If you let a house in Newcastle to three or more people who aren’t one family, and they share a kitchen or a bathroom, that property is a house in multiple occupation. It needs a licence from the council. That applies everywhere in the city, not only in the student streets, and it costs £1,100.
Planning permission is a different question, and it has a different answer. You only need planning permission to turn a family house into a small HMO in certain parts of Jesmond, Heaton, High West Jesmond, South Gosforth, Sandyford and Spital Tongues. Everywhere else in Newcastle, you don’t need it at all.
So there are two maps. The licence map is the whole city. The planning map is a handful of streets, and most landlords outside of the student hotspots are not on it.
Getting those two confused is what causes the two most common mistakes we see. One is a landlord letting to three sharers without a licence because the property isn’t a student house and the tenants are all working. The other is a landlord who won’t consider sharers at all because they think it means a planning application, when their property sits well outside the Article 4 areas and never needed one.
What counts as an HMO in Newcastle?
Three or more people, living in two or more households, sharing a kitchen, a bathroom or a toilet.
“Two or more households” is the part that trips people up, so it’s worth spelling out. Three friends renting a house together are three separate households, even though they all get on and all signed the same agreement. A couple and their two adult children are one household. It’s about the relationship between the occupants, not about who signed what.
Across England, the mandatory HMO licence applies at five or more occupants in two or more households. Newcastle runs a second scheme on top of that, called additional licensing, which brings the threshold down to three. The current designation covers “the administrative area of the City of Newcastle upon Tyne”, so it is genuinely the whole city. It came into force on 5 April 2025 and runs until 5 April 2030, replacing a city-wide scheme that had been in place since April 2020.
Which of the two licences you need depends on the numbers. Three or four occupants is an additional licence. Five or more is a mandatory HMO licence. Either way it’s a licence, and the fee is the same.
Failing to apply is a criminal offence. The council’s own guidance puts the financial penalty at up to £30,000, or an unlimited fine on prosecution.
What does an HMO licence actually cost?
£1,100 for a five-year licence, under the fee schedule published in June 2025.
It’s paid in two parts. £350 goes with the application, covering processing and administration. £750 falls due once the licence is granted, and the licence isn’t issued or published on the public register until it’s paid. The £350 isn’t refunded if the application is withdrawn or refused.
Three discounts are worth knowing about, because two of them are easy to miss:
- £100 if the property has an EPC rating of A, B or C. This is the one landlords most often leave on the table, usually because they don’t check the certificate before applying.
- £50 if you apply within one month of buying the property. New licences only, so it’s a one-shot window at purchase.
- £100 if the property is already accredited through the council’s Property Accreditation scheme. Mandatory HMO licences only, so this one doesn’t reach the three and four person lets.
Spread across the five-year term, £1,100 is £220 a year. An EPC C property licensed within a month of purchase comes in at £950, or £190 a year. On a three-bed house let to sharers.
Which matters because it makes the decision a priceable one. Landlords talk themselves out of sharer lets on a vague sense that HMOs are expensive and complicated. The licence is neither. It’s just compulsory.
Do I also need planning permission?
Only if the property is inside an Article 4 area, or you’re housing more than five people.
Here is how it works. Since 2010, moving a house between Class C3 (a family home) and Class C4 (a small HMO of up to six residents) has been permitted development. You don’t apply for anything. But a council can remove that right in a defined area by making an Article 4 direction, and Newcastle has made three of them, from 2011 onwards. They cover parts of Heaton, High West Jesmond, Jesmond, South Gosforth, Sandyford and Spital Tongues.
Inside those areas, converting a family house into a three to six person HMO needs planning permission. The council’s own wording, on the point that matters most: “Outside the areas covered by an Article 4 Direction, it remains permitted development to move between Class C3 (dwellinghouses) and Class C4 (HMO) without the need to apply for planning permission.”
Two things follow from that, and they pull in opposite directions.
If your three-bed is in High Heaton, Killingworth, Longbenton, Wallsend or Blakelaw, you can let it to three sharers tomorrow with no planning application at all. You still need the licence. But the planning gate that landlords worry about isn’t there.
If it’s in Jesmond or the parts of Heaton inside the boundary, you need both, and the planning application can be refused. That’s the whole purpose of an Article 4 direction. The council made it precisely so it could say no in areas where it thinks the balance of housing has already tipped.
The boundaries are street-level, not ward-level, which is why “it’s in Heaton” isn’t an answer. The council publishes an interactive map and the restricted streets show up as areas labelled “Area of Housing Mix”. Check the address, not the postcode.
Above six residents, the position is the same everywhere in the city. Planning permission is always required to create an HMO for more than six people, Article 4 area or not, because a seven-person HMO falls outside Class C4 altogether.
There is a planning application fee, and the council doesn’t publish its own schedule. The Planning Portal fee calculator is the place to get the current figure before you budget for it.
What if the property has already been let to sharers for years?
Then the planning question has probably already been answered, and in your favour.
The council’s guidance says it plainly: “Planning legislation and Article 4 Directions do not apply retrospectively. As a result planning permission is unlikely to be needed for an established Class C4 HMO, provided the property was brought into that use when planning permission was not required and has remained in the same use class ever since.”
So a Jesmond house that has been let to sharers continuously since before the Article 4 direction was made doesn’t suddenly need permission now. The two conditions are that it went into HMO use when no permission was needed, and that it has stayed in that use without a break. A house that reverted to a family let for a few years and is now going back to sharers is a different case, and one to take advice on rather than assume.
The licence works the other way round. It’s a live requirement, not a historic one. Length of use gives you nothing there. If three or more people are sharing it today, it needs a licence today.
What does the licence actually require you to do?
The conditions attached to a Newcastle HMO licence since April 2025 are longer than most landlords expect, but they are recognisable. Most of them describe a property that’s being run properly.
The ones with real teeth:
- Inspect the property at least every six months, and keep a record of any damp and mould found.
- Annual gas safety certificate, produced to the Property Licensing Team.
- A valid, satisfactory EICR for the electrical installation, produced on demand.
- A smoke alarm on every storey used as living accommodation, with the fire detection system tested annually and at the start of every tenancy.
- Minimum room sizes. 6.51 square metres for one person over ten. 10.22 square metres for two. Anything under 4.64 square metres cannot be used as a bedroom at all, and floor area under a ceiling lower than 1.5 metres doesn’t count towards the total.
- EPC of at least E, or a registered exemption.
- Emergency works to secure the property within 24 hours where reasonably practicable.
- Five hours of housing-related training a year for the licence holder.
- Notify the council within 28 working days of the property becoming vacant.
Taken together, that list is a fair description of the property that lets fastest. Bedrooms big enough that the third tenant doesn’t feel short-changed. A damp and mould record that exists before anyone complains. Certificates that are current rather than nearly current. Repairs that get done.
That’s the actual return on the £220 a year. Not the avoidance of a fine, which is a poor reason to do anything, but a property that holds better tenants for longer and has fewer arguments in it. The landlords who find HMO licensing painful are usually the ones meeting the conditions for the first time on a property that had drifted. The ones who find it uneventful were already doing most of it.
Keeping those records current, and the six-monthly inspections actually happening, is a large part of what a managed service is for.
And a third map: selective licensing
There’s one more scheme. It affects far fewer landlords, but the timing makes it worth a paragraph.
Selective licensing requires a licence for every private rented property in a designated area, whether it’s an HMO or not. Newcastle currently has designations covering Cowgate, the West End Terraces, part of the Howdene Road area in Benwell, Lemington, Denton Court and Columbia Grange, running to 5 April 2030. The existing Byker Old Town and Greater High Cross schemes end this autumn and a new designation replaces them, covering the Byker area and Greater High Cross from 30 September 2026 through to 29 September 2031. A selective licence is £1,000.
If your property is in one of those areas and is also a licensable HMO, you don’t need two licences. The designation carves out any house that requires a licence under Part 2 of the Housing Act 2004, which is where both HMO schemes sit. The HMO licence covers it.
Which question applies to you
Two questions, in this order.
First, how many people, and are they one household? Three or more in two or more households, sharing facilities, means a licence. That’s the whole city, no exceptions by area, and there’s no version of the answer that depends on where the house is.
Second, is the address inside an Article 4 area? If it isn’t, and most of Newcastle isn’t, changing the use needs no planning application. If it is, it does, and permission is not guaranteed.
Answer both before you advertise rather than after. A licence application made late is still a licence application, but a property let in breach of an Article 4 direction is a planning problem you’ll be arguing about for months.
If you’re weighing up whether a house you own would let better to sharers than to a family, those two answers are most of what you need. We can check the address against the Article 4 map, tell you which licence class the property falls into and what the fee comes to after the discounts, and look at what the property would realistically achieve let either way. That gives you the numbers to make the decision on, whichever way you go.
And if where you land is selling rather than re-letting, the notice timing has a trap of its own that’s worth reading first: there’s a 16-month clock most landlords haven’t seen.
This post sets out the position as at 2 September 2026, taken from Newcastle City Council’s published designations, fee schedule and licence conditions. Licensing schemes and planning directions change. Check the current position with the council before you rely on it, and take advice on anything specific to your property.