The Rates Reckoning
The post-pandemic Retail, Hospitality and Leisure relief scheme that propped up thousands of venues from 2020 onwards ended on 31 March 2026. A new permanent structure of lower multipliers came in. On paper, it sounded like progress.
The catch is in the revaluation that came with it.
What changed this spring
Business rates are calculated on rateable value: what the government decides your premises could fetch in rent. The 2026 revaluation updated those values using rental data from April 2024, when rents across food-led high streets and city centres had largely recovered from the pandemic lows.
The previous assessment was based on April 2021 rents. Those were depressed. Sharply, in many cases. Operators who had been sitting on suppressed rateable values for five years found those numbers correcting upward this spring, and their bills following.
The government did soften the blow for pubs. An additional fifteen percent relief was announced in January, layered on top of the new multiplier structure. That is welcome. It does not close the gap for operators whose underlying rateable value jumped substantially in the new assessment.
The city problem
For venues in food-heavy cities like Brighton, the dynamic is particularly sharp. Post-pandemic, the eating and drinking scene recovered hard and fast. Good rooms filled up. Rents on prime restaurant streets held or climbed. The April 2024 snapshot caught the market at a point of real recovery.
So the revaluation landed disproportionately on exactly the kind of venues that make a food city worth visiting: the independents, the neighbourhood kitchens, the rooms that ran lean through lockdown and came back to find their costs had been quietly reclassified upward.
A bigger rates bill does not arrive with a note explaining that it coincided with a twenty percent VAT rate, a raised employer National Insurance contribution, and a wages floor that keeps rising, rightly, year on year.
It just arrives.
What it changes and what it does not
None of this makes a Monday quieter at the pass. None of it fills the corner table on a Wednesday evening that was always going to sit cold through service.
That table has already absorbed the rates bill. It absorbed the NI increase. It sat through food inflation and the energy spike. Every empty seat has been paid for by the time service starts, and every empty seat that stays empty earns back nothing.
That is the calculus Halfseat runs on. The fixed costs are fixed. The question on any given night is only whether the margin left on those empty covers gets recovered, or lost.
When a venue releases its spare tables around 4pm, food at half price, drinks at full price, a real cut of the booking fee going directly to the venue, it is not running a promotion. It is recovering something from a cost it was going to bear regardless.
Where this leaves the industry
The 2026 revaluation was not designed to hurt hospitality. The new multiplier structure is arguably more rational than the relief scheme it replaced, which always felt temporary and kept needing to be renewed through each budget cycle.
But the transition caught a lot of operators at a vulnerable moment. Years of margin compression, costs still rising, and a sector still closing businesses faster than it opens them.
A recalculated rates bill, landing on top of all of that, is not quite the reason to feel optimistic about the year ahead. But the operators who come through it will be the ones who treated every cost as fixed and every empty seat as a recoverable asset, rather than the other way around.
The rates went up. The empty chair still earns nothing. Those two facts do not cancel each other out.