Right to Buy in London: the discount is £16,000, not £136,400

If you have looked up Right to Buy in the last year and come away with a figure over a hundred thousand pounds, the page you read was out of date. The London cash cap changed on 21 November 2024, and it did not change by a little.

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How the discount is actually calculated

Two limits apply and you get whichever is lower. The first is a percentage of the property’s value: 35% for a house at three to five years of public sector tenancy, rising by one percentage point for each further year; 50% for a flat on the same starting period, rising by two points a year. The second limit is 70% of the value, whatever the years add up to.

Then the cash cap applies on top. In practice, for most London properties, the cap is what binds. A flat with a long tenancy behind it might qualify for 70% on the percentage rules and still receive £16,000, because that is the ceiling.

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The two boroughs where it is different

Barking and Dagenham and Havering sit outside the London figure, with a cap of £38,000. If you are a tenant in either, the sum is more than twice what it is across the rest of the capital.

What else changed at the same time

A quieter change matters as much for some tenants. The discount is reduced by what the landlord has spent on the property, and the window for that spending was extended from the previous ten to fifteen years to the last thirty. A block that has had a major refurbishment within that period will now reduce the discount where previously the work had aged out of the calculation.

Qualifying, and the five-year rule

The qualifying period is three years as a public sector tenant. They need not be consecutive and need not all have been with the same landlord. Sell within five years of buying and you repay a proportion of the discount, on a sliding scale.

One point on dates. The government has published no uprating of these figures since November 2024, so this is not a "2026/27 rate" that resets each April. It is the figure in force since that date, and it stays until it is changed.