue-raising than as an effective supply-side lever. If you are evaluating whether a premium is likely to change ownership behaviour in a specific London postcode, the average property value in that postcode relative to the premium size is a more useful predictor than the premium rate itself.

Three real-world London scenarios

Is moving borough for lower council tax actually worth it?

The arithmetic looks compelling on paper: moving from Kingston to Wandsworth at Band D saves £1,588 a year, or roughly £31,760 over twenty years before any inflation. In practice, council tax is rarely the deciding variable in a London relocation, and treating it as one risks a poor decision for three reasons. First, the borough-to-borough gap is dwarfed by rent and purchase price differences between most London boroughs — the same move that saves £1,588 in council tax typically involves a rent difference many multiples larger. Second, council tax bands were fixed to 1991 valuations, meaning a borough's headline Band D rate tells you nothing about which band your specific target property will actually be in. Third, service quality, school catchments, and commute time are generally far larger lifetime cost or benefit factors than a four-figure annual council tax difference.

Where the council tax comparison genuinely is worth prioritising: if you are choosing between two near-identical properties, in near-identical locations, at near-identical rent or price, purely across a borough boundary line (which does happen at edges like the Wandsworth/Lambeth or Bromley/Croydon boundaries), the council tax difference becomes one of the few remaining variables and is worth weighing seriously, since in that specific scenario little else differs.

Typical mistakes people make comparing London council tax

• Comparing headline Band D rates without checking the actual band. A borough's Band D figure is irrelevant if the property in question is Band B or Band F; the ninths scaling can move the real difference substantially.
• Assuming the GLA precept varies by borough. It does not, for the 32 boroughs — the entire visible difference in London bills is the borough's own element, aside from the City of London's structurally different police arrangement.
• Treating Wandsworth and Westminster's low rates as a template. Their commercial property income base is not replicable by most boroughs, so a low rate there does not indicate inefficiency elsewhere by comparison.
• Assuming Council Tax Reduction schemes are identical across boroughs. Each of the 32 boroughs (plus the City of London) sets its own working-age CTR scheme independently, with different maximum award percentages - a scheme offering 100% in one borough might cap at 70-80% in a neighbouring one.

2025/26 versus 2026/27: what changed across London

The GLA precept rose by £20.13 (+4.1%) at Band D, driven primarily by continued funding pressure on Transport for London and the Metropolitan Police, alongside a record £1.26 billion City Hall investment in policing and crime prevention for 2026/27 - nearly £100 million more than the previous year. Almost every borough applied the maximum permitted 4.99% rise to its own element, consistent with the national pattern of near-universal maximum increases in 2026/27. The clearest structural change was the divergence at the top of the flexibility scale: five boroughs gained permission to exceed 4.99%, and the response from at least three of them was to apply the lowest possible increase instead, a genuinely unusual outcome compared with 2025/26, when special dispensations were more consistently used in full.

Decision guide: who should act on this information

Discounts and reductions available across London boroughs

Universal Credit and council tax in London

If you receive Universal Credit, it does not automatically reduce your council tax in any London borough. Use our Universal Credit Calculator to estimate your UC entitlement, then apply for Council Tax Reduction directly with your own borough, since award levels and application processes are set locally rather than centrally by the GLA.

Explore your specific London borough

Detailed borough pages, including the full Band A-H table, precept breakdown, discounts, and local context for each authority, are listed below as they are published.

How to challenge your council tax band in London

Band challenges go to the Valuation Office Agency, not your borough council, regardless of where in London you live. Start at gov.uk/challenge-council-tax-band. This is particularly relevant in London given the scale of post-1991 flat conversions and loft extensions that may not have been reassessed consistently. You must continue paying at your current band throughout the process; a successful challenge is refunded and can be backdated.

Frequently asked questions