Back in 2024, the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act passed with considerable fanfare. Ministers lined up to call it a landmark moment for millions of homeowners stuck in a system many described as feudal. Two years on, the picture is considerably less triumphant. Millions of leaseholders across England and Wales are still paying escalating ground rents, still battling opaque service charges, and still finding it eye-wateringly expensive to extend their lease or buy the freehold outright. Leasehold reform UK 2026 is, for most people actually living through it, a promise that has yet to arrive.
The scale of the problem is not trivial. According to the Department for Levelling Up’s leasehold dwelling statistics, there are around 5 million leasehold homes in England alone. That is roughly one in five of all dwellings. The majority are flats, but somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million are houses, a fact that strikes many people as particularly absurd, since leasehold houses offer none of the building management rationale that at least partially justifies the model for blocks of flats.
What the 2024 Act Was Actually Supposed to Do
The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 contained some genuinely meaningful measures. It abolished new leasehold houses (mostly). It made it easier and cheaper to extend a lease or buy a freehold by changing the calculation method used to set the price. It extended lease extension terms from 90 to 990 years. And it gave leaseholders greater rights to challenge unreasonable service charges through the First-tier Tribunal.
The problem is the gap between legislation passing and secondary legislation actually coming into force. Most of the Act’s key provisions require further statutory instruments before they take legal effect. As of mid-2026, those instruments have been slow to materialise. The Law Commission’s enfranchisement valuation reforms, arguably the part leaseholders care about most because it determines what they pay to buy their freedom, are still not fully implemented. For people sitting on leases below 80 years, where the dreaded “marriage value” calculation kicks in and costs rocket, the wait has real financial consequences.
Ground Rents: The Promised Ban That Has Caveats
The Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022 banned ground rents on new residential leases, restricting them to a nominal peppercorn. That was real progress. But the critical word there is “new”. Existing leaseholders with ground rents doubling every ten years, or tied to the retail price index, received no retrospective relief. Their contracts remain legally binding. Some are paying annual ground rents of £500 or more that will double again within the decade, making their flats effectively unmortgageable and difficult to sell.
The Competition and Markets Authority investigated ground rent practices and secured voluntary commitments from some developers to remove the most egregious doubling clauses. Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, and others made high-profile pledges. Whether those pledges have been universally honoured, and whether they cover every affected property in every development, is a different question. Campaigners at the National Leasehold Campaign continue to document cases where leaseholders are still trapped, and their caseload has not dried up.
Service Charges: Still a Black Box for Most Residents
Ground rents get the headlines, but service charges are often where the money really bleeds out. Managing agents can charge for everything from lift maintenance to insurance, garden upkeep to building management fees, with limited transparency and even more limited accountability. The 2024 Act gives leaseholders improved rights to request information and challenge charges at tribunal, but exercising those rights still requires time, money, and confidence that most people juggling jobs and families simply do not have.
There is also the insurance racket. It has been well documented, by the FCA among others, that managing agents and freeholders were taking substantial commissions from buildings insurance policies without declaring them to leaseholders, who were footing the entire premium. The FCA cracked down on this in 2023, but enforcement is patchy and legacy arrangements persist in some blocks.
Who Is Actually Buying and Selling in This Environment?
For anyone moving house or investing in property right now, leasehold status has become one of the first questions on the checklist. Mortgage lenders are nervous about short leases and escalating ground rents; some refuse to lend on them entirely. This freezes out buyers, depresses values, and leaves current owners stranded. Homeowners across the East Midlands and beyond are navigating this carefully. Based in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, Lister Group offers a full suite of property services including mortgages, lettings management, and buy-to-let advisory work (lister-group.co.uk), and the leasehold question comes up constantly for clients who are either moving house or looking to build a property portfolio. When you are investing in property, knowing whether you are buying a freehold or a leasehold with a problematic ground rent clause is not a footnote, it is the deal.
The buy-to-let market has its own complications here. Being a landlord with a leasehold flat means you are simultaneously a leaseholder yourself, subject to the freeholder’s service charges and building management decisions, whilst also managing your own tenants. The costs stack. If the service charge rises sharply, due to a major works programme, say, and there is no effective right to challenge it quickly, landlords can find themselves squeezed between a freeholder above and a tenant below, with no good exit.
The Political Football Problem
Part of why leasehold reform UK 2026 remains incomplete is that it has been used as a political football for the better part of a decade. The Conservatives announced reform. Labour announced reform. Both passed legislation. Neither party has moved at the pace leaseholders needed, partly because freeholders and large developers carry considerable political and financial weight, and partly because the secondary legislation required to operationalise reform is genuinely complex and resource-intensive for civil servants to draft.
There is also a structural tension in the flat market. Commonhold, where all flat owners collectively own the freehold of the building, is the alternative that most other European countries use as standard. The government has expressed support for expanding commonhold as the default tenure for new flats. But converting existing leasehold blocks to commonhold requires consensus among all owners and is administratively daunting. Progress has been glacial.
What Leaseholders Can Actually Do Right Now
The situation is not entirely without remedy. Leaseholders whose lease has more than two years remaining can apply to extend under the current statutory route. Groups of leaseholders in a block can pursue collective enfranchisement to buy the freehold together if they meet the qualifying criteria. The Leasehold Advisory Service (LEASE) offers free guidance on both processes, and it is worth using before instructing a solicitor.
For those buying leasehold property now, the homework matters enormously. Check the ground rent, check the escalation clause, check the remaining lease term, and scrutinise recent service charge accounts before exchanging. Any property professional worth their salt, whether you are using a solicitor, a mortgage broker, or a firm like Lister Group helping clients moving house or investing in property across the Nottinghamshire region, should be flagging these checks as non-negotiable due diligence.
The deeper frustration is that none of this should still be necessary. The political will to fix leasehold was declared years ago. The legislation exists. What remains is execution, and on that count, leaseholders have been waiting long enough. The secondary legislation needs to follow through, and it needs to do so before another generation of homeowners signs contracts they will spend a decade trying to escape.
Frequently Asked Questions
Has leasehold been abolished in England and Wales?
New leasehold houses have been effectively banned under the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, but leasehold flats remain the norm and millions of existing leasehold homeowners are still subject to their original contracts. Full abolition of leasehold has not happened.
Can I still be charged ground rent on my leasehold flat in 2026?
If your lease predates the Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022, your existing ground rent obligations remain legally enforceable. The 2022 Act only restricted ground rents on new leases. Retrospective reform for existing leaseholders has not been implemented.
How much does it cost to extend a leasehold in the UK?
Costs vary significantly depending on the lease length remaining, the property value, and the freeholder. Leases below 80 years attract an additional “marriage value” payment that can push costs into tens of thousands of pounds. The 2024 Act aims to reform the valuation method, but the relevant secondary legislation is not yet fully in force.
What is commonhold and why isn't it used more widely in the UK?
Commonhold is a tenure where flat owners collectively own the freehold of their building, removing the landlord-tenant dynamic entirely. It is standard across most of Europe. In the UK, it was introduced in 2002 but rarely used due to legal complexity and developer preference for leasehold. The government has committed to expanding it, but progress has been slow.