Business Rates (Non-Domestic Rating List)
Every commercial property in England and Wales — 2.1 million of them — with its address, postcode, what kind of property it is, its floor area in square metres and its rateable value. Effectively a national register of business premises, free to download.
Property Construction & trades Facilities management Retail Professional & B2B services Business & companies
| Publisher | Valuation Office Agency (HMRC) |
|---|---|
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3 — Attribution to the Valuation Office Agency is required. what this means |
| Updates | Updated weekly |
| Cost | Free — open data |
| Last verified | 2026-07-16 |
What your business can use it for
Sales prospecting
Build a list of buildings that fit what you sell — offices over a given size, hotels, care homes, warehouses — filtered to your travel radius, with floor areas attached.
Property valuation
Ground a commercial valuation or a rent review in the VOA's own rateable values and £ per square metre for comparable properties nearby.
Market analysis
See the commercial property stock of any area by type and size — how much retail, office or industrial space there actually is, and what it is worth.
Site selection
Compare candidate premises on rateable value and floor area, and work out the rates bill before you sign anything.
Works with data you already have
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Your site, customer or territory postcodes
Postcodes
Postcode is field 15 of the list entries file; link to LSOA/LAD via the free ONS postcode lookup -
The names of businesses you deal with
Business names
The occupier name is often embedded in the composite address string — a fuzzy match, not a clean join
How to get it
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Bulk download
Rating list downloads — list entries and summary valuations
No account needed. The baseline files carry one row per property; the summary valuations add floor area and the £ per square metre used. Weekly change files sit alongside.
What's involved in using it
- The files don't use commas between values — they use asterisks — so opening them in a normal spreadsheet gives a jumbled mess until the software is told the right separator.
- There are no column headings at all; you have to line the data up against a separate specification document to know which column is the address, which is the rateable value, and so on.
- There's no clean shared reference to match a property to your own records, so linking it to your address list is a fuzzy text-matching job rather than a simple join, and some matches will be wrong.
Worth knowing before you start
- The files are asterisk-delimited with no header row — most spreadsheet tools will open them as one long column and give you nothing.
- England and Wales only. Scotland and Northern Ireland run separate valuation rolls.
- There is no UPRN, so joining to property datasets like energy certificates means matching on address text and postcode — expect it to be fuzzy.
- Rateable value is a valuation for tax purposes, not a rent and not a market price.
- Two record types share the same file: header rows and follow-on line items. Filter to record type 1 for one row per property.
Ask us about Business Rates (Non-Domestic Rating List)
Ask a factual question about Business Rates (Non-Domestic Rating List) — what it covers, how often it changes, whether it matches the records you keep — and we will answer, free. Or tell us what you are trying to work out, and we will tell you what it would take to get this data working next to the numbers you already have.