A flat on Silvercroft Street in Manchester's Castlefield regeneration area sold new in May 2024 for just over £280,000. Under the True Cost tool, the mortgage and council tax on a flat like it come to around £1,810 a month. But that figure leaves out two costs that only exist because the flat is leasehold — and whether they add £0 or several hundred pounds a month depends almost entirely on when the lease was signed.
The baseline: mortgage and council tax
Land Registry data shows 56 new-build flats changed hands in postcode M15 4ZR between 2023 and 2025, averaging £329,428 (HM Land Registry, queried 25 October 2026). On a 90% loan-to-value mortgage — a 10% deposit of £32,943, a £296,485 loan over 25 years at the Bank of England's quoted 75%-LTV five-year fixed rate of 4.32% — the monthly repayment works out to £1,618. A 90% LTV product typically prices a little higher than the 75% LTV rate used here, so treat this as a floor, not a ceiling.
Manchester's 2026-27 Band D council tax is £2,312.04 a year, or £192.67 a month — the band Homecost's own estimator assigns to a flat on this street. Add the two together and the "headline" monthly cost is £1,810.
Neither figure includes what actually makes a flat different from a freehold house: a service charge, and possibly ground rent.
Service charge: the cost that's always there
Almost every flat in England and Wales is sold leasehold — 128,499 of 131,523 flats that changed hands in 2025 were leasehold, 97.7% (HM Land Registry, queried 25 October 2026), a figure that has barely moved in years. Leasehold means someone else owns the building structure and communal areas, and charges you for maintaining them.
Industry surveys cited by the Leasehold Advisory Service and the HomeOwners Alliance put typical new-build flat service charges in a wide band, scaling with the amenities on offer:
| Annual service charge | Per month | What it typically buys |
|---|---|---|
| £1,200 | £100 | Small block, no lift, no concierge |
| £2,400 | £200 | Mid-range development with a lift |
| £3,600 | £300 | Lift, gym, communal gardens, concierge |
| £5,000+ | £415+ | Tall building, 24-hour concierge, pool or spa |
Flat numbering on Silvercroft Street runs past 2500 — consistent with a tower of 25 or more storeys — the profile this scale associates with the top band. We have no verified service charge figure for this specific building, but a tall, amenity-heavy tower like it plausibly sits at £3,600-£5,000+ a year (£300-£415+ a month), not the £1,200 small-block minimum. See our guide to typical new-build service charges for the full breakdown.
Ground rent: why the date on the lease decides everything
Ground rent is the other leasehold-only cost, and it is where the date a lease was granted matters more than anything else. The Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022 caps ground rent at a "peppercorn" — effectively £0 — on most new long residential leases granted on or after 30 June 2022 (retirement properties followed from 1 April 2023). A flat that had its first sale in May 2024, like the Silvercroft Street example, almost certainly has a lease dated after the cut-off — meaning its ground rent should, by law, be nil.
Leases granted before 30 June 2022 are unaffected and keep whatever terms they were written with. The government's English Housing Survey puts the average ground rent paid by existing leaseholders at £298 a year, though the range runs from as little as £10 to far higher (cited via HomeOwners Alliance, 2026). The leases that cause real problems are a minority with escalating clauses — ground rent that doubles every 10 or 25 years, or rises with RPI — which the Competition and Markets Authority estimates affect close to a million leases nationally. Mainstream mortgage lenders generally treat ground rent above roughly 0.1%-0.2% of a property's value, or doubling more often than every 20 years, as "onerous," which can complicate a future sale or remortgage even though it rarely affects the lease you're buying today.
Separately, the government has proposed capping existing ground rents at £250 a year before phasing them to a peppercorn after 40 years — but this is a proposal working through Parliament, not current law, and the timetable isn't fixed.
What it adds up to
Putting the baseline and the leasehold-only costs together for a flat like the Silvercroft Street example:
| Cost | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Mortgage (90% LTV, 25yr, 4.32%) | £1,618 |
| Council tax (Band D, Manchester 2026-27) | £193 |
| Service charge (tall-tower estimate) | ~£415 |
| Ground rent (2024 lease — peppercorn) | £0 |
| Total | ~£2,226 |
The service charge alone adds roughly 23% on top of the mortgage-and-council-tax baseline — far more than ground rent, which this particular flat's 2024 lease date reduces to nothing. Even on an older, pre-2022 lease carrying the national average £298 a year in ground rent, the extra is only about £25 a month — a rounding error next to the service charge for the large majority of flats. It's the minority with escalating "doubling" clauses, not the typical lease, that generates the ground-rent horror stories.
The practical takeaway for anyone buying a flat is to budget for the service charge as a certainty and check the ground rent as a formality on anything bought since mid-2022 — but to read the actual clause on anything older, since that's where the real variation sits. For the regional picture behind why flats are leasehold at all, see our breakdown of leasehold house and flat shares across major UK cities, and browse our full set of first-time buyer guides for more on the costs that sit outside the mortgage.
This is general information, not financial or legal advice. Service charge estimates are illustrative, not a quote for any specific building, and lease terms vary. Speak to a qualified conveyancer or adviser before acting.