Property maintenance costs for landlords

It is a fact of life that as a landlord, you will need to account for certain costs. Unfortunately, there is evidence that the burden of those costs has gone up in recent years. It was reported in 2022, for instance, that the maintenance costs for a rental property now accounted for over a fifth of the average rental income it produced.

On the other hand, while landlords are seeing a squeeze on their finances, being a landlord can still be more than worthwhile in terms of the income it brings in. After all, it is still effectively a way to get someone else to pay off your mortgage.

So, by keeping close track of the typical property maintenance costs for landlords like you, it will be easier to optimise your expenditure in all the ways you need to. This, in turn, will help ensure you keep more pounds in your pocket.

With no further ado, let’s give you a rundown of the property maintenance costs for landlords when maintaining a rental property. Our summary will encompass both the indoor and outdoor elements of your building, as well as the likes of insurance and administrative costs.

Buy-to-let mortgage fees and payments

Let’s begin with the process of acquiring a property that you go on to rent out. We are, of course, referring to the buy-to-let mortgage. If you take out this form of loan, you can expect it to cost more than a standard residential mortgage. This reflects the tendency of lenders to regard it as a riskier type of borrowing.

So, you can anticipate your buy-to-let mortgage having a higher rate of interest than an equivalent standard residential mortgage. Your deposit, too, will probably need to be bigger than would be the case for a “conventional” mortgage.

Legal and administrative costs

There are many costs associated with the management and maintenance of a rental property that, on their own, don’t seem like very much… until they accumulate into a significant expense overall.

Examples of such costs include registering with a tenant deposit scheme, securing an energy certificate for the given property, and setting up utilities such as water, electricity, and gas.

Health and safety measures

If you’re looking to rent out any property, you will need to obtain a gas safety certificate for it. This is typically between £60 and £90.

Meanwhile, you can usually anticipate an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) costing between £60 and £120. This is another legal necessity for anyone who is seeking to rent out a property in the UK. The exact cost of an EPC, though, will depend on such factors as the type of property involved, and the number of bedrooms it has.

Maintenance and repairs to the fabric of the building

When most of us think about the typical property maintenance costs for landlords, it is the expenses incurred in looking after the building’s main structure and fabric that a lot of us tend to picture.

There are certainly a lot of elements – across both the exterior and interior facets of your building – that you will need to maintain, and therefore budget for. Such aspects as the roof, the flooring, the plumbing and electrical systems, the boiler, and any white goods, can all trigger not-always-predictable costs through the years.

It is extremely difficult to put a precise figure on how much a landlord might be advised to budget for. Much will depend on the specific property and the tenants.

As a rough rule of thumb, though, you can probably anticipate spending about 1% of your property’s total value to cover repairs each year. So, if your rental property is worth about £320,000, budgeting approximately £3,200 for maintenance and repairs is probably a good idea. You can, of course, fine-tune this amount as the years go by.

Naturally, there is also the sheer frequency of maintenance and repair interventions to bear in mind. We have accounted for that in this rundown of specific costs you might need to plan for.

Installing and repairing kitchens and white goods

The term ‘white goods’ refers to large (and essential) electrical appliances that tend to appear in a UK house, such as a washing machine, fridge-freezer, dishwasher, microwave oven, and so on.

In the case of any one item in the aforementioned list, you probably won’t need to intervene to fix or replace it for years on end. However, there are probably going to be quite a few such items in your property that the tenant will depend on. It might be wise to budget about £350 per year for these costs.

Below are some other approximate costs – on a per-year basis – that you might expect to incur in the process of maintaining and repairing your rental property:

• Fitting the roof and tackling roof leaks: £350
• Repairing and/or replacing the boiler: £300
• Repairing and/or replacing appliances over £100 in value: £300
• Repairing and/or replacing the carpeting/flooring: £300
• Painting/repainting: £300
• Fixing heating problems: £250
• Fixing electrical problems: £250
• Repairing and/or replacing broken showers, sinks, or toilets: £250
• Fixing other plumbing problems: £300
• Replacing a broken window: £300
• Tackling mould: £300
• Tackling pests: £300

Letting agency fees

Not every landlord of a residential rental property will necessarily use a letting agent. In your case, you might ask such an agency to simply find you a tenant, following which, you will manage the property and your relationship with the tenant yourself. If you take this approach, you will probably just have a one-off fee to pay.

Alternatively, you might wish your letting agency to manage the property for you. In this situation, you will probably need to pay somewhere between 10% and 20% of the monthly rental income.

End-of-tenancy cleaning fee for a landlord

Much as it sounds like, an end-of-tenancy clean is the deep cleaning of a rental property that occurs after a tenant moves out. This is carried out to make sure the property is clean and disinfected prior to new tenants moving in.

The Tenant Fees Act 2019 sets out that landlords, letting agents, and estate managers are not permitted to force tenants to pay for end-of-tenancy cleaning fees. However, if the cleaning that your departing tenant undertakes doesn’t restore your property to the same cleanliness as when the tenancy began, you may apply a cleaning charge, deducted from your tenant’s deposit.

The typical end-of-tenancy cleaning fee for a landlord is around £300. Again, though, this must be interpreted as a very approximate figure. The actual price will greatly depend on the specific number of rooms in the rental property.

You might be quoted about £200 for a studio flat, a £400+ is likely for a 6+ bedroom house.

Landlord insurance

It isn’t a legal requirement for owners of buy-to-let property to have landlord insurance. However, it is strongly recommended that landlords have this type of cover. A standard home insurance policy won’t protect them in the event of any of a range of dreaded scenarios occurring at their rental property.

According to one recent analysis, the median average cost of landlord insurance in the UK, as of 2024, is around £225. This is for landlord insurance excluding any optional extras. It takes into account all types of property, tenants, and locations in the UK.

We must emphasise, however, that many different factors impact on how much you can expect to pay for landlord insurance. These encompass such aspects as the value and type of property to be insured. Bigger and pricier properties tend to have higher insurance costs. Location, the type of tenant, and the level of coverage requested also have an impact.

All the above should not be interpreted as an exhaustive guide to every cost that a landlord might incur over the course of an average year. Nonetheless, it will hopefully give you a sense of the range of typical property maintenance costs for landlords.

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