UK Long-Term Empty Homes: A Signal for Off-Market Investors

The national picture: more homes standing empty, and for longer

According to MHCLG's Local Authority Council Taxbase in England 2025 release, published in November 2025 and revised in January 2026, 542,260 dwellings were recorded as empty for council tax purposes as of 10 September 2025, excluding those that are formally exempt. That is up 8.0%, around 40,000 homes, on the 502,263 recorded in 2024.

A subset of that total, 152,928 dwellings, was being charged the Empty Homes Premium, the additional council tax levied once a home has been empty for a year or more. That is up 27.9% on 2024's 119,606, a much steeper rise than the headline empty homes figure. The breakdown by length of vacancy shows most of the growth sitting in the earlier bands: 58,631 properties have been empty for one to two years, 68,673 for two to five years, 17,179 for five to ten years, and 8,445 for ten years or more.

Separately, MHCLG records 212,004 further dwellings that are unoccupied but formally exempt from council tax, most commonly because the owner is in a care home or hospital, the property is tied up in probate, or it is otherwise legally uninhabitable. Of that group, 124,100 fall under Class F, the exemption specifically for homes left empty by a deceased person. That is the one place this official dataset already draws a direct, published line between empty housing stock and probate. Altogether, 758,000 dwellings in England, 2.9% of all stock, are exempt from council tax in some form, up 1.3% on the year.

For a more genuinely comparable long-term measure, the ONS and GSS Coherence Team's reconciled figures put England's homes empty six months or more at 303,185 in 2025, up 11.4% on 272,257 in 2024. One thing worth flagging: an earlier, pre-revision cut of the same underlying series, analysed independently shortly after the original November 2025 release, put the 2025 figure at 309,856. That is not a second, conflicting data point. It is the same series before MHCLG's own subsequent revision, and the two numbers should not be quoted side by side as though they disagree.

Comparing the four nations: same word, different rulebooks

The ONS's own 2026 UK-wide coherence report is explicit that "empty home" is not measured the same way across the UK, and any comparison needs that caveat attached. England counts a property as long-term empty once it has been unoccupied for six months. Scotland and Wales use a twelve-month threshold. Northern Ireland measures vacancy through its domestic rates system entirely, a different legal and tax framework that the ONS itself says is not comparable to the other three nations at all.

With that caveat firmly in place, here is where each nation stood in the most recent data:

• England: 303,185 empty six months or more, 1.2% of dwellings.
• Scotland: 44,453 empty six months or more, 1.6% of dwellings; 73%, or 32,337, have been empty a full year or more under Scotland's own stricter measure, up 2% on the year. Highland has the largest number in absolute terms, 3,879 properties, 12% of the national total. The highest rates per 10,000 dwellings are in Argyll and Bute, Aberdeen City, Na h-Eileanan Siar and Shetland. On the positive side, 2,066 previously empty properties were brought back into use in 2024 to 2025, up 10% on the year.
• Wales: 23,033 empty twelve months or more, 1.5% of dwellings, per Welsh Government Council Tax Dwellings data. One secondary industry aggregation puts Swansea highest among individual Welsh local authorities, at 2,014 properties, though this has not been independently checked against a primary Welsh Government table and should be treated with some caution.
• Northern Ireland: 21,472 vacant properties, 2.6% of stock, via Land and Property Services' domestic rates data, explicitly flagged by the ONS as not comparable to the other three nations.

Where the empty homes are: the ten local authorities with the most

MHCLG does not publish its own ranked local authority table, but Property Investments UK's analysis of the Council Taxbase Table 1.16 data, cross-referenced against HM Land Registry average sold prices, gives a workable picture of where the largest numbers sit in England for 2024. Treat this as a third-party compilation of official data, not an official government ranking.

The raw count and the rate tell different stories. The highest vacancy rates cluster in the North East and North West, while London itself spans a huge range, from 0.12% in Wandsworth to 2.77% in Kingston upon Thames. A borough with a modest absolute number of empty homes can still carry one of the highest vacancy rates in the country.

What is this stock worth, and why that number needs care

Property Investments UK also estimates the aggregate value of England's long-term empty homes by multiplying the count against average Land Registry sold prices. On that basis, the 272,257 long-term empty homes recorded in 2024 were worth an estimated £79.1bn, up from £75.1bn in 2023, £74bn in 2022, £66bn in 2021 and £69.7bn in 2020, and roughly double the £41.4bn estimated for 2013. This is a useful order-of-magnitude figure, not an official government statistic, and it should be labelled as an estimate every time it is quoted. We have deliberately not extrapolated a 2025 or 2026 figure from this series and presented it as sourced data, since no primary release has published one.

GalimAI's lens: reading empty homes alongside probate and company distress

The one place the official data already draws a direct line between empty housing and probate is Class F, the 124,100 homes exempt from council tax specifically because they were left empty by someone who has died. Beyond that single, official crossover point, no government body or data provider currently publishes a combined dataset linking empty-homes records to company-distress data such as Companies House dissolutions, strike-offs or insolvencies.

That gap is exactly where GalimAI's own analytical approach sits, and we want to be precise about what that is and is not. It is our proposed lens for reading this data, not a claim that a ready-made combined dataset already exists. A long-term empty home is often connected to one of a small number of underlying situations: an estate working through probate, a landlord company in financial difficulty, or a dissolved special purpose vehicle that once held the freehold. Treating a long vacancy as a prompt to check who actually owns a property, rather than as proof of any single cause, is a genuinely useful discipline for anyone sourcing off-market opportunities. We have not built, and are not presenting here, a specific correlation statistic tying empty homes to company distress; that would go beyond what the published data currently supports.

What this means if you are trying to reach these owners

An empty home does not come with a for-sale board or a phone number. The council tax and coherence data above tells you the scale of the opportunity and roughly where it concentrates, but turning that into a genuine lead means identifying the actual owner, often through HM Land Registry title records or, where a company is involved, Companies House filings, then approaching them in a way that respects a situation that may involve bereavement, financial strain or simple inertia. Our guide to how to contact UK property owners covers the practical channels available and which to use first depending on the type of owner involved. Where probate specifically looks like the likely driver behind a vacancy, our guide on how to find probate property in the UK goes into the company and director signals that tend to flag an estate sale before it lists. Both sit alongside our broader UK property market statistics for 2026 for a wider view of where distress signals are concentrated this year.

Common questions

How many homes in England are officially classed as empty long-term?

303,185 properties in England had been empty six months or more as of 2025, according to the ONS and GSS Coherence Team's reconciled reading of MHCLG data, up 11.4% on 272,257 in 2024. A wider council tax measure, which also counts shorter vacancies, puts total empty dwellings at 542,260.

Why did the number paying the Empty Homes Premium jump so much?

The 152,928 dwellings charged the Premium in 2025 were up 27.9% on 2024's 119,606. The Premium applies once a home has been empty a year or more, so the rise reflects both newly vacant properties crossing that threshold and existing vacancies simply persisting for longer.

Can I compare England's empty homes rate directly with Scotland's or Wales's?

Not without an important caveat. England defines long-term empty as six months or more, while Scotland and Wales use a twelve-month threshold, and Northern Ireland measures vacancy through a different domestic rates system entirely. The ONS's own 2026 comparison explicitly warns against treating the four nations' figures as directly comparable.

Does a long-term empty home mean the owner wants to sell?

Not necessarily. Homes stay empty for many reasons, including probate, renovation delays, absent landlords or simple inertia, and the data itself does not indicate an intention to sell. It is best used as a starting signal worth investigating rather than evidence of a live opportunity on its own.

This is general information, not financial or legal advice. Figures are drawn from MHCLG, ONS/GSS, Scottish Government, Welsh Government, Land and Property Services NI, and third-party analysis of official data, each attributed above; always check the primary source before relying on a figure.