The Building Safety Levy commences on 1 October 2026 in England. It is charged per square metre of chargeable floorspace on applications for building control approval relating to dwellings, at a rate set separately for every local authority area. Before anyone panics: developments of fewer than ten units are exempt, and that exemption was written specifically to keep small sites out of it.
Article · 24 February 2026
The levy is imposed by The Building Safety Levy (England) Regulations 2025, SI 2025/1236, commencing 1 October 2026. It is England only.
Who pays: anyone submitting an application for building control approval relating to the provision of one or more dwellings and/or one or more purpose-built student accommodation bedspaces on or after 1 October 2026, unless exempt.
How it is calculated: an "applicable area rate" per square metre of chargeable floorspace, set for each local authority area in Schedule 3 to the regulations. Developments on previously developed — brownfield — land pay half the standard rate for that authority.
We are deliberately not quoting a figure. The rates are set authority by authority in Schedule 3, they vary substantially, and a rate for the wrong authority is worse than no rate at all. Before you price a site, get the rate for that specific local authority and establish whether the land is previously developed, because that halves it.
There are also exempt persons under regulation 13: non-profit registered providers of social housing and their wholly owned subsidiaries. Nothing they develop incurs the levy.
A builder doing one-off houses, small infill sites, extensions, conversions of under ten units and refurbishment. Outside the levy entirely. Note the threshold and move on.
A subcontractor — sparky, plumber, groundworker, roofer — on somebody else's site. The levy attaches to the person submitting the building control application, so it lands on the developer or the client, not on the trades working for them. Your indirect exposure is margin pressure on ten-unit-plus schemes, which travels down the chain the way all developer cost pressure does.
A small developer stepping up from nine units to eleven. This is the position where the levy becomes a real line in an appraisal for the first time, charged per square metre across the whole chargeable floorspace. The rate has to come out of Schedule 3 for the specific authority, and the brownfield question has to be answered, before the land is bought rather than after.
A developer appraises two versions of the same plot.
We have deliberately not substituted a number for £R. The rates are set separately for every local authority area in Schedule 3 to SI 2025/1236 and vary substantially, and we have not read that Schedule — so any figure we printed here would be a guess dressed as a fact. What the arithmetic does show is where the money actually turns: the two-unit step from nine to eleven moves you from nil to a charge on all 950 m², and the brownfield answer then halves it. Both of those are land-purchase decisions, not building-control ones.
The levy gets the attention because it has a number attached. The dutyholder and competence duties are the ones already in force and applying far more widely, and small trade businesses routinely do not know about them.
The Building Regulations etc. (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2023, SI 2023/911 apply to all building work from 1 October 2023 — not only higher-risk buildings. Dutyholders are clients, principal designers, designers, principal contractors and contractors. If you are a contractor carrying out building work, you are a dutyholder.
The core duty is competence: the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours, or organisational capability, for the work you are engaged to do. Dutyholders must also plan, manage and monitor their work, and cooperate, communicate and coordinate with the others. A client appointing a principal contractor must take all reasonable steps to satisfy itself that they meet regulations 11F(1)–(2) and 11H(1); for a principal designer it is 11F(1)–(2) and 11G(1).
Practically: when you are appointed principal contractor on a domestic project, the client has a legal duty to satisfy itself you are competent. Expect to be asked, and have something to show.
One honest limit. We have verified the duties in regulations 11F to 11H. We have not verified any separate requirement for a formal "competence declaration" document, a term you will see used freely online. Do not treat a template competence declaration downloaded from the internet as satisfying a legal requirement nobody can point to in the regulations.
On 27 January 2026 the Building Safety Regulator moved out of the HSE to become a standalone non-departmental public body sponsored by MHCLG, a step towards a single construction regulator. Its stated target is to respond to a Gateway 2 building control approval application for a new higher-risk building in non-complex cases in 18 weeks or less by the end of March 2027.
Separately, and relevant to far more businesses, a project is notifiable to HSE on form F10 where construction work will either last longer than 30 working days AND have more than 20 workers working simultaneously at any point, or exceed 500 person-days. That is an "and" in the first limb, not an "or" — and the second limb is the one people forget. Five hundred person-days is ten people for ten weeks, so an ordinary medium-sized job can be notifiable without ever having twenty people on site. The building safety guide has worked examples.
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Probably not. The levy commences on 1 October 2026 in England under SI 2025/1236 and is charged on applications for building control approval relating to dwellings or purpose-built student accommodation bedspaces — but developments of fewer than 10 units are exempt, an exemption written explicitly to protect SMEs and small sites. Affordable housing, care homes, supported housing, children's homes, NHS hospitals and several other categories are also exempt. A builder doing one-off houses, small infill sites, extensions, sub-ten-unit conversions and refurbishment work is outside it entirely.
No. The levy attaches to the person submitting the application for building control approval, which is the developer or the client rather than the trades working on the site. So an electrician, plumber, groundworker or roofer subcontracting on a levied scheme does not pay it and does not account for it. The indirect effect is margin pressure on schemes of ten units or more, because a new per-square-metre cost in a developer's appraisal travels down the supply chain the way all developer cost pressure does — but it is not a line on your own returns or your own invoices.
It depends entirely on the local authority, and there is no single national figure to quote. The regulations set an applicable area rate per square metre of chargeable floorspace separately for each local authority area, listed in Schedule 3 to SI 2025/1236, and the rates vary substantially between authorities. Developments on previously developed brownfield land pay half the standard rate for that authority. Anyone appraising a scheme of ten units or more needs the rate for that specific authority out of Schedule 3, plus a firm answer on whether the site is previously developed, before committing to the land.
Yes, and they have applied to all building work since 1 October 2023 under The Building Regulations etc. (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2023, SI 2023/911 — not just to higher-risk buildings. Dutyholders are clients, principal designers, designers, principal contractors and contractors, so a contractor carrying out building work is a dutyholder. The core duty is to have the competence — skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours, or organisational capability — for the work you are engaged to do, and to plan, manage and monitor it while cooperating with the other dutyholders. Clients appointing a principal contractor must take all reasonable steps to satisfy themselves of that competence.
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