It seems we've decided that homelessness is a problem that's simply too difficult to solve. What other reason can there be for the ever-increasing number of people who are without a safe and secure home?
Whilst rough sleeping is a visible and terrible manifestation of the housing crisis, the number of people living on the streets is miniscule compared to the many thousands of families now living in sub-standard temporary accommodation, having been failed by a society which is either unwilling or unable to build the homes that it needs. The families in temporary accommodation—living in hotels and bedsits, B&Bs, cramped and mouldy flats, or overnight accommodation—are not just a human tragedy, but a vast financial drain on the state.
In the financial year April 2025 to March 2026, councils in England spent an eye-watering £2.93 billion housing people in temporary accommodation, and £4.05 billion on homelessness altogether. Even after housing benefit subsidy and rents are taken off, the net bill still came to £2.34 billion—more than double the 2020‑21 figure. A staggering 135,580 households were still in temporary accommodation on 31 March 2026, the highest since records began in 1998.
This site delves into the detail. It shows the number and children affected, and what this costs to country, across each region, down to local authority level. It makes for grim reading.
Two numbers matter on this page, and the switch at the top moves between them. Total spent is every pound that leaves the council. Cost to councils is what is left once housing benefit and rent have come back in—the part that has to be found from council tax and reserves. The gap between the two lines below is the money that comes back, and it has grown far more slowly than the spending it offsets.
London has 56% of England's households in temporary accommodation but only about one in seven of its homes, and it accounts for roughly half the national bill. Cost per household is a different story. Regions are much closer together on what a household costs than on how many households need help, and the small regions, with only a few hundred households between them, sit at both the top and the bottom. The figures below add up only the councils that filed, so they fall a little short of the national total.
Two councils can spend similar amounts and be in completely different trouble, because one is far bigger than the other. A map takes size out of it. Every council is shaded by a rate rather than a total: what one household costs it, how many households it is housing for its size, or how much of its council tax the bill would swallow. London is drawn twice—once in place, where its boroughs are too small to pick out, and once enlarged beside it. One warning. A council is shaded across its whole area, and area has nothing to do with how many people live there: Northumberland is enormous and thinly populated, Tower Hamlets is tiny and packed. The colour is the rate, not the size of the problem.
England's councils do not all do the same jobs. Across much of the country a district council handles housing while a county council handles schools and social care. London boroughs, metropolitan districts and unitary authorities do both. Only councils that carry the housing duty appear anywhere on this page.
A council's spending on homelessness has to come from somewhere, and the most tangible comparison is the money it raises in council tax. Across England the cost of homelessness is equivalent to — of everything councils raise that way. For a handful it is the whole lot: in — councils the bill is larger than their entire council tax income, before a single bin has been emptied. This comparison always uses cost to councils, because the money that comes back through housing benefit was never theirs to spend.
A council that cannot balance its books has two options. It can ask the government for permission to borrow to cover day-to-day costs—called Exceptional Financial Support, and normally forbidden—or its finance officer can issue what is known as a section 114 notice, which stops most new spending. — of the councils on this page have been granted support for 2026-27, sharing — between them. The question this page can answer is whether homelessness is what pushed them there. For a handful it plainly is. For most of them it is not: the larger causes are the cost of support for children with special educational needs, and debts run up years ago.
Three other numbers say something about how much room councils have left. Usable reserves are the savings a council can spend at will: — of the councils on this page hold less than 5% of a year's spending in them. The Housing Revenue Account is the ring-fenced pot that runs council housing, kept separate from everything else: — of the — councils that still own homes spent more on it than they took in rent this year. And the schools deficit—the money councils have overspent on support for children with special educational needs, which a temporary rule lets them keep off their books—now stands at — across England. The government has said it will cover 90% of that, measured at 31 March 2026, leaving councils to find the rest by 2028-29.
All 296 councils in England with a legal duty to house homeless families. Click any row to see how that council split its money, what kind of accommodation its households are living in, and how the figures have moved over six years. County councils, police, fire and combined authorities do not appear here—housing is not their job.
Central government gives councils grants earmarked for homelessness. They are counted separately from the money recovered through housing benefit, so they do not cancel any of it out. In the chart below, the stacked blocks are the grants and the blue bar beside them is what councils were left to pay; the percentage is how much of that the grants covered.
Not every council sent figures. 377 of England's 413 councils filed a spending return for 2025‑26. For the England totals the government fills the gap with an estimate. There is no such estimate below England, so regional and council‑level figures only add up the councils that did file, and come out about 3% short. Councils that filed nothing are marked no figures in the table, with their household counts still shown.
Why the figures start in 2020‑21. Before then the government collected this information in different categories, so the older numbers are not comparable. There was no single figure for all homelessness spending at all.
Total spent, and cost to councils. Money comes back to councils, mostly through housing benefit and rent paid by the households themselves. Take that off the total and what is left is the part a council has to find from its own budget. On some kinds of accommodation more comes back than goes out, so that figure can be negative. That is real, not a mistake.
What none of this captures. Most of the rent for temporary accommodation reaches landlords through housing benefit, which is recorded elsewhere. In 2025‑26 councils in England paid £1.10bn of it and got £0.98bn back from the Department for Work and Pensions. The shortfall exists because government still repays councils at 2011 rent levels. So use total spent for the cost of the accommodation, and cost to councils for the hit to council tax.
Timing, and why it changes the answer. The spending covers a whole year. The household count is a single day, 31 March. England's caseload grew 13% during 2025‑26 and London's by 30%, so dividing a year's spending by the count at the end makes the cost per household look lower than it really was. Average over the year, the setting this page starts on, uses the midpoint of the counts at either end of the year. At 31 March uses the closing count. Neither is perfect, and a council with no count for the previous year falls back to the closing one. How common temporary accommodation is, per 1,000 homes, always uses the 31 March count, because that is a snapshot by its nature.
Small numbers jump around. Where a council has only a few dozen households in temporary accommodation, a single unusual placement can swing its cost per household wildly. The hide councils under box filters them out. Counts are rounded to the nearest ten, and for a handful of councils each year the government withholds them entirely, shown as a dash.
Some changes are not real changes. Government notes that Lambeth, Newham and Westminster all altered the way they sorted their spending into categories this year. They are the three biggest spenders, so movements between categories for those three are bookkeeping rather than anything that happened on the ground.
Two councils' figures look wrong. Tower Hamlets reports £96.4m of homelessness spending with nothing at all against any type of accommodation. Southwark's accommodation total is exactly its overall total, which would mean it spends nothing on advice or prevention. Both look like filing errors, so treat those two breakdowns with suspicion.
Do not divide one table by the other. It is tempting to divide the B&B spending by the number of households in B&B to get a nightly rate. It does not work, because councils file the two sets of figures inconsistently: 114 report households in nightly‑paid flats but no spending on them, and Westminster reports 906 households in B&B and nothing spent on B&B. Do the division and London's B&B comes out above £2,000 a room a week, which is nonsense. The accommodation split is reliable for showing the mix and the totals, not for working out prices.
Two ways of counting, never mixed. With no filter on, the headline figures use the government's England totals, estimate included. The moment you filter by region or type of council, everything switches to adding up the councils that filed, and the bar under the filters says so. Filtered figures are a floor rather than a ceiling. Cost per household always uses only councils that have both a return and a published household count, which is why the filter bar quotes three different numbers of councils.
New this year. Government added a column recording management and back‑office costs. It is part of the total rather than an addition to it, and there is nothing to compare it with in earlier years. Barnsley and Sheffield also received new area codes after a boundary change.
Regions. The spending return does not record which region a council is in, so councils were matched to the nine English regions separately. The matching was checked against the government's own regional household figures and agrees exactly for every region in 2023‑24, 2024‑25 and 2025‑26.
Council finance and homelessness each come with their own jargon, and this page has to use a little of both. Everything that might need explaining is here, grouped by where you will meet it rather than alphabetically. The box searches the definitions as well as the terms.
Built 18 September 2026 from MHCLG Revenue Outturn RO4 (published 17 September 2026) and the Statutory Homelessness detailed local authority data series. Figures in £ thousands unless stated. Accredited Official Statistics; contact lgf1.revenue@communities.gov.uk.