UK Business Rates

Rateable values for every non-domestic property in England and Wales, straight from the Valuation Office rating list, with the floor by floor valuation behind each one.

🔍 What does UK Business Rates do?

UK Business Rates reads the Valuation Office rating list, the official register of every shop, office, warehouse, pub, surgery, car park and mast that pays business rates in England and Wales. Give it a postcode and it returns each rated property at that address with its current rateable value, the date that value took effect, every earlier value the property has held, and the floor areas and rates per square metre the valuer used to arrive at the figure.

The quickest way to try it is the prefilled postcode: press Start and you get nine High Street properties in Bath with their rateable values in about fifteen seconds. From there you can widen out to a whole street, a whole town, an entire billing authority, or one property type across the whole country, and you can bound any of those by a rateable value range.

It runs on plain HTTP with no browser and no proxy. The rating list is a public register and the Valuation Office publishes it openly, which is why this Actor needs nothing from you beyond a search.

📊 What data can I extract from the rating list?

Every row is one rating list assessment. The uarn is the Valuation Office's own identifier for it and is stable between runs.

Field	Type	What it is
uarn	string	Unique Authority Reference Number, the Valuation Office identifier for this assessment
address	string	Full address of the assessment as the rating list holds it, on one line
postcode	string	Postcode taken from the end of the address line
description	string	What the property is used for, in the Valuation Office's own words
rateableValue	number	Current rateable value in whole pounds, the figure the council multiplies to bill you
effectiveDate	string	Date the current valuation took effect, YYYY-MM-DD
ratingList	string	Which rating list the current valuation sits in, by revaluation year
localCouncil	string	Billing authority responsible for collecting the rates on this property
localCouncilReference	string	Billing authority reference, the number printed on the rates bill
specialCategoryCode	string	Special category or SCAT code, the finer of the two classifications
valuationSchemeReference	string	Reference of the valuation scheme, shared with the property's comparables
baseRatePerSquareMetre	number	Headline rate per square metre applied by the valuation scheme, in pounds
measurementMethod	string	Basis the floor areas were measured on, usually gross internal area
transitionalReliefCertificate	boolean	Whether a transitional relief certificate has been issued
totalAreaSquareMetres	number	Total measured floor area across every line of the valuation
floorAreaValue	number	Value of the measured floor areas before plant and adjustments
plantAndMachineryValue	number	Value added for plant and machinery, null when the valuation has none
adjustmentsValue	number	Total of the adjustments applied, negative when it reduces the value
totalValueBeforeRounding	number	Valuation total before it is rounded down to the rateable value
floorAreas	array	Line by line breakdown: description, area, rate per square metre and value
adjustments	array	Adjustments the valuer applied, such as a discount for poor access
valuationHistory	array	Every valuation period listed for the property, current one first
previousRateableValue	number	Rateable value of the period listed immediately before the current one
rateableValueChange	number	Current rateable value less the previous one, in pounds
rateableValueChangePercent	number	That change as a percentage of the previous value, to one decimal place
valuationUrl	string	Link to the Valuation Office page the row was read from
valuationDetailAvailable	boolean	Whether the valuation page was read. False only on a run with the valuation detail switched off
searchedBy	string	Which of the service's searches the run used to find this property
retrievedAt	string	When the run read the rating list, as an ISO timestamp

💡 Why pull rateable values from the rating list?

Rates reclaim casework. A rateable value is only right if the floor areas and the rates per square metre behind it are right. floorAreas gives you both, line by line, so an assessment that is measured too generously shows up as an area you can check against a plan rather than a number you have to accept.

Comparables for a challenge. valuationSchemeReference is shared between every property valued under the same scheme, and baseRatePerSquareMetre is the rate that scheme applied. Pull a whole street or a whole special category code and you have the evidence set in one dataset instead of forty browser tabs.

Revaluation impact. previousRateableValue and rateableValueChangePercent sit on every row, so a portfolio's exposure to the 2026 revaluation is one run and one sort. Sorting a town by percentage change is how you find the assessments worth looking at first.

Small business rate relief thresholds. Set maxRateableValue to 12000 or 15000 and you get every assessment in an area sitting at or under the relief thresholds in England, which is the population that a relief review is worth running against.

Property and asset sourcing. totalAreaSquareMetres with description and postcode is a floor area index for commercial stock that is not on any listings portal, because a rated property exists whether or not anybody is marketing it.

Council and portfolio reconciliation. localCouncilReference is the same reference printed on the bill, so a dataset keyed on it lines up directly with a rates ledger and shows which assessments in the ledger are no longer in the list.

🚀 How do I use UK Business Rates?

1. Click Try for free and sign in to Apify, or open the Actor from your Console.
2. Leave the prefilled postcode in place for a first run, or type your own.
3. To go wider, clear the postcode and set a town, a local council, or a special category code instead.
4. Narrow with description code, minimum rateable value or maximum rateable value.
5. Set maximum properties to return, which caps both the run and its cost.
6. Press Start, then open the Dataset tab and export to JSON, CSV, Excel or Google Sheets.

⬇️ Input

Field	Type	Notes
postcode	string	Full postcode or outward code. Matched by prefix, so BA1 also returns BA11
town	string	Switches to the advanced address search, the only one that takes street, number and value range together
street	string	Street name without the number
propertyNameOrNumber	string	Building name or street number
localCouncil	string	Billing authority by name, by four digit code, or by a unique fragment
localCouncilReference	string	The reference on a rates bill. An exact lookup for one assessment
descriptionCode	string	Valuation Office description code, by code or by name
specialCategoryCode	string	SCAT code, by number or by name
descriptionContains	string	Free text matched against the description after the results arrive
minRateableValue	integer	Lowest current rateable value to keep, inclusive
maxRateableValue	integer	Highest current rateable value to keep, inclusive
fetchValuationDetail	boolean	Read each property's valuation page. On by default
maxResults	integer	Cap on rows saved, which is the cap on cost
maxRecordsScanned	integer	Safety stop on how many search results are read

{
  "town": "BATH",
  "descriptionCode": "Shop and Premises",
  "minRateableValue": 25000,
  "maxResults": 200
}

⬆️ Output

Table view

Address	Postcode	Description	Rateable value	Effective from	Local council	Council reference	Area m2
Royal Mail, Manvers Street, Bath, BA1 1AA	BA1 1AA	Royal mail sorting centre	200000	2026-04-01	Bath and north east somerset	2670 5150 20	4324.11
18, High Street, Bath, BA1 5AJ	BA1 5AJ	Shop and premises	45250	2026-04-01	Bath and north east somerset	1990 0018 00	200.3

JSON

{
  "uarn": "2948482000",
  "address": "Royal Mail, Manvers Street, Bath, BA1 1AA",
  "postcode": "BA1 1AA",
  "description": "Royal mail sorting centre",
  "rateableValue": 200000,
  "effectiveDate": "2026-04-01",
  "ratingList": "2026",
  "localCouncil": "Bath and north east somerset",
  "localCouncilReference": "2670 5150 20",
  "specialCategoryCode": "217G",
  "valuationSchemeReference": "674501",
  "baseRatePerSquareMetre": 50,
  "measurementMethod": "Gross internal area",
  "transitionalReliefCertificate": false,
  "totalAreaSquareMetres": 4324.11,
  "floorAreaValue": 210008,
  "plantAndMachineryValue": 6785,
  "adjustmentsValue": -16259,
  "totalValueBeforeRounding": 200534,
  "floorAreas": [
    { "description": "Ground floor warehouse", "areaSquareMetres": 1809.67, "ratePerSquareMetre": 50, "value": 90484 },
    { "description": "Ground floor office", "areaSquareMetres": 203.1, "ratePerSquareMetre": 60, "value": 12186 }
  ],
  "adjustments": [
    { "description": "Access", "adjustment": "-7.5%" }
  ],
  "valuationHistory": [
    { "period": "1 April 2026 to present", "status": "Current", "isCurrent": true, "effectiveDate": "2026-04-01", "rateableValue": 200000 },
    { "period": "1 April 2017 to 31 March 2023", "status": "Previous", "isCurrent": false, "effectiveDate": "2017-04-01", "rateableValue": 125000 }
  ],
  "previousRateableValue": 141000,
  "rateableValueChange": 59000,
  "rateableValueChangePercent": 41.8,
  "valuationUrl": "https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/business-rates-find/valuations/start/2948482000",
  "valuationDetailAvailable": true,
  "searchedBy": "postcode",
  "retrievedAt": "2026-08-16T11:28:15.087Z"
}

Coverage

The rating list covers England and Wales only. Scotland keeps its own valuation roll through the Scottish Assessors and Northern Ireland keeps its own through Land and Property Services, and neither is in this dataset.

It covers non-domestic property, so a house has no entry unless part of it is rated separately, such as a home office assessed on its own or a holiday let. The current list is the 2026 list, compiled on 1 April 2026, and the valuation history on each property reaches back through the 2023, 2017 and 2010 lists where the assessment existed then.

The list is live rather than a snapshot, so a new assessment, a deletion or an alteration appears as soon as the Valuation Office publishes it.

How the searches behave

The Valuation Office offers several searches and they are not interchangeable. The Actor picks the one the service will accept from the fields you fill in, and it tells you in the log which of your filters it sent and which it had to apply itself.

You set	Search used	Sent to the service
Local council reference	Council reference lookup	The reference only
A town	Advanced address	Town, street, number, postcode, description code and value range
A local council	Advanced council	Council, description code and value range
A special category code	Advanced category	Category, description code and value range
A postcode on its own	Simple postcode	The postcode

Two of these accept parameters and then ignore them. The council search and the category search both take a street and a house number, return the identical result set either way, and never say so. Measured on Bath and North East Somerset: 9,623 results with no street, and the same 9,623 with a street. The Actor therefore never sends a street to those searches and filters on it here instead, which is slower but correct. The council reference lookup does the same thing with the rateable value range.

The service also repeats itself while paging. Ten pages of a council search returned 150 rows containing 117 distinct properties, some appearing three times. Every row is deduplicated on uarn, so a repeat is never saved or charged twice.

Rateable value ranges

The service applies a value range against every valuation period a property has ever had, not just the current one. A search for 0 to 199,999 returns a property whose current rateable value is 200,000 if an earlier list had it lower, which is not what anybody means by the filter.

So the range is sent to the service as a fast pre-filter and then checked again here against the current rateable value, and anything that only qualified on an old valuation is dropped. On High Street in Bath with a minimum of 50,000 the service returned 15 properties and four of them had a current value below the bound.

This second check needs the valuation page, so it only applies while Include the full valuation is on. With detail switched off you get the service's own looser behaviour, and the run says so in the log.

Limits and speed

The service will not page past 10,000 results whatever total it reports, so a search wider than that needs splitting by postcode district or by description code.

If the service stops answering partway through a large job, the run finishes with the properties it had already read rather than throwing them away, and the run status says how many that was. You keep what you paid for and nothing else is charged.

With the full valuation on, the run reads one page per property, so a hundred properties is a hundred and seven requests. Requests go out two at a time with a pause between them and the run backs off when the service asks it to, which keeps a large job polite rather than fast. Switching the valuation detail off drops that to one request per fifteen properties, at the cost of the rateable value and everything else on the valuation page.

Data source

Every row comes from the Valuation Office Find a business rates valuation service at tax.service.gov.uk/business-rates-find, which has been part of HMRC since 1 April 2026. The rating list is a public register that anyone may inspect. Publication of the valuation information is restricted to non domestic rating purposes under the service terms and conditions, so use it for rating work: reviewing an assessment you have an interest in, or comparing it against others, on your own behalf or a client's.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.001 per property returned, plus the standard $0.00005 Apify charges once when a run starts. Nothing else.

So a run that pulls every shop on one high street, say 60 assessments with their full valuations, costs $0.06005. A thousand properties across a whole council area costs $1.00005. Ten thousand, which is as far as the service will page, costs $10.00005.

Paid Apify plans pay less per property: $0.00085 on Bronze, $0.0007 on Silver, $0.0006 on Gold, $0.0005 on Platinum and $0.0004 on Diamond. That same thousand property run is $0.40005 on Diamond.

You are charged for properties the Actor actually delivers. A search that matches nothing returns nothing and costs nothing beyond the run start, and a property whose valuation page could not be read is left out rather than handed to you blank, so it is not charged for either.

maxResults is the cap on both rows and cost, so setting it is how you bound a run in advance: maxResults 50 cannot cost more than $0.05005. Narrowing with a description code, a special category code or a rateable value range keeps you from paying for assessments you were only going to discard afterwards, because those filters run on the service side before anything is saved.

🔌 Integrations

Send results straight to Google Sheets, Slack, Airtable, Zapier, Make or your own webhook using Apify integrations. Runs can be scheduled, so a monthly job that re-reads a portfolio by council reference and appends the current rateable value to a sheet takes about a minute to set up. You can also trigger a run from another tool, which is the usual way to attach a rateable value and a floor area to a new record in a CRM.

🔗 Using UK Business Rates with the Apify API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/spookyweb~uk-business-rates/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "town": "BATH",
    "descriptionCode": "Shop and Premises",
    "minRateableValue": 25000,
    "maxResults": 200
  }'

Start a run without waiting for it and collect the dataset later:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/spookyweb~uk-business-rates/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "localCouncil": "WESTMINSTER", "descriptionCode": "Public House and Premises", "maxResults": 500 }'

The Apify API reference covers runs, datasets, webhooks and schedules. Client libraries exist for JavaScript and Python.

❓ FAQ

What is a rateable value?

It is the Valuation Office's estimate of a property's open market annual rent on a fixed valuation date. It is not the rent you pay and it is not the rates bill. Your council multiplies the rateable value by a multiplier and then applies any reliefs to get the bill.

Does it cover Scotland or Northern Ireland?

No. The rating list is England and Wales. Scotland is on the valuation roll held by the Scottish Assessors and Northern Ireland is with Land and Property Services, and neither publishes through this service.

Can I get the rateable value for one specific property?

Yes, and the cheapest way is localCouncilReference with the reference printed on the rates bill, which returns that single assessment. Failing that, use the full postcode with a property name or number.

How do I get every rated property in one council area?

Set localCouncil to the council name or its four digit code and leave the address fields empty. Bath and North East Somerset returns 9,623 assessments. Narrow with a description code or a rateable value range if you want a slice rather than the lot.

Why is my rateable value different from my rates bill?

The bill is the rateable value times the multiplier, less reliefs, plus any transitional adjustment. transitionalReliefCertificate tells you whether a transitional certificate has been issued. Estimate your business rates bill on GOV.UK does the arithmetic.

What is a SCAT code?

A special category code, the Valuation Office's finer classification of what a property is. 217 is post office sorting centres, for example. Searching on one alone returns that kind of property across the whole of England and Wales, which is how a national comparable set gets built.

Why does my search return nothing?

Most often the property is domestic and therefore not on the rating list at all, or the postcode is outside England and Wales. A search that matches nothing finishes successfully with zero rows rather than failing, and the log says which of those it was.

Do I need a Valuation Office account or an API key?

No. The service hands out a session and a form token to anybody who asks, which is all the Actor uses.

Can I get the comparable properties for an assessment?

Not directly, but valuationSchemeReference is the key to them. Every property valued under the same scheme shares it, so pulling a town or a council and grouping on that reference gives you the comparable set.

⚖️ Is it legal to collect business rates valuations?

The rating list is a public register and anyone has a right to inspect it. The Valuation Office publishes the same figures on its own website, with no account, no sign in and no restriction on who may look at them.

Publication of the valuation information is restricted to non domestic rating purposes under the service's terms and conditions. That covers reviewing an assessment you have an interest in, comparing it against ones you consider comparable, and doing either of those as a representative or adviser acting for a ratepayer or a council. Use it for rating work, and pass the same terms on with the data if you pass the data on.

Two conditions are easy to miss and both are yours once you hold the data. Delete it when the business need ends, because the terms require it. And do not present it as official: the Valuation Office does not endorse this Actor or your use of the data, and the information is licensed as is with warranties excluded. Every run logs these terms and writes them to the key value store as TERMS_OF_USE, before it reads a single property, so a run that stops halfway still leaves them beside whatever it did return. They travel with the data rather than stopping at this page.

Nothing here is personal data. The rating list records property, not people: an address, a description, a floor area and a value. The Actor reads only pages the Valuation Office publishes openly, at a pace a person browsing the site would generate, and it signs in to nothing.

👍 Your feedback

Found a page shape the parser handles badly, or a filter that behaves differently from what is written above? Open an issue on the Issues tab of this Actor and it gets looked at. If you need a variation on this, a different set of fields, a scheduled portfolio re-read, or the same data shaped for your own system, say so in an issue and it can usually be built.

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