The data desk for Britain's most-ignored tax break.
Council tax bands have barely moved since 1991 — so hundreds of thousands of homes sit in the wrong one. Here's the open evidence, ready to chart, embed and localise to your patch.
01 The story in the data
The most regressive tax in Britain.
Bands are frozen at 1991 values, so the bill barely tracks what a home is worth today. The most-regressed tenth of areas pay about 3.4× the share of their home's value that the least-regressed tenth do — and the gap is so wide that a Burnley home worth £105,000 is charged more in pounds than a Westminster home worth nearly £1m.
= bill ÷ median home value
02 Where challenges win
Success rate by region
Share of resolved challenges that won a lower band, rolled up from every authority with data.
England & Wales average: 27% · regional rollups from the live league-table dataset
03 The league table
Councils with the best odds
Top authorities by challenge success rate, FY2023-24. Ranking restricted to the 82 authorities with 150 or more resolved challenges, to keep small samples out.
| # | Authority | Region | Resolved | Success rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Westmorland and Furness | North West | 460 | |
| 2 | Cumberland | North West | 340 | |
| 3 | Stockport | North West | 260 | |
| 4 | Cheshire West and Chester | North West | 270 | |
| 5 | Powys | Wales | 150 | |
| 6 | Somerset | South West | 900 | |
| 7 | Lambeth | London | 230 | |
| 8 | South Gloucestershire | South West | 240 | |
| 9 | Kirklees | Yorkshire and the Humber | 270 | |
| 10 | Northumberland | North East | 190 |
04 Embed library
Interactives, themed to your house style
Drop any of these into a story. They carry only a light "Data: BandCheck" credit and theme to your colours. Build and copy a snippet in the Embed Studio.
05 The open feed
Every table as JSON and CSV
Read-only, CORS-open, rate-limited, with an OGL attribution line in every payload. Append
?format=csv and Datawrapper, Flourish and Excel read it straight
from the URL.
Council tax bands have barely moved since 1991, so hundreds of thousands of homes sit in the wrong band. Where households do challenge, more than a quarter win a reduction — yet most never try. — BandCheck, ready to quote
Methodology & sourcing
- Challenge outcomes: VOA Council Tax: challenges and changes (England & Wales, March 2024).
- Effective rates: VOA band-D charges ÷ HM Land Registry median prices.
- National headline taken from the VOA's published totals, not summed per-LA (avoids April-2023 reorg double-counting).
- Per-authority rates use a 150-resolved-challenge volume floor. We never publish per-address valuations.
FY2023-24 is the latest published year; the next VOA release was postponed. All figures Open Government Licence v3.0. BandCheck is not affiliated with the VOA or HMRC.
06 About & contact
Morgan Hall is the creator of BandCheck and an open-data developer. The commercial side — £4.99 appeal packs — funds BandCheck's open-data tools, which are free for anyone to use, embed and republish.