Official Statistics

Leasehold term remaining 2023 to 2024: Technical summary

Published 21 May 2026

Applies to England

This document summarises the steps taken to generate the leasehold term remaining estimates for households in leasehold properties in England.

The lease term remaining estimate is an official statistic in development, to reflect the new approach used to combine EHS data with HM Land Registry leasehold data, and to give users an opportunity to provide feedback on the information. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact ehs@communities.gov.uk.

1. Data sources, weighting approach and differences to the leasehold dwelling estimate

Each year the department publishes estimates of the total number of leasehold dwellings in England. The latest dwelling estimates are available here leasehold dwelling estimate 2023-24. In this report we provide further information on the length of the leases associated with leasehold properties in England and the typical characteristics of households living in leasehold properties of various lease length.

The leasehold dwelling estimate is created by combining data from various sources:

• The English Housing Survey – contributes details of the proportion of dwelling types (terrace housing, detached, flats, etc.) belonging to each of the main tenure types (private rented, owner occupied, etc.).
• HM Land Registry – contributes details of the leasehold and freehold status of those addresses surveyed as part of the EHS. This is drawn from the Land Registry’s leases dataset: Registered Leases - Use land and property data. Not all of the properties sampled as part of the EHS can be identified on HM Land Registry’s datasets. The match rate with the most recent EHS results was ~ 96%.
• Valuation Office Agency – results are weighted so that total number of dwellings align with the overall England dwelling profile published by the Valuation Office Agency: Council Tax statistics.
• Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government - results are also weighted so that the total number of dwellings aligns with the overall England tenure estimates published by MHCLG: Live tables on dwelling stock (including vacants).

There are some key differences between the approach taken to produce the dwelling estimate and the approach used when estimating lease lengths.

The dwelling estimate is weighted to be representative of all dwellings in England. This includes vacant properties as well as properties that may be inhabited by multiple households. In contrast, this report on leasehold lengths is based on households. These are occupied dwellings where at least one person is resident, where we were able to interview a member of the household for the purposes of completing the English Housing Survey.

For this report, we are interested in the characteristics of those living in leasehold properties with different lease lengths. The results in this report are therefore weighted to be representative of households in England.

Both the leasehold dwelling and leasehold terms reports use combined EHS data from across two years of fieldwork. The 2023-24 results use EHS survey data collected between 2022/23 and 2023/24. This is to ensure full geographic coverage of England in the results. The EHS randomly selects addresses from the postal address file. Addresses are stratified by:

• Region
• Urban/rural classification
• In some designs, deprivation or tenure indicators (derived from area level data)

Addresses are clustered into Primary Sampling Units (PSUs), typically postcode sectors or groups of sectors. Only a subset of PSUs is selected in any single year. A weighting strategy is used to ensure national representativeness within each year by tenure, dwelling type, regional location and certain household characteristics.

This ensures broad balance within each survey year, even though not all areas are covered every year.  The EHS operates a rotating PSU design, where one set of PSUs is visited in Year 1. A different, complementary set is visited in Year 2. Over two consecutive survey years, all PSUs in the design are covered. This means that smaller areas (such as local authorities/ sub-regional areas) are not typically representative on an individual year basis. Because the leasehold status of properties can vary significantly across local geographies, and because leasehold status is not specifically accounted for in the annual weighting strategy, we combine 2 years of data to ensure all national leasehold properties have a chance at selection.

The combined 2 year dwelling sample is based on those dwellings where a physical survey was undertaken. For resource reasons and due to rates of respondent agreement to physical surveys, this is around half of those dwellings where a household survey was undertaken. In contrast, as the household survey requires only that an interview with the household is undertaken, this report utilises the full sample of all households that were surveyed across the two years. This increases the sample size and enables greater accuracy, particularly when exploring findings for smaller sub-groups within the overall sample, such as Leaseholders.

Further information on the sampling approach, the differences between household and dwellings and how this impacts data collected can be found in the English Housing Survey: technical advice.

In addition to this report and the leasehold dwellings estimate, MHCLG also publishes separate reports and factsheets on leaseholders based solely on responses to the English Housing Survey. These reports are limited to owner occupiers who self-identify as leaseholders and therefore should not be directly compared to the leaseholders on which the findings in this report are based (although there will be significant overlap between the two groups).

2. Calculation of the lease term remaining

All leasehold properties should include a lease term which details the length of the lease associated with the property before ownership reverts back to the freeholder. Details of this lease term are included on the property title documents held by HM Land Registry.

The lease term information is recorded as an open response on the title information and  occasionally prone to mistakes such as missing information, transcription errors and typos. This information needs to be converted to a numeric format to enable analysis. We have corrected obvious mistakes when processing the data for this report (such as correcting “Janaury” to “January”). Where data are missing, we have occasionally made a subjective assessment to calculate lease information for the purposes of later analysis. For example, some title documents omit granular detail, stating instead “lease term runs from January 1900 until February 2800”. In this example we would assume dates of 01/01/1900 and 01/02/2800.

Some lease term information was completely missing or prevented a reasonable subjective assessment to be made. In these instances we have categorised the information as unknown.

The annex tables published alongside this report typically include grouped information on lease length remaining together with the overall mean average.

3. Accounting for properties with more than one lease

Properties can be associated with multiple leases. There are many potential reasons for this. Common examples include where the overall freeholder creates numerous sub-leases for the purposes of managing multiple properties within the same building, or where ownership is split across multiple groups (such as in the case of shared ownership). The most “junior” lease is typically the one associated with the owner of the property. This would be the most recently granted lease and is typically shortest lease associated with the property, as a junior lease cannot end later than the more senior lease under which it is granted. When analysing differences in lease length between households, we have therefore focused on the shortest, or most junior, lease associated with the property and household.

For the purposes of this analysis we are primarily interested in the lease term remaining (rather than the term when the lease was initially created). It is the term remaining which affects factors such as property value and costs of extending the lease. The lease term remaining is calculated from the first day of the month in which the survey was undertaken.

4. Exclusions

Some properties may be associated with leases outside the scope of the Leasehold and Freehold reforms. This includes those associated with home reversion plans, airspace and parking space leases, etc. It is not possible to exhaustively review each lease to determine the nature of the lease; however, attempts were made to exclude certain leases where parking or airspace was referenced in the property description. We also excluded from the analysis those leases where it could be determined they were initially granted with fewer than 21 years (27 excluded). For the leasehold dwelling estimate no attempt is made to exclude leases initially granted with fewer than 21 years.

For some properties the shortest lease term we were able to match in HMLR records had already expired (i.e. the end date associated with the lease was prior to the month in which the survey was undertaken). This is indicated on the tables.