£165.40. That number leaves our joint account ten times a year for Sheffield City Council, and until last Thursday lunchtime I had never checked that it was the right one. I did it at my desk with half a cheese sandwich in one hand, typing our postcode into the government page for looking up a council tax band and scrolling down a list of the houses around us.
Where a band comes from
In England, bands are based on what a property would have sold for on 1 April 1991. Band A is anything valued at up to £40,000 on that date, and each band above it steps up from there. It has nothing to do with what the house is worth now, how many people live in it or what we earn. The Valuation Office Agency sets the band, and the council collects the money and decides the amount for each band every year.
Our house is in Band A. For 2025/26 that's £1,654, split into ten instalments of £165.40 from April to January. Nothing is taken in February or March, which are my two favourite months of the year. It is the second biggest line in our monthly budget after the mortgage, and I've spent most of the year taking it for granted.
What I found when I looked
The checker lists every property near a postcode with its band, so it's easy to compare like with like. Ours is the end house of a row of four, and the other three, which are the same age, size and layout, are all Band A. So are the identical rows opposite and along the street. A few of the bigger houses higher up the hill are B and C, which looks about right. Nothing suggested we'd been put in a higher band than our neighbours.
In payroll I spend my days on deductions that come out on the same date every month and that nobody ever checks, so I should have known better. It was a useful reminder to look at my own.
What a challenge involves
You can ask the Valuation Office Agency to look at your band again. You do it online and give your reasons, usually by pointing to similar houses in a lower band. As I read the guidance, the easy window is the first six months after you become the bill payer, and ours closed at the end of July. After that, you generally need a reason such as a change to the property or the area. That's from my reading at the time, so check the current rules if you're thinking of doing the same.
The bigger point for us is that Band A is the lowest band there is. A review can lower a band, leave it alone or raise it, and for us "lower" isn't on the menu. All we could win by asking is the status quo, and all we could lose is a band. I don't need a spreadsheet for that decision.
The discount we can't have
A single adult living alone gets 25 per cent off. We're two adults, so we don't qualify. There are other discounts and reductions, for full-time students, for people on a low income, for empty properties, and I went down the council's list one by one. It took five minutes to rule every one of them out. Maureen gets the single person discount, and mentions it about once a quarter. "Ron always said the rates would have the roof off your head if you let them," she said when I told her what I was doing. She still calls it the rates, more than thirty years after it stopped being the rates.
It isn't a dramatic post. Nobody got a refund and nothing was fixed. I spent twenty minutes checking a number I'd been paying for ten months, and it was right. On the question of what we owe the council, we turn out to be the most ordinary house on the hill, which I find oddly comforting.
