Sources and attribution

Where the data comes from

• Council HMO licence registers. Local authorities must keep a public register of licensed HMOs under s232 of the Housing Act 2004. Where a council publishes one, we collect it, standardise it and record the date we fetched it.
• Planning applications. From council planning portals — applications for change of use to or from a small HMO, and for large (sui generis) HMOs.
• Article 4 directions. From council planning policy documents, verified against the council’s own website.
• Geography. Postcode positions from postcodes.io, built on ONS and Ordnance Survey open data. Council boundaries and codes from the ONS Open Geography Portal.

Attribution

Attribution is a condition of the licences we rely on, and failing to carry it ends our right to use the data. So:

• Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.
• Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2026.
• Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.
• Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Every individual record also carries its own source council and retrieval date, shown next to the data rather than buried on this page.

What we deliberately do not publish

The Open Government Licence explicitly does not cover personal data, so there is no licence to republish it — even where a council has put it online.

• No names of licence holders or managers where they are individuals. We record only whether a licence is held by an individual or a company. Company names and Companies House numbers are published, because a company is not a person.
• No home addresses of holders, managers or agents, in any form. These are stripped when we import a register and never reach our database.
• No bedroom counts, occupancy limits or amenity counts at an address. At a single address that is a targeting dataset. We publish these only in aggregate, and only for the property being searched in a paid report.
• No allegation against any address. Resident reports go to the council and appear publicly only as a ward-level count.
• No bulk download, no public API, no export. Search is rate limited.

What absence from this site means

Nothing. A property missing from our data may be lawfully licensed, may hold a temporary exemption notice, may not require a licence in that area, may be a converted block of flats with different rules, or may simply be missing because the council’s published register is out of date or because our address matching failed.

Operating an unlicensed HMO is a criminal offence. We are not in a position to say whether one has been committed, so we never do.

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland is out of scope. The Houses in Multiple Occupation Act (Northern Ireland) 2016 restricts inspection of the register to interested persons, so republishing it to the world would go beyond that right. BT postcodes also require a paid Land & Property Services licence we do not hold.