Ground rent
How you can reduce your ground rent
It’s possible to reduce your ground rent by requesting a change to your lease, extending your lease or buying the freehold together with other leaseholders. These options can be expensive, but they may be worthwhile if you need to sell or remortgage your property.
The government is planning to make changes in the law to deal with unaffordable ground rent by capping ground rent for existing leases. Find out more about future changes to leasehold law and ground rent.
Changing your lease (deed of variation)
You can ask your landlord if they will agree to a change to the terms of your lease to reduce the ground rent or stop it from increasing.
However, your landlord does not have to agree to a change, or they may want to charge you a high fee for agreeing to it.
If your landlord agrees to the change and you agree to their fee, you will need to ask a solicitor to set out the change in a document called a deed of variation.
Some companies have already removed high ground rent increases from their leasehold contracts, after an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority into consumer protection law for leasehold housing.
Extending your lease through the formal route
If you extend your lease using the formal route, where you follow a set legal procedure, your ground rent will be changed to a “peppercorn rent”. This means you do not pay anything.
However, high ground rent in your current lease is likely to make a lease extension more expensive. This is because the cost of a lease extension includes an amount to compensate the landlord for the future ground rent that they’ll be losing.
Extending your lease through the informal route
If you extend your lease informally by negotiating an extension with your landlord, you will usually still have to pay ground rent on the same terms for the rest of the period of the original lease.
Your landlord cannot increase your ground rent as part of the lease extension, but they can leave it unchanged, and any clauses in your original lease such as regular increases or doubling can still apply.
Your ground rent must be changed to a peppercorn rent (zero) for the extra years that are added to your lease, after the original expiry date. But this might not happen for many years. For example, if your lease was 85 years and you extended it to 125 years, you would pay ground rent for the first 85 years, and then no ground rent for the next 40 years.
Leasehold reforms
It’s expected that changes to the law could make lease extension cheaper in future for properties with a high ground rent.
If you do not need to extend your lease quickly, then you could consider waiting for these changes. But the full details of the changes and when they will happen are not yet known.
Find out more: future changes to leasehold law and ground rent
Buying a share of the freehold (collective enfranchisement)
You may be able to work together with other leaseholders in your building to buy the freehold from your landlord, if your building is eligible.
Once the leaseholders own the freehold, you can decide to change the terms of the leases, including the ground rent.
- Last updated:
- 27 January 2026
- Next review:
- 27 January 2028
Related content
An introduction to things you need to know if you buy a leasehold property
Advice guideHow to extend your lease, including the different routes and valuation