What is in your service charge, and where is the detail?
By Synclair · Updated 9 November 2026
A service charge pays for running your development: repairs and maintenance, buildings insurance, the reserve fund, on-site staff, the managing agent's fee, utilities and general costs. The demand shows only your total and a due date. The detail is in the budget and the year-end accounts, and reading those two side by side is how you see what you are paying for.
Can you ask to see the invoices?
In England and Wales, leaseholders have rights set out in statute: to see the invoices and receipts behind the service charge, and to ask an independent body to decide whether a charge was reasonable.
That is worth knowing before you read anything else, because it changes what a question is. You are not asking a favour.
This page does not explain how to use those rights, and deliberately so — how they apply depends on your lease, and that is a question for someone who has read it.
Which document shows what you are paying for?
The demand tells you what to pay and by when. It is the least informative of the three.
The budget is what the manager expected to spend for the year. It is a plan, not a record.
The accounts are what was actually spent. This is the document worth your time, and the one people read last.
Set the budget beside the accounts. Where a line came in materially above what was planned, that gap is not automatically wrong — but it is the thing to ask about, and it is invisible if you only read the demand.
What does a typical service charge pay for?
The Property Institute's TPI Service Charge Index 2026 covers 2,137 professionally managed developments, more than 117,000 homes in England, Wales and Scotland. Across them, the average charge in 2025 was £2,709 per leaseholder, and it divided like this:
| The index's category | Share of the 2025 charge |
|---|---|
| Repairs & Maintenance | 21.2% |
| Buildings Insurance | 14.1% |
| Reserve Funds | 13.5% |
| On-site Staff | 12.3% |
| Management Fee | 12.1% |
| Utilities | 11.8% |
| General Expenses | 9.2% |
| General Health & Safety | 2.1% |
| Other Professional Fees | 2.1% |
| Building Safety Act | 1.6% |
These figures cover the index as a whole, not any one area, and its report warns that "aggregated cost averages will not be representative of actual leaseholder bills". A block with a lift, a concierge or large grounds costs more to run than one without.
What leaseholders say they pay is a different measure, and a median rather than an average. The English Housing Survey puts the median service charge at £1,375 a year in 2023-24 for owner-occupier leaseholders in England who pay one: £1,500 for flats, and £1,865 for flats in London. Those are the amounts leaseholders report in the survey, not figures taken from accounts. The survey interviews the households living in the homes it samples, so its figures come from owner-occupiers: where a flat is let, the household living there is renting it, and its leaseholder is not asked. The two sources describe different groups of homes, and neither is a fair price for any particular development: each is a reference point.
Which lines are worth a question?
The management fee, separately from what contractors were paid. They are different things and are often presented as one.
Anything major. Large works usually have their own consultation process attached, and a large figure that arrived without one is worth asking about.
Insurance. It is a line like any other and it can be compared.
Sundries, administration, other. Same as anywhere: this is where costs go when nobody has categorised them.
Your apportionment. Your share is fixed by your lease. If the development's total rose and your share rose by more, two things happened and only one of them was announced.
If the charge has risen, read this year against last year rather than against the budget. The management fee is the line most often misread, and what it does and does not cover sets it out separately.
Should you stop paying while you query a charge?
Do not stop paying while you query a charge.
Questioning whether a charge is fair and withholding payment are two different things. Under a lease, arrears can put your home at risk, and the sums involved do not have to be large. Keep paying, and put your questions in writing.
What does Synclair do?
Synclair explains each line of your service charge that your documents show, and compares it with published figures where they exist. If you add earlier years, it shows how each line has changed. Anything you report about the development stays on record with its date, so next year you have a history rather than a memory. When something is worth raising, Synclair can draft a letter for you to check and send in your own name, and you can then record the reply and the outcome.
Only owners pay for Synclair: never managers, insurers or suppliers.
One document is enough to start. It is free for three months, and the three months begin when your first analysis is ready — not when you sign up. There is one free period for each email address.
Analyse my statementOne document is enough to start: a budget, a charge demand, a statement or year-end accounts.
Sources
- The Property Institute, TPI Service Charge Index 2026, 21 May 2026 — the report · its release
- Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, English Housing Survey 2023 to 2024: leasehold experience fact sheet, Annex Table 1.4, 17 July 2025 — gov.uk. © Crown copyright 2026. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Figures checked 7 October 2026.