The drawings are done. The groundworker is pencilled in for the second week of November. And the building control application — the one piece of paper nobody is thinking about — is sitting in someone’s drafts folder, waiting to be sent.
This autumn, that folder is expensive. From 1 October, the date on that application decides whether your scheme pays a tax that didn’t exist the day before. On a modest development the difference can run to tens of thousands of pounds. Here’s what’s coming, and the one piece of admin worth doing in the next ten weeks.
A tax on new homes, priced by postcode
The Building Safety Levy is a new government charge on new residential buildings in England. It exists because of the cladding crisis: the state is paying to fix unsafe buildings, and it has decided the house-building industry should fund a share of that work. The regulations were made law last November, and the levy switches on for applications made on or after 1 October 2026.
It works like this. When you create new homes — new build, or converting something like an office block into flats — you pay a charge on every square metre of residential floorspace you create. The rate depends on which council area the site sits in, weighted by local house prices: from £12.70 a square metre in County Durham up to £100.35 in Kensington and Chelsea. The council collects the money and passes it to central government.
The person who pays is the “client” named on the building control application — the party the work is being carried out for. On most schemes that’s the developer. If that’s you, keep reading.
The date on the form
Building control is the sign-off process that checks work against the building regulations — the technical rules about how buildings must be put together. It’s separate from planning permission, which is about whether you may build at all. Before starting a scheme you submit an application for building control approval, either to the council’s building control team or through a private approver.
The rule is brutally simple. An application submitted on or after 1 October 2026, for a scheme of ten or more dwellings, pays the levy. An application submitted before that date doesn’t — ever. Even if it’s amended later, the exemption holds.
Do the arithmetic on a real scheme. Twelve houses at roughly a hundred square metres each is 1,200 square metres. At a mid-range rate of £30, that’s £36,000. One form. One date.
And no, you can’t dodge it by splitting the scheme into batches of nine. The threshold is judged on the planning permission, not the application — if the permission is for ten or more homes, every building control application under it is chargeable, however small each one is.
The parts your spreadsheet doesn’t know
Every developer I’ve sat with runs scheme appraisals in a spreadsheet. Those spreadsheets have lines for land, build cost, fees, and the planning charges everyone already knows about. None of them — yet — has a levy line. And the levy has enough moving parts that “we’ll remember it” won’t survive contact with a busy pipeline. The rate changes by council. The charge is per square metre, per plot. Social housing is exempt — including the affordable units a private developer builds under a planning agreement — as are care homes and hotels, and housing associations don’t pay at all. Build on brownfield land — land that’s been developed before — and the rate is cut by half, but only if at least three-quarters of the site inside the planning boundary qualifies.
Then there’s the cash flow. The levy has to be paid in full before the completion certificate can be issued — the document that says the work is signed off, which you need before homes can be occupied. So the bill lands at the end of the job, precisely when the money is stretched tightest and everything depends on completing sales. A five-figure payment sitting between you and your completion certificate is not something to discover in the final month.
The fix is not dramatic. A rate lookup by council. A levy line in the appraisal. A payment sitting in the forecast in the month before completion. If you run one scheme at a time, add the line to your spreadsheet this week and you’re done. Where purpose-built software starts earning its keep is when you carry a pipeline: a register of live schemes, each holding its council area, floorspace per plot, split between market and affordable homes, and brownfield answer, so the levy appears in the bid, the appraisal and the cash flow without anyone having to remember it exists.
But before any of that, do the ten-week job. Between now and the end of September, someone in your business should own a single list: every scheme with planning permission that could get its building control application submitted before 1 October. That’s not software. That’s a Tuesday afternoon and a decision — and it may be the best-paid afternoon of your year.
Where this doesn’t apply
If you build in Scotland or Wales, this levy is England-only. If you only ever build for developers — you’re the contractor, someone else is the client on the application — it isn’t your tax, though expect it to show up in your clients’ sums and, eventually, in what they’re prepared to pay you. Schemes under ten dwellings are exempt. So is anything built by a housing association. And if your pipeline is one small site every couple of years, a note in the job file beats any system I could build you.
But if you carry a pipeline of residential schemes and your appraisal template hasn’t changed this year, this is a line worth adding before October adds it for you. Get in touch.