Chester Council Tax 2026: Band D Is £2,479.20

Cheshire West and Chester set its council tax for 2026/27 on 26 February 2026, and the resulting charge is not one number. It varies by a little under £100 at band D depending on which town or parish you live in, because your town council’s precept is bolted onto the same bill. The council publishes the full list once, as a statutory notice, and then leaves it there. Here it is, with the three precepts that make it up and what changed this year.

What a band D bill actually is where you live

These are the totals from the council’s statutory council tax notice for 2026/27, which lists every band for every parish area in the borough. They include the county-wide police and fire precepts and the local town or parish precept, so they are the figure on the bill.

Kingsmead, on the western edge of Northwich, is the most expensive place in the borough to hold a band D property. The cheapest are the small unparished and zero-precept areas, where band D is £2,475.95: Agden, Chidlow, Cuddington near Malpas, Puddington, Tushingham with Macefen and Bradley, and Wigland. The gap between the cheapest and the dearest is £111.51 a year at band D.

Note the two Ellesmere Port rows. If your address falls inside the Charter Trustee area you pay £8.13 a year more at band D than a neighbour just outside it. Kelsall, Willington and Utkinton and Cotebrook are split the same way by the Chester City Charter Trustee boundary.

Where the money goes: the three precepts

Strip out the town and parish element and the bill is made of three parts. The council’s own breakdown of how council tax is calculated gives them band by band. This table is the borough average and excludes town, parish and charter trustee precepts, which is why it sits slightly below the figures above.

The council warns that this is an average, and that “as a result of special expenses the charges in some areas will be slightly higher or lower than the figures shown”. That, plus the local precept, is the whole of the difference between this table and the one above it.

What changed this year, and by how much

Cheshire West and Chester’s own element rose 4.99%. The council’s council tax leaflet for 2026/27 puts it in weekly terms: a band D property paid £38.04 a week towards council services in 2025/26 and pays £39.94 in 2026/27, up £1.90 a week.

The policing precept rose 6.68%, above the usual cap. The Police and Crime Commissioner’s 2026/27 council tax leaflet records that the government granted Cheshire an additional £3.50 of exceptional precept flexibility, taking the referendum threshold to £18.50 at band D. The band D policing element is now £295.44. It followed a consultation that drew 6,169 responses, Cheshire’s largest, of which 73% backed some level of increase and 57% chose the more expensive of the two options put to them.

The fire precept rose about 5.26%. Cheshire Fire Authority agreed a £61.7m budget on 11 February 2026, taking the band D element from £95.09 to £100.09, a £5 rise.

Town and parish precepts moved separately, and some moved a lot. From the council’s local precepts page:

Barnton’s precept rose 25.7% and Northwich Town Council’s 10.8%, while Frodsham and Kingsmead held theirs flat. Only bodies raising more than £140,000 have to publish this detail, so the smallest parishes are not listed.

Where every £100 goes

Out of every £100 of Cheshire West and Chester’s own element, the council’s leaflet allocates £52.02 to adult social care and £22.62 to children’s social care. Between them the two care budgets take just under three quarters of the bill. Support to schools takes £7.65, waste management and recycling £6.90, clean and green streets £2.30, transport, roads, footpaths and cycle routes £2.09, culture, libraries and archives £1.98, housing and homelessness £1.92, customer services £1.03, protecting health and wellbeing 91p and support to businesses and regeneration 58p.

Checking and challenging your band

Bands are set by the Valuation Office Agency on what a property would have been worth on 1 April 1991, not what it is worth now. The bands and their 1991 value ranges are: A up to £40,000, B £41,000 to £52,000, C £52,001 to £68,000, D £68,001 to £88,000, E £88,001 to £120,000, F £120,001 to £160,000, G £160,001 to £320,000 and H above £320,001.

You can look up your own band and your neighbours’ free on gov.uk. If you think yours is wrong, the council cannot change it: you challenge it with the VOA, which can also be reached on 03000 501 501. Two things the council is clear about. You must keep paying at your current band until the challenge is decided. And a challenge can move a band up as well as down.

If you have moved into a new build and have no band yet, the council will let you request a provisional band and pay monthly against it, which avoids a single large catch-up bill once the VOA rules.

Discounts, including one that is new this year

• Single person discount, 25%. For a property where only one adult over 18 lives as their main home. It cannot be claimed on a second home, and someone who works away but returns occasionally still counts as living there. The council runs reviews of every discount and treats a knowingly wrong claim as fraud.
• Terminally ill discount, new from 1 April 2026. Cheshire West is one of the few councils to run one. It applies if you, your partner or a family member in your household is terminally ill, and it is claimed by emailing a completed SR1 form to SR1@cheshirewestandchester.gov.uk with your name, address and account reference. The discount runs from the date the form is received, so there is no advantage in delay.
• Students, care leavers, carers, annexes, people who are severely mentally impaired, and reductions for disabled people each have their own rules on the council’s discounts and exemptions pages.

Empty properties and second homes

A second home, meaning a furnished property with no resident, has carried a 100% premium on top of the standard charge since 1 April 2025, so the bill is double. Holiday homes and furnished properties left after a resident moved out or died both fall in scope, and there are published exceptions.

Separately, the 25% discount for uninhabitable property was withdrawn on 1 April 2025 and only applied up to 31 March that year, so a renovation project no longer earns a reduction.

Help with the bill

Council tax reduction is means tested, and the working age scheme was rewritten from 1 April 2025. The changes that catch people out:

• The capital limit is now £6,000 for everyone, where protected groups previously had £16,000.
• Support is capped at the band D charge for everyone, including protected groups, so a band E or higher property gets band D level help at most.
• A minimum award of £2 a week applies, and an entitlement below that is paid as nothing.
• Earnings disregards were replaced with a single flat £30 a week.
• Non-dependant deductions are £5 a week, rising to £10 where the person works over 16 hours or earns more than £266 a week.
• Claims can now be backdated up to three months for good cause, which was not possible before.
• Universal Credit claimants are considered automatically when the council receives their details from the DWP, without a separate application.

Transitional support was promised for a minimum of two years for those who lost out. Pension age claimants are unaffected, since that scheme is set nationally.

The council also runs a benefits calculator and cost of living support, including a HELP scheme for emergency assistance with food, furniture and essential household items.

Related pages

• Chester bin collection days: full council tax reduction cuts the garden waste subscription to £45 and bulky collections to £15 an item.
• Parking in Chester for tariffs, permits and fines.
• Chester house prices, the modern values that bands no longer reflect.
• Chester planning news for what the borough is building.