Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates

If you rent privately, Housing Benefit does not simply pay your rent. It pays the lower of your eligible rent and your Local Housing Allowance rate. LHA is a maximum, set for your area and your household size, and it is the cap that most private tenants meet first. Understanding it means understanding two things: your Broad Rental Market Area and how many bedrooms your household is allowed.

What a Broad Rental Market Area is

England, Scotland and Wales are divided into Broad Rental Market Areas, or BRMAs. Each BRMA is an area in which a person could reasonably be expected to live, with access to shops, schools and services. The Valuation Office Agency sets an LHA rate for each BRMA for each bedroom category. Your postcode decides your BRMA, and neighbouring streets can fall in different BRMAs with different rates, so always check your own postcode rather than borrowing a neighbour's figure. The Valuation Office Agency's LHA search tool gives the rate for your area.

The bedroom categories

LHA rates run from a shared room rate up to a four-bedroom rate. The four-bedroom rate is the maximum: even if your household needs five bedrooms or more, the four-bedroom rate is the cap. The shared room rate applies if you do not have exclusive use of more than one room and you share a kitchen, living room, bathroom or toilet, and it also applies to most claimants under 35. The bedroom-need rules themselves, who is expected to share and who gets a room of their own, are set out on the bedroom tax guide, and the same sharing logic underlies the LHA bedroom count.

The 2026/27 freeze: why last year's table still answers this year's question

For 2026/27, LHA rates are frozen at the 30th percentile of market rents as determined on 31 January 2024, which means they are the same rates that came into force on 1 April 2024. Rents have moved since then, but the cap has not, so the gap between a market rent and the LHA rate is wider in many areas than it was when the rates were set. That gap is the shortfall you must cover yourself, unless a Discretionary Housing Payment helps. Rates are normally reset each January and apply from the following April, so check again each spring rather than assuming a frozen year will repeat.

Worked examples: two real BRMAs, April 2026

There is no national LHA rate, so this site prints no single table as if one existed. Instead, here are two published 2026/27 BRMA tables, so you can see the shape of the system and how much rates vary by place:

Read the table the way the council does. A two-bedroom household in the Portsmouth BRMA paying £250 a week in rent is capped at £194.47 before any means test, leaving £55.53 a week to find from other income even before income is taken into account. The same household in the Blackwater Valley BRMA would be capped at £230.14. Your own BRMA table is the only one that matters to your claim.

When LHA does not apply

LHA does not apply to council or social housing tenants, to registered fair rents, to supported accommodation, to hostels, caravans and houseboats, or where meals are included in the rent. It also does not apply to someone who has received Housing Benefit continuously since before 7 April 2008, unless they move or have a break in their claim, in which case the LHA rules start to apply. If you are in one of those special tenancies, contact your council rather than working from an LHA table.