Section 20: the consultation rule every resident director needs to know

This week the government said that, for the first time, it intends to bring in independent regulation of property agents, including the managing agents who look after blocks of flats. Under plans set out by the Housing Secretary, Angela Rayner, on 29 September, agents would need a licence and proper qualifications, and a regulator could take that licence away. Some permission and admin fees charged to leaseholders would also be capped. None of it is law yet, and no start date has been set.

Good news for anyone stuck with a poor agent. But if your building runs itself, the rules protecting leaseholders’ money already apply to you. The one that catches people out most is Section 20.

What Section 20 actually says

If a job will cost any one leaseholder more than £250, you can’t just book the contractor. You have to consult first. That’s Section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985.

It isn’t hard, but it is slow and it has to be done properly. Skip it or get it wrong, and the building can usually only recover £250 from each leaseholder, however much the job cost. On a £30,000 roof, that’s an expensive shortcut.

It’s easy to assume this is something landlords do to leaseholders. But for service charge purposes, an RTM company, RMC or resident-owned freehold company is the landlord. The duty to consult is yours.

The threshold is lower than it sounds

The trigger is any one leaseholder’s share going over £250. In a block of eight flats paying equal shares, that’s any job over £2,000. With unequal shares, it’s the biggest share that counts, which pulls the figure lower still.

Long-term contracts have their own trigger: any agreement lasting more than a year where a leaseholder’s share would be over £100 a year. A cleaning or lift maintenance contract can easily fall into this.

These figures haven’t changed in more than twenty years, which is why ordinary work like repainting a stairwell now crosses them. The government consulted in 2025 on raising them to £600 and £300. That hasn’t happened. Until the law changes, £250 and £100 are the numbers that count.

The stages

Notice of intention. You write to every leaseholder describing the work and why it’s needed. They get 30 days to comment, and can nominate a contractor they’d like a quote from.

Estimates. You get at least two estimates, at least one from a contractor with no connection to whoever runs the building. If a leaseholder nominated someone, you try to get a quote from them too. Then you write again with the estimates, a summary of the comments and your response. Another 30 days for comments. Leaseholders can ask to see the estimates themselves.

Reasons, sometimes. If you pick a contractor who wasn’t the cheapest and wasn’t nominated by a leaseholder, you write within 21 days of signing the contract explaining why.

Throughout, you have to genuinely consider what people say. Sending the notices and ignoring the replies isn’t consultation.

Do leaseholders have to agree?

No. Section 20 gives leaseholders a say, not a vote. Nobody has to agree for the work to go ahead, and no number of objections can block it. What leaseholders get is the right to be told, to comment, to put forward a contractor and to see the quotes. If they still think the cost is unreasonable, they can challenge it at the tribunal afterwards.

In a resident-run building, who actually makes the decision is a separate question, set by your company’s articles and your lease. Usually that’s the directors. Plenty of buildings put big jobs to a resident vote anyway, which is often wise. It just isn’t something Section 20 requires.

How long it takes

Two 30-day windows, plus time to get proper quotes in between. Realistically two to three months from first notice to signed contract. So start early. If the surveyor says the windows need doing next spring, send the first notice this autumn.

When something can’t wait

A collapsing wall can’t sit through two months of consultation. For genuinely urgent work, the building can ask the tribunal (the First-tier Tribunal in England, the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal in Wales) for dispensation, meaning permission to skip some or all of the process. It’s frequently granted for urgent jobs. The test is whether leaseholders were actually disadvantaged by not being consulted, and it’s up to them to show they were. Dispensation can come with conditions, and the cost itself can still be challenged separately. It’s for real emergencies, not jobs nobody got round to planning.

Doing it well when you’re all neighbours

The notices are the legal minimum. Among neighbours it pays to go further: talk about the job before the first notice lands, and share the actual quotes rather than a summary.

SavvyPlace helps here. When someone logs a maintenance job with a cost estimate that looks likely to cross the Section 20 threshold, it flags it straight away, so the consultation starts before anyone books a contractor rather than after. From there you can open a Forum thread already filled in with the proposal, attach the estimates so everyone sees the same answers, and add a vote if the building wants one. The statutory notices still have to reach every leaseholder in writing and in the proper form. The difference is they confirm something people already understand.

For a first consultation, the Leasehold Advisory Service publishes example Section 20 notices you can work from. And if the money is coming from your reserve fund, you still have to consult. Our pieces on reserve funds and service charges cover the money side.

Written for leasehold buildings in England and Wales, and correct as of 4 October 2026. The consultation rules sit in regulations and the thresholds are under review, so check the current position before serving your first notice.