Council tax- paying significantly more now I’ve moved areas.

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Reddragon69

We moved from one Local Authority to another and had to claim UC. We are on UC and PIP and my partner receives Carers Allowance for our child, who is on DLA- high rate for both. We used to get council tax reduction and pay about £26 per month. We have had our council tax support worked out now. We haven’t paid any council tax since May 24 in the new place. We have received a bill saying we need to pay £129 every month from 1/10/24 until 1/3/25. I know there are a few months to catch up on but this does seem quite a significant rise from what we paid before. Our council have an ‘entitled to’ calculator that is linked to the area lived in and when I did the calculator, it said that I had to pay £7.35 per week. I’ve emailed the council but I am not really understanding and quite worried that I will have to pay this much. Does any one know how it works if you are on UC? I think it’s probably different schemes for each council but the comparison between our previous one and the present one is huge and we are on the same income.

Thanks if you can help. 😊

OverlyAnxious

Hi,

You are correct that each council uses a different scheme to work out council tax reduction so it's very difficult for us to offer any advice on here.

Some councils are calculating 'income' differently on Universal Credit than they were on legacy benefits. So that is also increasing some peoples council tax bill.

The best thing you can do is ask them for a breakdown of the costs they've used to calculate your entitlement so we can see on paper how they've done it.