Small business relief | BETA - South Gloucestershire Council

If you occupy a property that has a rateable value of less than £15,000, you may be eligible for a discount on your business rates. This discount is called small business rate relief.

What relief you will get

You will not pay business rates on a property with a rateable value of £12,000 or less.

For properties with a rateable value between £12,001 and £15,000 the rate relief will go down gradually from 100% to 0%.

The relief is available to business rate payers with either:

one property
one main property and other additional properties, as long as the additional properties do not have individual rateable values of more than £2,899 and the combined rateable value of all the properties is under £20,000

If you get a second property, you will keep getting any existing relief on your main property for 12 months.

How to apply

If you consider yourself eligible for this relief, you can download and complete the small business rate relief application.

You can return the form by:

email: businessrates@southglos.gov.uk
post: South Gloucestershire Council, Department for Resources and Business Change, Revenues Services, PO Box 1953, Bristol, BS37 0DE

If your rateable value is between £15,000 and £51,000

If your rateable value is under £51,000 you will still be considered a small business so you will pay lower rates even though small business rate relief does not apply.

This is because your rates are worked out using the small business multiplier. You can find the business rate valuation of a property on GOV.UK

You will not need to complete an application form but you must inform us if:

you wish for the relief to be applied
the relief has been applied incorrectly

Change in circumstances

If your circumstances change you must notify us within 4 weeks of the change.

You can do this using the contact details on this page or find more information on our report a change of address or circumstances for your business rates page.

More information

Unoccupied properties do not qualify for small business rate relief. Find out more about exemptions on our empty properties page.

Once you have applied for this relief it will remain on your account. We periodically check that you still remain eligible either by doing company searches or by reviewing applications.