The State of Rental EPC Compliance 2026
Our headline study of the full GOV.UK EPC dataset, 27.6 million certificates covering 19.7 million homes: how far England and Wales are from the 2030 EPC C standard, what fixing it costs, and why your postcode decides your odds.
Key findings
Every figure below is reproduced verbatim from our verified findings file. National figures cover all 27,612,160 certificates. Regional figures are directional and drawn from a 75,000-home tenure sample.
49.6%
Almost half of England and Wales' assessed homes would fail the 2030 EPC C standard today
£67.7bn
Fixing them all carries a £67.7 billion bill
3.4x
A postcode is a 3.4x swing in the odds of failing
318 local authorities benchmarked
Every region has a wildly uneven internal spread
53.3% vs 61.5% below C
Private rentals are in BETTER shape than the homes owners live in
33.6% vs 21.0% solid-wall uninsulated
Landlords got there the hard way, with worse starting stock
£687 vs £919 a year
Tenants in rentals pay less to heat their homes than owner-occupiers
33.2% below C
Social housing leads everyone
1,222 a day
1,222 rented homes must be upgraded every day to hit the deadline
The postcode lottery
Same law, same deadline, same penalties. Whether a landlord can afford to keep letting a property is decided in large part by where it happens to sit. These figures are computed over the full 27,612,160-certificate GOV.UK dataset across all 318 local authorities, and are fully defensible as national numbers.
Homes below band C
49.6%
Of the 19.7 million homes in England and Wales that hold an Energy Performance Certificate, 9.8 million, 49.6%, sit below band C, the standard the government wants every rented home to hit by 2030.
Estimated cost to fix them all
£67.7bn
Bringing every sub-C home up to standard would cost an estimated £67.7 billion, a bill currently landing on individual owners and landlords rather than the state.
3.4x
A postcode is a 3.4x swing in the odds of failing
In the Isles of Scilly, 85% of assessed homes fall below band C. In Tower Hamlets, 24.9% do. A landlord's compliance risk is 3.4 times higher purely because of where the property sits.
Worst: Isles of Scilly (85% below C). Best: Tower Hamlets (24.9% below C).
The hardest-hit areas are rural, coastal and northern, not the inner cities
The ten worst-performing local authorities for EPC compliance are overwhelmingly rural, coastal and northern: Gwynedd, Pendle, Ceredigion, Blackpool, Burnley. All have older housing stock and lower rents to absorb upgrade costs.
The worst ten local authorities
- 1Isles of Scilly 85%
- 2Gwynedd 74.3%
- 3Pendle 74%
- 4Ceredigion 73%
- 5Castle Point 72.6%
- 6Blackpool 72%
- 7Hyndburn 71.2%
- 8Staffordshire Moorlands 70%
- 9Burnley 69.6%
- 10Denbighshire 69.5%
Every region has a wildly uneven internal spread
EPCGuide has benchmarked all 318 local authorities in England and Wales, letting any landlord or letting agent see exactly how their patch compares. It is the only dataset of its kind built from the full register and corrected for local government reorganisation.
See every area rankedThe reversal
The homes so often called substandard rentals are, on this measure, in better shape than the houses owners live in. Landlords have carried a decade of MEES rules that owner-occupiers never faced.
Read these as directional, not national. The figures in this section come from a 15-local-authority, 75,000-certificate tenure sample, the only tenure-broken-down data currently held. They are not presented as national figures. National tenure verification is pending the GOV.UK bulk certificate pull.
53.3% vs 61.5% below C
NationalPrivate rentals are in BETTER shape than the homes owners live in
Across all 19.7 million assessed homes in England and Wales, 53.3% of privately rented homes fall below band C, against 61.5% of owner-occupied homes. The rental stock the press calls substandard is, on this measure, eight percentage points ahead of the houses people own and live in, and it holds in 286 of 318 local authorities.
33.6% vs 21.0% solid-wall uninsulated
NationalLandlords got there the hard way, with worse starting stock
Privately rented homes carry far more of the hardest-to-treat housing stock. 33.6% have uninsulated solid walls, against 21.0% of owner-occupied homes, and they still come out ahead on EPC compliance.
£687 vs £919 a year
NationalTenants in rentals pay less to heat their homes than owner-occupiers
Modelled annual heating costs run to £687 for privately rented homes against £919 for owner-occupied homes, a £232 gap that follows directly from rentals' better efficiency.
33.2% below C
NationalSocial housing leads everyone
Social rented homes are the most compliant tenure in England and Wales at 33.2% below band C, against 53.3% for private rentals and 61.5% for owner-occupied homes.
The pattern across the sample is consistent: the more a tenure is regulated, the more efficient it is, with social housing ahead of everyone. We break the tenure comparison down in full in our rental versus owner-occupied study.
Methodology and scope
Every finding is national and computed over the full GOV.UK bulk domestic EPC register for England and Wales, downloaded August 2026. The unit is the HOME, not the certificate: the register holds 27,612,160 certificates covering 19,721,103 distinct properties, at about 1.4 certificates each, and only the most recent certificate for each property is counted. Deduplication matters because rented homes are re-assessed far more often than owner-occupied ones, usually straight after improvement works, so a raw certificate count over-weights recently improved rental stock. Certificate-level figures are still quoted where the source is the March 2026 API pull, and they are labelled as such. No figure in this file may be used in outreach unless it is reproduced here verbatim.
public/data/epc-national-2026.json (27,612,160 certificates, 19,721,103 homes, 318 LAs)
public/data/epc-full-dataset.json byTenure summed across all rows (28,625,767 certificates, March 2026 API pull)
Explore the data behind the study
Constituency EPC rankings
Every local area benchmarked against the national picture.
Rental vs owner-occupied gap
The full tenure comparison behind the reversal finding.
Interactive EPC map
The choropleth of all 318 local authorities.
Postcode EPC lookup
Check the compliance picture for your own patch.
EPC upgrade costs
What the works cost, and where the £67.7bn bill lands.