Stevenage Council Tax Bands: Band D Is £2,391.97 in 2026/27

Search for Stevenage council tax bands and you land on the council’s Council Tax Bands page, which tells you what each 1991 valuation band is worth and nothing at all about what you pay. The charges are on a different page, under a different heading, three clicks away.

Here is the whole thing in one place, checked on 1 September 2026 against the council’s own figures and the budget report councillors approved.

What you pay in 2026/27

Charges are from Your Council Tax, band ranges from the council’s Council Tax Bands page.

The overall rise is 4.85 per cent, and it is the same percentage in every band. Band D went up £110.69, which is £2.13 a week. Band A went up £73.79, or £1.42 a week. Band H went up £221.38.

One set of figures covers the whole borough. Stevenage has no parish or town councils, so there is no parish precept to add and no address in the borough pays a different rate for the same band. That is unusual in Hertfordshire, where most districts publish a different total for every parish.

Where the money actually goes

Almost four fifths of your bill never reaches Stevenage Borough Council.

Three separate decisions, taken by three separate bodies:

• Hertfordshire County Council set its element on 17 February 2026, at 4.99 per cent, made up of 2.99 per cent general council tax and a 2 per cent adult social care precept. Its band D charge is £1,858.19 (Council Tax Information 2026/27). There is no separate fire precept in Hertfordshire. The fire and rescue service is run by the county council and paid for from its budget, so a Stevenage bill has three lines, not four. The three above add to £2,391.97 exactly, which is the proof.
• The Police and Crime Commissioner added £15 to band D, taking it from £265.00 to £280.00, a 5.66 per cent rise. The commissioner’s leaflet says the increase was set “as [residents] asked for in my survey” and that the force still has to find £7 million in savings in 2026/27 (Hertfordshire PCC precept leaflet 2026/27).
• Stevenage Borough Council took the smallest increase of the three, 2.99 per cent, or £7.37 on band D. That is 14p a week. Councillors approved it on 25 February 2026, in the General Fund and Council Tax Setting report (Stevenage Borough Council, 25 February 2026).

So the authority whose name is on the bill, and which collects it, sets a tenth of it.

A warning about one of the sources. Hertfordshire County Council’s own Council Tax in Hertfordshire page is a year out of date in its labels. It presents £1,858.19 as the “yearly bill for 2025/26” when its own leaflet shows that figure is 2026/27, and it gives the previous year as £1,789.87 when the leaflet says £1,769.87, a £20 difference. The leaflet is the document councillors approved. Use it, not the web page.

How to check your own band, and challenge it

Bands were set on what a property was worth on 1 April 1991, not what it is worth or what it sold for. New homes are banded as though they had existed in 1991 too.

Look yours up free on the Valuation Office Agency’s band search. The VOA sets bands; the council only applies the charge. Banding queries go to the Listing Officer, Council Tax East, Valuation Office Agency, Ground Floor, Ferrers House, Castle Meadow Road, Nottingham NG2 1AB, on 03000 501501.

Challenging your bill, as opposed to your band, is a two-stage process, and the first stage is not a form:

1. Write to the council setting out who you are, where you live, which decision you disagree with and why. The council then has two months to respond.
2. Appeal to the Valuation Tribunal Service if the council rejects your case, acts on it but leaves you dissatisfied, or does not reply within the two months. The tribunal is on 0303 445 8100 or appeals@valuationtribunal.gov.uk. There is no fee.

You can use this route if you think you should have a discount, think the property should be exempt, believe you are not the person liable, or think a penalty was wrongly imposed.

One practical note: council tax is administered for Stevenage by a shared service with East Herts Council, based at Wallfields, Pegs Lane, Hertford SG13 8EQ. General enquiries are on 01438 242875 even though the office is in Hertford. Benefits, which is a separate team, is still at Daneshill House in Stevenage on 01438 242440.

Discounts, and the one that catches people out

Single person discount, 25 per cent. Council tax assumes two adults in a property. One adult means a quarter off.

Disregarded persons. Some adults are not counted at all when the council works out how many people live there. If everyone in the house is disregarded, the discount is 50 per cent. If one non-disregarded adult lives with disregarded people, it is 25 per cent. Two or more non-disregarded adults means no discount. The list runs to about fifteen categories (Disregarded Persons), and the ones people miss are:

• an unpaid carer looking after a resident for at least 35 hours a week, provided the person cared for gets a qualifying benefit and is not a spouse, partner or child under 18
• 18 and 19 year olds still in receipt of child benefit
• apprentices and youth training trainees under 25
• someone severely mentally impaired, which needs a doctor’s certificate on the council’s own form

A property occupied entirely by students is exempt outright, not discounted.

Council tax support is capped at 91.5 per cent. This is the Stevenage-specific rule and it is the one that surprises people. Under the local scheme, every working age resident pays at least 8.5 per cent of their council tax, however low their income. Only pensioners are protected and get support on the old basis.

The council put a figure on what that means: a working-age household on maximum support in a band C council home paid £172.36 in 2025/26 on the total bill after a single person discount, or £3.31 a week. Members agreed in November 2025 to keep the scheme for 2026/27, uprated for benefit changes, and asked officers to look at a banded scheme for a future year, subject to the local government reorganisation timetable. Both the figure and the decision are in paragraphs 4.3.9 and 4.3.10 of the February budget report, and the 91.5 per cent limit is written into the Council Tax Support Scheme 2026-27.

There is an exceptional hardship scheme for people who cannot meet even that, and a disability reduction that bills a property at one band lower if it has been adapted for a disabled resident.

Whatever discount you get, you have to tell the council in writing within 21 days of anything that changes your entitlement.

Empty properties and second homes

The council’s rules here are the ones it set in 2017, and the page setting them out has not been updated since December 2023 (Council Tax Exemptions). As it stands:

• Second homes get no discount. Owners pay the full charge, not a premium on top.
• Empty and unfurnished gets no discount, from the day it empties.
• Empty and under major repair gets no discount either, which catches people renovating a house they cannot live in.
• Empty for two years or more attracts a 150 per cent charge.

The trap the council spells out is the single person who moves out of a home they own. The 25 per cent discount stops the moment the property is unoccupied and unfurnished, so the bill rises from 75 per cent of the charge to 100 per cent. The same applies between a tenancy ending and the next one starting, and between a property emptying and a sale completing.

Your bill will be set by a different council in 2028

Stevenage Borough Council is being abolished. The government decided on 16 July 2026 to replace Hertfordshire’s eleven councils with four unitary authorities from 1 April 2028, with elections in May 2027.

Stevenage goes into Central Hertfordshire Council, together with Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council less one ward and North Hertfordshire District Council less five wards. The new council will have 89 councillors. The existing councils remain responsible for services until they are abolished (implementation letter to Hertfordshire chief executives, 21 July 2026).

The council is already paying for it. Its 2026/27 budget carries £560,000 of reorganisation transition budgets, plus a further £500,000 the Cabinet can release if transition costs run over.

What that means for the charge in this table is not yet decided. When separate councils merge their council tax has to be brought to a common level, and neither the government nor the shadow authority has published how that will be done in Hertfordshire.

More Stevenage local information: bin collection days, parking in Stevenage, roadworks and travel, house prices.