Challenge Your Band ("we", "us") operates the website challengeyourband.co.uk.
We reply to support emails within 2 working days.
Anyone can challenge their Council Tax band free of charge, directly with the Valuation Office Agency (VOA), at gov.uk/challenge-council-tax-band. The VOA does not charge for a review, and you do not need an agent or any paid service to make one.
What you pay us for is research work only: finding and checking comparable properties, and drafting wording you can use. You are free to do that work yourself for nothing.
Challenge Your Band is an independent private service. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the Valuation Office Agency, HMRC, any local council, or any government body. We are not your agent and we do not submit anything to the VOA for you.
We are a property research service, not a challenge service. The fee buys you the time-consuming research work: searching the official records for comparable homes near you and picking out the ones that give a challenge the best chance of succeeding — the addresses that would otherwise take you hours to find and compare by hand.
For a one-off fee we provide, for the single property you select:
The draft text we produce is generated by an algorithm from the data described above. It is a starting point, not a finished legal document, and no person at Challenge Your Band reviews it before you see it.
Before you submit anything to the VOA it is your responsibility to:
Automatically generated text can contain wording that is wrong for your circumstances, or figures drawn from records that are themselves out of date or mismatched. Send it only once you are satisfied it is correct.
A challenge asks the VOA to look at your property again. The outcome is entirely theirs, and the band can go up as well as down, or stay the same. According to the VOA's own published guidance:
Published VOA outcome data indicates band increases following a challenge are rare: of the 39,590 challenges the VOA resolved in the year to 31 March 2024, under 1% resulted in a higher band (Council Tax challenges and changes, official statistics, England & Wales). But rare is not never, and we cannot control or predict the VOA's decision. A higher band means a higher Council Tax bill.
By buying and using our report you accept this risk. If you are not willing to accept the possibility of an increase, do not submit a challenge.
Our information comes from official public sources, but those sources can be incomplete, out of date, or contain errors, and address matching between databases is not perfect.
You must check the information yourself before you submit anything to the VOA. We provide direct links to the official VOA record and EPC certificate for each property so you can verify them. You are responsible for what you send to the VOA and for anything you state in it.
The fee is £9.99, a one-off payment for one property. The price shown includes any applicable tax. Payment is handled by Stripe; we never see or store your card details.
Under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 you normally have 14 days to cancel a distance purchase. Because we supply the report immediately after payment, before you pay we ask you to tick a box confirming that:
We confirm your consent and acknowledgement on screen and by keeping a record of it. If you do not tick the box, we cannot take payment or supply the report.
We will refund you in full if:
We do not refund because the VOA rejected your challenge, took a long time, or did not change your band — that outcome is the VOA's decision and is expressly not what you are paying for (see section 4).
To request a refund, email support@challengeyourband.co.uk with your payment reference.
Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, digital content must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described. Nothing in these terms removes or limits those rights, and we do not attempt to exclude them. You always keep your statutory rights.
We are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking this contract or failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for:
Except where the law does not allow it, our total liability to you is limited to the fee you paid. We do not exclude or limit liability where it would be unlawful to do so, including liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
Council Tax bands are read from the VOA's published Council Tax list; floor areas and property types from the official EPC register; sale prices from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data. These sources are used under the terms that apply to them, including the Open Government Licence where applicable. Addresses and mapping data may be subject to Ordnance Survey terms. We present this data for your own analysis of your own property.
The report is for your personal use for the property you selected. Please do not resell it, scrape the site, or use it to provide a competing commercial service.
We may update these terms. Each version carries a version number and an effective date, and the version that applies to you is the one you accepted when you paid. We keep a record of which version each customer accepted, and we retain previous versions.
If something has gone wrong, email support@challengeyourband.co.uk first — we would rather fix it than argue about it. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may bring proceedings in your own courts.
Council Tax bands in Scotland are handled by the Scottish Assessors, not the VOA. Our service covers England and Wales only.