Apply for empty property relief
You do not have to pay business rates on empty buildings for three months. After this time, most businesses must pay full business rates. You can only tell us that a property will become empty six weeks in advance.
Before you start
Do not apply if your property is used for storage as this is seen to be occupied.
You will need
- Business rates account number
Uploading supporting documents
We will ask you upload photos to show the property is empty.
- Accepted file types: Word (docx), Acrobat (pdf), Excel (xlsx), Plain text (txt)
- Zip files can't be uploaded
- We also accept photos taken on phones and tablets and the following image file types - jpeg, gif, png
- There is a maximum individual file size per document of 50MB
What happens next
We may send an inspector to check that the property is empty. You do not need to be there for the visit.
We aim to give you an answer within 20 working days. This may take longer if we need to contact you for more information.
Please check My transactions for updates.
This form should take approximately three minutes to complete.