Business rates when you let a yard for lorry parking

After liability, this is the second question landowners ask, and it usually arrives about a week later than it should. If I let part of my yard to lorries, what happens to my business rates?

The honest answer has two halves. For a lot of small yards the bill comes to nothing, because of a relief most owners do not realise applies to them. And if your land is currently exempt because it is agricultural, that exemption does not come with you into a lorry park.

What follows is general information so you can ask better questions. The Valuation Office Agency sets values and your council sends bills, and a rating surveyor is the person to ask about your particular site. This is not rating or tax advice.

How a bill is actually put together

Three steps, and only the first is a judgement call.

The Valuation Office Agency gives the property a rateable value. Your council multiplies that by a multiplier set nationally. Then any reliefs you qualify for come off the top.

For 2026 to 2027 in England, for anything that is not a retail, leisure or hospitality business, gov.uk gives the multipliers as 43.2p where the rateable value is below £51,000, 48p from £51,000 to £499,999, and 50.8p at £500,000 and above. A yard sits in the first band unless it is very large indeed.

So the arithmetic is not mysterious. Take a hypothetical rateable value of £20,000, which is an illustration and not a prediction for your site: at 43.2p that is a gross bill of about £8,640 a year before any relief. What the number actually comes out at depends entirely on the value the Valuation Office puts on the land, and that varies by region, by surface, by access and by what the land is being used for.

The relief that decides it for most small yards

Small business rate relief is the part worth reading twice.

Gov.uk is specific. If the rateable value is £12,000 or less and it is your only property, you pay no business rates at all. Between £12,001 and £15,000 the relief tapers from 100 per cent down to nothing, and gov.uk's own worked example is a rateable value of £13,500 getting 50 per cent off.

There are conditions once you hold more than one property. You keep relief on your main property for 36 months after taking on a second, if you took it on from 27 November 2025. After that you only keep it if none of your other properties has a rateable value above £2,899 and the total across all of them is under £20,000, or £28,000 in London. Your council decides eligibility, so the conversation is with them.

For a yard letting a handful of spaces, the practical question is simply whether the Valuation Office lands above or below £12,000. That single number is usually the difference between a real annual cost and none.

If your land is agricultural, read this part twice

Gov.uk lists agricultural land and buildings used for agricultural purposes, including fish farms, among the properties exempt from business rates.

The words carrying the weight are used for agricultural purposes. The exemption is attached to the use, not to the field. Parking somebody else's lorries is not an agricultural purpose, however agricultural the gatepost looks.

The illustration rating people reach for is a grain store. Store your own grain in it and it is agricultural and exempt. Let it to the farmer down the road and it has stopped being used for agriculture, and it becomes rateable. Letting hardstanding for third-party HGVs sits on the same side of that line.

The reassurance is that it is the part used for the non-agricultural activity that gets assessed, not the whole farm. You are not putting the holding at risk by letting the corner by the road. But it is a genuine change to the rating position of that corner, and it is far better known about before the first lorry than eighteen months later with arrears attached.

Who actually gets the bill

Rates follow occupation, not ownership, and that is worth understanding because it decides whether this is your problem at all.

If you let a defined area exclusively to one operator, who gates it, controls it and runs it as theirs, they may well be the rateable occupier and carry their own assessment. If you are letting spaces night by night, keeping the keys and the run of the yard and deciding who comes in, you are in occupation and it is yours.

That is the same distinction that governs what you are liable for if something goes wrong on the land, so it is worth being deliberate about which of the two arrangements you are actually running, and writing it down.

Three things to do before the first lorry

Look the property up. The rating list is public and searchable from gov.uk, so you can see what, if anything, is already assessed and at what value.

Tell your council what the land is being used for. Finding out from them is always worse than telling them.

If the land is agricultural, speak to a rating surveyor before you start rather than after the first bill. It is an hour of somebody's time against a liability that runs annually.

One timing note. The Budget is on 28 October, and multipliers and reliefs are exactly the sort of thing a Budget moves. The figures above are the ones in force for 2026 to 2027 as gov.uk states them today, so check them again afterwards rather than working from this page in March.

The size of the thing

For most small yards this is either nothing, because of small business rate relief, or a few thousand a year set against the income from the spaces. It is a line in the sums, not a reason to leave a yard empty.

The failure mode here is not the bill. It is not knowing the bill exists.

If you have a yard with room on it and you would rather work out the numbers with real enquiries in front of you, listing takes a few minutes and is free to use for your first 12 months. Put it on HGV-Parking.co.uk and see what the demand looks like first.