How to check a leasehold flat's lease before you make an offer

Why the lease is the part of a flat purchase that quietly moves the price most

Most UK flats are leasehold. You own the flat for a fixed number of years, while a freeholder owns the building and the land. That single number, the years remaining on the lease, can swing a flat's value by tens of thousands of pounds and decide whether a mortgage lender will even touch it.

The trouble is that the lease length is easy to skim past. A listing says "long lease" or "125 year lease", a buyer hears "fine", and nobody checks the actual figure until the solicitor surfaces it weeks later. By then the buyer is emotionally committed and money has been spent on surveys and searches. A short lease found early is a negotiating lever. A short lease found late is a nasty surprise. So this is the first thing worth checking, before the viewing turns into an offer.

Step 1, get the real years remaining, not the original term the agent may quote

The original term is the length the lease was first granted for, often 99, 125 or 999 years. The years remaining is what is actually left today, and that is the number that matters. A flat sold on a 99 year lease in 1985 has around 58 years left, not 99.

To get the real figure, ask the agent or seller for a copy of the lease, or at least the date it started and the original term. Then do the arithmetic. Start date plus original term, minus today, gives the years remaining. These are illustrative figures to show the method. If a lease began on 1 January 1990 for 99 years, it runs to 2089, so in 2026 there are about 63 years left. Do not accept "it's a long lease" as an answer. Get the start date and the term in writing and work it out yourself.

Step 2, confirm the figure against the HM Land Registry title for a few pounds

You do not have to take the agent's word for it. HM Land Registry sells the official title documents for any registered property in England and Wales for a few pounds each through gov.uk.

Order the leasehold title register, which names the lease and usually states the term and start date, and, if you want the full picture, the title plan and a copy of the lease itself. From the start date and term on the official register, you can calculate the years remaining and check it matches what the agent told you. This is the single most reliable and cheapest check you can do before involving a solicitor. While you are in public records, it is worth pulling the property's EPC from the gov.uk EPC register too. EPCs are banded A to G and are valid for 10 years, and the rating tells you something about likely running costs.

Where the lease sits on the clock, comfortable, watch, and the area near 80 years

Once you have the real years remaining, you can place the lease on a rough scale. These are guide bands to help you read the situation, not legal advice, and your solicitor and lender set the real lines.

Comfortable. Broadly 125 years or more remaining, and share of freehold or a very long lease such as 990 years sits at the top. Lenders are generally relaxed here and extension is not pressing.

Watch. Roughly 90 to 125 years. Usually fine to buy and live in, but the clock is running and you may want to extend at some point, so factor it in.

The area near 80 years. As a lease approaches and drops below 80 years remaining, extension has historically become more expensive because of marriage value, covered later in this guide. Many lenders also get more cautious as leases get shorter. A lease in the low 80s that you will hold for years can cross the 80 year line on your watch, so this band deserves real attention before you offer.

Ground rent, what to look for and why post-2022 leases differ from older ones

Ground rent is a charge you pay the freeholder simply for holding the lease, separate from the service charge. Two things matter. The amount, and how it rises.

For most new long residential leases granted from mid-2022 onward, ground rent must be a token amount, a peppercorn, under the Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022. So a genuinely recent lease should carry little or no ground rent. Older leases are different. They can carry meaningful ground rent, and some contain doubling or RPI-linked clauses that escalate over time. A clause that doubles the ground rent every 10 or 15 years can make a flat hard to mortgage and hard to sell.

Find the ground rent figure and the review clause in the lease itself, not just the listing. Read how often it rises and by how much. A flat amount that stays flat is the easy case. A rising or doubling clause is something to raise with your solicitor before you offer.

What a lease extension can cost and why marriage value near 80 years is the watch point

If a lease is short, you will likely want to extend it, and the cost belongs in your offer maths. The premium for a statutory extension depends mainly on the years remaining, the ground rent and the flat's value, and it tends to rise as the lease gets shorter.

The established position under the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993 has been that once a lease drops below 80 years remaining, an extra cost called marriage value becomes payable, which is why extending before the lease falls under 80 years has traditionally been much cheaper. This is exactly why the low 80s deserve attention. A flat at 82 years today sits inside the cheaper zone now, but if you sit on it the lease can slip under 80 and the extension bill can jump.

Important. This area of law is mid-reform under the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, and not every valuation provision had been brought into force at the time of writing. So treat the 80 year mark as the long-standing position to be aware of, and confirm the current position and any likely figure with a solicitor or a specialist valuer rather than relying on a rule of thumb. Online extension calculators are a rough indication only.

How Flatscope screens the lease from a pasted Rightmove link

Doing all of this by hand is the right instinct, and it takes time. Flatscope is research software that does the first pass for you. Paste a Rightmove listing link and it reads the listing and pulls from public records to produce a sourced report, with every figure cited to where it came from.

The lease sits on its own axis. Flatscope scores it from 0 to 20 on a Lease axis, with a freehold or virtual freehold scoring at the top, longer leases scoring high, and short leases scoring low, and it flags anything near or under 80 years as a time-sensitive thing to ask about. It also reads ground rent and service charge into a Costs view, looks up the EPC, checks for building safety signals, and rolls everything into a headline score and a plain verdict that runs from Strong buy down to Skip. The point is to see the lease position before you fall for the flat.

Honest framing. Flatscope screens, it does not confirm. It distils public records and published guidance into a fast first read. It is not a solicitor, it does not give legal advice, and no professional reviews your individual report. It does not replace the full lease review your conveyancer does once you offer. Use it to decide which flats are worth your solicitor's time, and what to negotiate.

Five lease questions to put to the agent in writing before you offer

Asking these in writing, by email or message, gives you a record and tends to produce more careful answers than a question on a viewing.

1. What is the exact lease start date and original term, so I can confirm the years remaining.

2. What is the current ground rent, and does it rise or double, and on what schedule.

3. What is the current annual service charge, and has it changed much in the last few years.

4. Are there any known major works planned or recent Section 20 consultations. Section 20 is the formal process a landlord must run before charging leaseholders more than £250 each for works, or more than £100 a year each under a long-term agreement.

5. Has the seller already started or been quoted for a lease extension.

Vague or evasive answers are themselves information. A seller who cannot tell you the lease start date is a reason to dig harder, not to assume the best.

What a desk check can and cannot tell you, where your solicitor takes over

A desk check using public records and the lease document gets you a long way. It tells you the years remaining, the ground rent and how it rises, roughly where the lease sits on the clock, and whether the 80 year question is in play. That is usually enough to decide whether a flat is worth offering on, and to price the lease into your offer.

What it cannot do is replace a full legal review. Your solicitor reads the whole lease, checks exactly what your flat includes, known as the demise, confirms the title and any restrictions, reviews the service charge accounts and any forfeiture risk, raises enquiries with the freeholder, considers any building safety obligations under the Building Safety Act 2022 where they apply, and confirms the current extension position under a law that is mid-reform. Those steps need the full pack and professional judgement.

The sensible order is simple. Screen first so you only spend money on the flats that survive the lease check, then let your conveyancer confirm the detail on the one you offer on.