How does the building's total become your share of the service charge?

Where is your share written down?

In your lease. Look for a definition near the start — it may be called the service charge proportion, the tenant's proportion or the tenant's share — or for the schedule towards the end that sets out the service charge. The share may be:

A fixed percentage or fraction of each total.

A method, such as your flat's floor area against the whole building's, or the number of flats. Some older leases use the flats' old rateable values.

A fair proportion for the landlord, or its surveyor, to decide, with no number written down. The budget or the demand is then usually where your share first appears, and it is fair to ask how it was arrived at.

The budget or the demand may print your share. Check that it matches your lease.

Why can there be more than one share?

Many buildings divide their costs into groups, each shared among the homes that benefit from it: the costs of the whole development among every home, a block's among the flats in it, a car park's among those with spaces, a lift's among the flats it serves. Your lease may give you a different share of each group. The budget and the accounts may show the groups as separate schedules, and your demand adds up your share of each.

How do you check the arithmetic?

For each group of costs, take its total from the budget and apply your share; then add the results. They should come to what you were asked to pay in advance for the year. Once the accounts are ready, do the same with their totals: the difference from what you paid in advance is your share of any surplus or shortfall. How to read the year-end accounts shows where those totals are.

A few pence of rounding is not worth a question. A difference you cannot reproduce is.

You can also ask whether the shares of all the homes add up to the whole of each total.

What if the total rose and your share rose by more?

Then two things changed: what the building cost, and how it was divided. The division can change when costs move from one group to another, when the number of homes sharing a group changes, or when a share is recalculated. None of these is necessarily wrong. Each is worth an explanation, and a change in your share is a fair question in its own right. Why did your service charge go up? covers the first of the two.

What do published figures compare with?

Most published figures for service charges are given per home, not per building, so the number to set beside them is your share, never the building's total — check which a figure is before you compare. Even then, a published figure is a reference point, not a fair price: a building with a lift, a concierge or large grounds costs more to run than one without.

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.

This page does not explain how to use them, because that depends on your lease and is a question for someone who has read it. But it changes what a question is. You are not asking a favour.

Should you stop paying while you query a charge?

What does Synclair do?

Synclair lays out what each line of your service charge pays for and your share of it, as your documents show them, and compares your charges with published figures where they exist. If your documents cover more than one year, you can see which lines moved. Anything you report about the building stays on record with its date. 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.

One document is enough to start: a budget, a charge demand, a statement or year-end accounts.