Five business rates multipliers, and a relief that became a rate.

Two changes land together and they are frequently confused. One is a revaluation, which changes what your property is deemed to be worth. The other is a restructuring of the rates applied to it.

Why relief becoming a multiplier matters

Retail, hospitality and leisure relief was a discount applied to a bill, announced in a Budget, renewed for a year at a time. Every autumn the sector waited to find out whether it survived.

A multiplier is not renewed. It is the rate, and changing it is a policy decision with a different process behind it. For a business planning a lease or an investment, that converts an annual uncertainty into something closer to a fixed input.

The trade-off is the £500,000 band at 50.8p, where the RHL distinction disappears entirely — so a large hospitality property is on the same multiplier as any other large property, funding the lower rates below it.

The revaluation is the part you can actually influence

The Valuation Office Agency revalues every three years, and the list taking effect on 1 April 2026 uses market values as at 1 April 2024. That two-year gap is deliberate and it is also the reason a valuation can feel wrong: it reflects a market that has since moved.

Three things follow for an occupier.

1. Check your new rateable value, not your bill. The bill is the value times a multiplier plus transitional arrangements. The value is the part you can challenge.
2. Know which side of £51,000 and £500,000 you are on. Those two thresholds are worth more than any negotiation, and a revaluation can move you across one without anything about your premises changing.
3. Do not assume your neighbour's experience is yours. Revaluations move different property types in different directions in the same street.

What this does not tell you

It is England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own systems with their own poundages and reliefs, and none of the figures above transfer.

It also omits transitional relief, small business rate relief and the various exemptions, all of which can change a bill substantially. The multiplier is one input, and a business planning around the table above without checking which reliefs it qualifies for will get the wrong number.

We are not rating surveyors and this is not advice on a specific property. What we would say generally is that the two thresholds are a scope rule of the kind worth writing down once, the same way a capacity figure or a user-to-user test is — cheap to settle, expensive to assume. The grid of what reaches whom is the same exercise across eleven duties.