Straight answers about business rates

No email, no account or login, no bank or payment details, nothing sensitive. We don’t ask for anything beyond what’s needed to find and compare the property.

It’s a starting point, not a verdict from HMRC.

Formally challenging a valuation is a separate step you’d take yourself, under "How the rating process works" below.

Run the Check, look at the result, and that’s entirely up to you to act on or not.

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Your council multiplies that by a rate set by government (43.2p in the pound for a small business in 2026/27) and applies any reliefs you’re entitled to, and that gives you the bill. We check whether the RV itself looks too high — that’s the number worth challenging.

Realistically it can take several months at the Check stage, and over a year if it goes all the way to Challenge. During that time you’re mostly waiting on HMRC — we handle the paperwork and evidence, you’re not stuck filling in forms yourself.

Vague comparisons or "it just feels too high" don’t carry weight with HMRC.

We build our comparison from published rating data, but to be clear: HMRC doesn’t endorse or back any third-party site, including ours — nobody gets that badge, so its absence isn’t a red flag specific to us.

Asking HMRC to look again at your valuation means they could decide it was too low, not too high, and raise it. This only happens if you go past the free Check into a formal Challenge, and we won’t push you into that step if the evidence isn’t strong enough to be confident — we’ll tell you plainly beforehand.

Our Check gives you an evidenced starting point, but the final decision sits with HMRC and depends on the specific evidence for your property. It’s "worth investigating properly," not "certain to succeed."

It can still be worth confirming your RV is accurate for the future, since relief can taper or your circumstances can change, but don’t expect a refund from a Check in this situation.

Think of it as a data-based comparison that flags when your valuation is worth a closer look, not a legal opinion. If your case is strong enough to pursue formally, you can choose to have us help with the HMRC Check, or be introduced to an independent RICS-qualified chartered surveyor for a more complex Challenge — that’s a separate step you’d knowingly agree to, never something that happens automatically.

Instead of floor area and a £/m² comparison, the VOA values them on receipts and expenditure: broadly, what the business could reasonably be expected to turn over, worked back to a rateable value. That’s a different SCat (property-type) category, and there’s no consistent £/m² comparable to check it against — so our free Check can’t give you a reliable "in line with the market or not" result for these property types the way it can for a shop or office. Rather than show you a comparison that would be misleading, we flag these as not yet checkable. If you run one through the Check, this is why you won’t see the usual comparison — the right next step for this type of property is a surveyor experienced in licensed or leisure valuations, who can review the actual trade figures behind the assessment.

Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland run separate rating systems, so a comparison built on English rating-list data wouldn’t apply to a property there.