What London councils charge for the same services — and how fast it is rising
Sixteen of London's 33 boroughs publish exactly what they charge for caretaking, grounds and lighting. The median is £12.40 a week and charges rose 3.8% — the same as inflation, and well below what the private leasehold market is doing.
TL;DR
- 16 of London's 33 boroughs publish what they actually charge, service by service, in their annual Cabinet papers — the only published, line-by-line service charge data in the UK.
- The median is £12.40 per dwelling per week for estate staffing plus grounds maintenance, ranging from £10.30 in Waltham Forest to £23.42 in Haringey.
- Charges rose a median of 4.2% — against September CPI of 3.8% and a 4.8% social rent cap. Exactly half the boroughs came in at or below inflation. Council charges are not outrunning it the way the private market is.
- Communal energy is the volatile line, swinging from −15% to +39%. That is reconciliation of past under- or over-recovery, not energy prices.
- Do not read a borough average as a target for your block. Hillingdon, the only council publishing its spread, charges £2.20 to £14.62 a week for caretaking depending on the block — a 6.6× range inside one borough.
Ask what a service charge should cost and you hit a wall almost immediately: almost nobody publishes their numbers. Private freeholders and managing agents have no duty to, so the market operates without a public price list, and the only figures that circulate are survey averages built on samples nobody can inspect.
Councils are the exception. Any council with a Housing Revenue Account has to set its tenant service charges every year, and that decision is taken in public — at a Cabinet meeting, with the papers published in advance. Sixteen London boroughs put an actual per-service rate table in those papers: so much a week for caretaking, so much for grounds maintenance, so much for communal lighting, with last year’s figure printed alongside for comparison.
That makes it, as far as we can establish, the only published, line-by-line, year-on-year service charge dataset in the country. This piece sets out what it shows — and, just as importantly, the three ways it will mislead you if you read it carelessly. If your borough is not among the 16, it is among the 13 that publish only a headline figure.
What the boroughs charge
The chart below is the like-for-like comparison: estate staffing (caretaking, cleaning, porterage, street sweeping, window cleaning) plus grounds maintenance. These are the two groups every rate-card borough publishes, which is what makes them comparable.
| Borough | 2025/26 | 2026/27 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Haringey | £22.40 | £23.42 | +4.6% |
| Kensington & Chelsea | £20.59 | £21.37 | +3.8% |
| Barking & Dagenham | £15.69 | £16.24 | +3.5% |
| Havering | £14.99 | £15.43 | +2.9% |
| Lewisham | £12.37 | £13.34 | +7.8% |
| Redbridge | £12.31 | £12.44 | +1.1% |
| Barnet | £11.92 | £12.37 | +3.8% |
| Hounslow | £11.21 | £11.73 | +4.6% |
| Southwark | £10.56 | £11.35 | +7.5% |
| Hackney | £11.44 | £10.92 | −4.5% |
| Hammersmith & Fulham | £9.76 | £10.74 | +10.0% |
| Waltham Forest | £9.76 | £10.30 | +5.5% |
The spread is 2.3× top to bottom — real, but far narrower than the raw published figures first suggest, and much of what remains is explained by how much service a borough actually buys. Haringey tops the table because it charges separately for street sweeping on estates; Kensington & Chelsea because it staffs mansion blocks with porters as well as caretakers. Neither is straightforwardly “expensive”.
What is rising, and what is not
The direction of travel is the more useful half of this data, and it is reassuringly dull.
Grouping every published head and comparing each borough with its own prior year:
| Service group | Boroughs | Range | Median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Estate staffing | 13 | −4.6% to +10.5% | +4.3% |
| Grounds maintenance | 13 | −4.4% to +13.9% | +4.6% |
| Waste and refuse | 3 | +2.9% to +3.4% | +3.2% |
| Communal energy | 12 | −15.0% to +39.1% | +1.1% |
Staffing and grounds — the labour-heavy services — cluster tightly just above inflation, which is what you would expect when wage growth is the main cost driver and councils are required to charge no more than the cost of providing the service. Across all published heads the median borough basket rose 3.8%, exactly September 2025 CPI.
This is worth sitting with, because it cuts against the prevailing story. Sector figures for the private leasehold market show charges rising well ahead of inflation, and the gap between a council block and a private one is widening as a result. If your private service charge went up 9% this year, “everything has gone up” is not, on this evidence, a complete explanation.
Communal energy is the volatile one — and not for the reason you would guess
One head refuses to behave. Communal energy — the electricity for lifts, stairwells and estate lighting, and communal heating where it exists — swings from a 15% cut to a 39% rise depending on the borough.
| Borough | 2025/26 | 2026/27 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hillingdon | £4.06 | £3.45 | −15.0% |
| Redbridge | £2.75 | £2.52 | −8.4% |
| Haringey | £3.45 | £3.24 | −6.1% |
| Waltham Forest | £6.64 | £6.64 | 0.0% |
| Southwark | £2.70 | £2.92 | +8.1% |
| Hammersmith & Fulham | £2.42 | £2.72 | +12.4% |
| Lewisham | £3.45 | £4.80 | +39.1% |
The obvious reading — that some boroughs got better energy contracts — is wrong. These councils buy energy through the same consortia in the same market. What actually drives the spread is reconciliation: whether a borough under-recovered its energy costs in a previous year and is now clawing back the shortfall, or over-recovered and is handing money back.
Lewisham says so plainly in its own report, which identifies a shortfall in recovery across caretaking, grounds, heating and communal lighting and sets 2026/27 charges at full cost recovery to correct it. Kensington & Chelsea moved the other way, cutting heat and hot water charges by up to 29.8% after introducing Ofgem-compliant annual reconciliation. Two councils, opposite directions, same mechanism.
The lesson generalises well beyond council stock: a large single-year movement in one line usually reflects a change in accounting, not a change in the underlying cost. When your own charge jumps, “what changed in how this was calculated?” is often a more productive question than “why did this get more expensive?”
Three reasons not to read these numbers too literally
This is where most comparisons of service charge data go wrong, so it is worth being explicit about the limits of our own.
1. A borough average hides an enormous spread
Hillingdon is the only council in London that publishes the distribution rather than the mean. It charges caretaking in eight bands, from £2.20 to £14.62 a week depending on the block — a 6.6× range inside one borough. Every other council’s single published figure is the average of something similarly shaped.
So a borough figure tells you what a council charges on average. It does not tell you what your block should cost, and a block at the top of its borough’s range is not thereby overcharged.
2. The denominator is unstated — and differs by service
Every rate is a total cost divided by a number of homes, and almost no council says which homes. Lewisham is the exception: it publishes the audited annual total alongside the weekly rate, so the division can be worked backwards.
| Service | Audited annual cost | Weekly rate | Implied homes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Caretaking | £3,317,466 | £7.11 | ~8,970 |
| Grounds maintenance | £1,431,404 | £2.98 | ~9,240 |
| Bulk waste | £806,574 | £0.87 | ~17,830 |
Lewisham has roughly 13,000 Housing Revenue Account homes. Caretaking divides across about 9,000 of them — houses do not get a caretaker, so that fits. But bulk waste divides across nearly 18,000, more homes than the council has tenants, so that cost must be spread over leaseholders as well. Three services, three different denominators, one council. This is the same apportionment question that decides what you owe on a private block, and it is why we do not rank boroughs on services like concierge or lifts, where coverage differences produce apparent gaps of 30× or more that are pure artefact.
3. These are tenant charges, not leaseholder charges
Everything above is what councils charge their tenants. If you bought your flat under Right to Buy you are a leaseholder, billed on a different basis — usually a share of actual costs under your lease, plus a management fee, plus buildings insurance, and typically reconciled to actuals after year end. Council leaseholders generally pay more than the tenant rate for the same services.
Only Enfield publishes leaseholder rates in the same way. Its 2026/27 figures give caretaking at £24.88 to £63.82 a month depending on the block, and buildings insurance at £20.13 a month for a one-bed rising to £80.55 for a four-bed. Treat the tenant tables above as a floor for what the same services cost, not as your bill.
If you are a council leaseholder
The published tenant rates are genuinely useful to you, because they tell you what your own landlord says the service costs. If your leaseholder charge for caretaking is far above the borough’s published tenant rate for the same service, that is a fair question to put in writing — the difference should be explained by your lease’s apportionment and the management fee, not left unexplained.
Your statutory rights are the same as any other leaseholder’s. Under Section 21 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 you can request a written summary of costs, and under Section 22 you can inspect the invoices and contracts behind it free of charge. Councils are generally good at responding to these, because the underlying figures are already in a public Cabinet paper. And the Section 19 reasonableness test applies to your council exactly as it does to a private freeholder: you pay only to the extent the cost was reasonably incurred.
Watch major works especially. The annual charges discussed here exclude them, and a Section 20 major works bill on a council block can dwarf several years of routine service charge — which is where most council leaseholder disputes actually arise.
If you are a private leaseholder
Use this as a sanity check on the labour-heavy lines, and only those. Caretaking, cleaning, grounds maintenance and communal lighting are broadly the same work on a council estate as on a private block, and a council is buying it at scale through a tendered contract. If your block is paying several times the London council median for cleaning a similar common area, that is worth asking about.
Do not stretch it further than that. Council stock is mostly walk-up blocks and estates with no concierge, no lift in many cases, and none of the amenities that legitimately drive costs in a modern development. A comparison on those services is not a comparison at all — and remember that the legal test is not whether your charge exceeds an average, but whether the specific cost was reasonably incurred for the work actually done.
How we compiled this
We reviewed all 33 London boroughs. Four have no Housing Revenue Account, having transferred their housing stock: Bexley, Bromley, Merton and Richmond upon Thames. Of the 29 that remain, 16 publish a per-service rate card in their 2026/27 rent-setting or HRA budget report — Barking & Dagenham, Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Hackney, Hammersmith & Fulham, Haringey, Havering, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Islington, Kensington & Chelsea, Lewisham, Redbridge, Southwark and Waltham Forest.
The other 13 publish only an aggregate — a blanket percentage uplift, a cap, or total HRA income — and so cannot be compared at this level: Brent, City of London, Croydon, Ealing, Greenwich, Harrow, Kingston, Lambeth, Newham, Sutton, Tower Hamlets, Wandsworth and Westminster. This is therefore a picture of just over half of London, not all of it. We have written separately about what those 13 do and do not disclose, and why a capped increase is a deferred one.
Every figure comes from the borough’s own published Cabinet or committee paper. Because councils name services differently — caretaking appears variously as block cleaning, estate cleaning, internal block cleaning, porterage and street sweeping — we map each council’s own labels onto common service groups and sum them within a borough before comparing anything. Comparing a single line across boroughs would systematically understate the councils that split their services across several lines.
Two boroughs are on an earlier cycle: Hounslow and Hackney figures compare 2024/25 with 2025/26, where every other borough compares 2025/26 with 2026/27. Hillingdon is excluded from the level chart because it publishes bands rather than an average, and Enfield because it publishes grounds maintenance but not staffing. Weekly figures are left weekly rather than annualised, because only Barnet states the number of weeks its charges are billed over, and assuming 52 where a council means 48 would overstate it by 8%.
The dataset and the code behind these figures are open, and each row records the document it came from. Figures are current as at 13 August 2026 and we refresh them each February when the new Cabinet reports are published. Our wider tribunal figures are on the statistics page.
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