What the VOA changed (August 2026)
Built from our own weekly ingest of the rating listThe public register listing every business property's Rateable Value. The current list is the '2026 list', based on rental values from 1 April 2024.. Which rateable values the VOA altered last month, by sector and by authority, plus how many Checks and Challenges are being filed where.
These are alterations to the list, not a measure of property values. Rateable values on the 2026 list are set by reference to 1 April 2024 and stay fixed for the life of the list — they change when a property is altered, split, merged or recategorised, or when the VOA corrects its own valuation.
Updated monthly, one month in arrears Amended properties, before and after
Checks and Challenges by authority (August 2026)
Top five by volume in August 2026
| Authority | No. of Checks/Challenges (August 2026) | Checks | Challenges | 3-month average | vs 3-month average | Last 6 months |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Westminster | 162 | 162 | 0 | 17 | +835%† | |
| Camden | 155 | 155 | 0 | 11 | +1268%† | |
| Birmingham | 66 | 66 | 0 | 11 | +500%† | |
| Reading | 46 | 46 | 0 | 3 | — | |
| West Berkshire | 38 | 38 | 0 | 3 | — |
Cases are matched to an authority on the billing-authority code, which is present on every case record. Counts and trends are published to whole numbers. † marks a trend drawn from a series that is still establishing itself. Our record of formal cases begins in April 2026 and coverage has been building since, so a large percentage on these rows mostly reflects that build-up rather than a change in how often ratepayers challenge. The sparkline shows the shape. Where the three-month average is below five cases the percentage is not published at all — dividing by almost nothing produces a number, not a measurement.
Checks and Challenges by sector (August 2026)
All sectors, August 2026
| Sector | No. of Checks/Challenges (August 2026) | Checks | Challenges | 3-month average | vs 3-month average | Last 6 months |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Offices | 651 | 639 | 12 | 366 | +78%† | |
| Other | 509 | 497 | 12 | 218 | +133%† | |
| Industry | 445 | 436 | 9 | 186 | +139%† | |
| Retail | 291 | 277 | 14 | 170 | +71%† |
Sector is the VOA’s own four-way grouping — Retail, Offices, Industry and Other — taken from the property’s SCat code against the VOA’s published Stock of Properties file. It is the same grouping as the RV change table below, so the two can be read together. Where we cannot match a case to a property, or the VOA has not mapped its SCat code, the case is counted in Other; that is currently about one case in twenty.
RV change by sector (August 2026)
Only the 2,282 properties the VOA amended
| Sector | Amended | Cut / raised / flat | Change in £/m² | % change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Retail | 571 | 257 / 140 / 174 | −£3.46 | −1.8% |
| Offices | 504 | 216 / 71 / 217 | −£6.75 | −2.2% |
| Industry | 848 | 392 / 189 / 267 | −£0.21 | −0.4% |
| Other | 359 | 131 / 133 / 95 | −£2.54 | −2.8% |
RV change by authority (August 2026)
By total change in rateable value, across the 8 authorities with at least 20 properties that moved
Biggest risers
| Authority | Amended | Cut / raised / flat | Net change in RV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shepway | 21 | 1 / 20 / 0 | +£0.05m |
Biggest fallers
| Authority | Amended | Cut / raised / flat | Net change in RV |
|---|---|---|---|
| City of London | 64 | 25 / 21 / 18 | −£2.16m |
| Westminster City | 33 | 30 / 1 / 2 | −£1.48m |
| Cornwall | 35 | 19 / 11 / 5 | −£0.20m |
| Sheffield | 34 | 15 / 8 / 11 | −£0.18m |
| Sandwell | 27 | 14 / 7 / 6 | −£0.15m |
Derived from Valuation Office Agency data published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. These figures are our own analysis and are not official statistics: they are unaudited, they describe only the properties the VOA altered, and they may be restated as the VOA revises its files. Rateable values on the 2026 list are set by reference to 1 April 2024.
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