From 1 October 2026, any development in England of 10+ homes (or 30+ student bedspaces) owes the levy, regardless of height.
Building control won't issue your completion certificate until the levy is paid.
The levy's cost depends on your building's floorspace and your local authority's rate.
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Your 12-unit terrace is finished. Snagging's done, the final list of fixes cleared, plumbers and electricians off site. All that's left is a signature.
Then building control calls. It's not about a defect, but a compulsory fee nobody on your team flagged six months ago, and they won't sign off until it's settled.
That's the scenario a lot of developers are going to run into if they’re not aware. From 1 October 2026, a new government levy attaches to most residential building control applications in England, and it has to be paid before that certificate gets issued.
It's called the Building Safety Levy, and it's part of the wider Building Safety Act. This isn’t about how high your building is, but how many people it can accommodate. If it’s anything over 10 units, you’re part of the levy.
The Building Safety Act is the law that reshaped how England regulates high-risk residential buildings after the Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 72 people. It created a new regulator, the Building Safety Regulator, to oversee high-risk buildings.
This gave owners more hands-on safety duties even after construction ended. And the taller the building, the higher up the risk goes, literally. For anything 18 metres or taller, or 7+ storeys, the approval process splits into three checkpoints called gateways:
Gateway 1: The planning stage.
Gateway 2: The pre-construction stage.
Gateway 3: The pre-occupation stage and the completion certificate checkpoint.
The building safety levy is part of the building control application process, the formal submission of plans and supporting documents sent to a building control body like your local council.
Section 58 of the Building Safety Act 2022 created the levy, but nobody knew what it would actually look like until the Building Safety Levy (England) Regulations 2025 gave all the details. It doesn't come into full force until 1 October 2026.
The simple rule: if you're submitting a building control application for a development with 10 or more homes, or 30 or more student bedspaces, you owe the government a charge based on the building's floorspace and land value.
Local authorities set their own rates, and they're nowhere close to consistent, from £12.70 per square metre in County Durham to £100.35 in Kensington and Chelsea.
Don't pay it, and you won't get a completion certificate, which means you can't legally hand the building over, sell it, or let anyone move in.
After Grenfell, the government committed billions of taxpayer money (£5.1 billion so far) to fix unsafe cladding and other building safety defects on existing buildings. The levy is a way to shift some of that cost off taxpayers and onto the industry instead, developers building new homes now help pay for fixing the mistakes of the past.
The government expects the levy to raise around £3.4 billion over the next 10 years. It's the direct financial follow-through of the Building Safety Act's promise: the industry that built the risk helps pay to fix it.
And like mentioned earlier, not every project has the same levy rate. Check your local authority's published number before you budget anything. It's also worth setting the levy up as its own cost line in your construction accounting software from day one, so the charge is built into the project budget rather than discovered at handover.
But not every project pays. Here's what actually qualifies for a building safety levy exemption:
Under 10 dwellings, or under 30 student bedspaces
Affordable and supported housing, plus anything built by a non-profit registered provider of social housing
Healthcare and care settings like NHS hospitals, care homes and hospices
Accommodation tied to vulnerable groups like children's homes and domestic abuse shelters
Institutional accommodation like armed forces personnel, prisons, hotels and hostels and school (not university) student housing
If your project doesn't fall into any of those categories, you have to pay a levy, and missing that payment is the one thing that can cost you your completion certificate.
Staying compliant with the building safety levy is a lot of paperwork. That's where digital tools help. Platforms like Mitti (by SafetyCulture) can turn levy compliance into a tracked checklist item on every project.
Exemption evidence: Logging registration numbers, funding agreements or planning permission class for any project claiming an exemption
Floorspace calculations: Recording gross internal area figures used to work out the chargeable amount
Local authority rate confirmation: Tracking which rate applies to a project based on its location
Payment status: Flagging whether the levy has been paid before a completion certificate gets requested
Documentation trail: Keeping everything filed against the right building control application, so nothing's scattered across separate spreadsheets or inboxes
This also isn't new to developers. The Donaldson Group, a UK housebuilding supplier with over 150 years in the industry, used to run its building safety audits the old-fashioned way, with paper.
Digitizing that process with Mitti turned scattered paperwork into something searchable and provable on demand. That's exactly the shift the levy now forces elsewhere: don't just do the compliant thing, keep the records that prove you did it.
“In three year’s time, if a customer wants to see exactly how their house was constructed or their kitchen installed, they have a full record.”
