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The Council Tax charge is partly based on the value of a property and partly on the number of adult residents. The property element and the person element each amount to 50 per cent of the charge.
Details of some of the discounts/reliefs are listed below under the related documents section of this page and application forms are also available on the Forms page of this website, to enable you to apply for any relevant reduction.
The basic bill assumes that there are two adults resident in the property. If there are more than two, the charge is not increased, but if there are fewer than two, a discount can be granted.
This discount amounts to 25 per cent of the total charge, in other words, half of the personal element of the charge.
When counting the number of adult residents in a property, certain categories of people are not included. For this reason they are known as "disregarded persons". A brief description of these categories is shown below:
In order to assess whether you qualify for discount, count up the number of adults in your household and then exclude anyone in the disregarded categories above.
A property may have a resident count of zero either because it is empty, or because all the inhabitants are disregarded, for example, a family consisting of a student and a person still on Child Benefit.
If you, or someone who lives with you, need a room, or an extra bathroom or kitchen, or extra space in your property to meet special needs arising from a disability, you may be entitled to a reduced Council Tax bill.
The bill may be reduced to that of a dwelling in the band immediately below the band shown on the valuation list (if the dwelling is in Band A, the reduced charge is calculated as five ninths of a Band D charge).
These reductions ensure that disabled people do not pay more Council Tax on account of space needed because of a disability.
The following documents are in Portable Document Format (PDF). You can download the PDF software for free from the Adobe website (opens in a new window)