Home Reach Rent Calculator

Home Reach is Heylo’s shared-ownership scheme for new-build homes: you buy a share of the property and pay rent on the share you do not own, normally 2.75% a year of its value. Enter the full property value, the share you want to buy, your household income and location, and this calculator returns the monthly and annual rent, next year’s rent after the RPI + 0.5% uplift, whether your income fits the scheme caps, and an affordability verdict that includes an estimated mortgage on your share.

Quick Answer

What this calculator covers, and what it does not

This is a Home Reach rent calculator, not a generic shared-ownership estimator. It uses the scheme’s own numbers: the 2.75% standard rent, the London and outside-London income caps, and the RPI + 0.5% annual uplift the scheme’s leases commonly use.

It does not replace the official affordability assessment. Under the scheme rules, an independent financial or mortgage adviser runs the Homes England assessment on your income and outgoings and sets the maximum share you may buy; developer examples also show that the minimum starting share varies by development, with many homes offered at 25% or 50% and up even though this tool accepts shares from 10%. Treat the verdict here as a planning check before that formal assessment, not as an approval. Calculator Zilo is not affiliated with Heylo, the scheme operator.

How to use the Home Reach rent calculator

Enter the property and your share first, then your income and location for the eligibility and verdict lines. Results stay hidden until you click Calculate.

1. Full property value: the whole home’s market value. Your share percentage is applied to it, so a 25% share of £300,000 is a £75,000 purchase and a £225,000 rental portion.
2. Share you want to buy: from 10% to 75%. Anything outside that range is rejected with an error, and fractional shares such as 33.5% are accepted.
3. Annual rent rate: leave it at 2.75% unless your listing or lease says otherwise. Choosing Custom reveals a rate field; a blank custom rate is rejected rather than silently treated as the standard rate.
4. Household income and location: income drives both the cap check and the verdict. Location changes only the cap (£80,000, or £90,000 in London); it does not change the rent by a penny.
5. RPI for next-year rent: the projection adds 0.5% to whatever RPI you enter. Leave the field blank and it counts as 0, which understates the likely rise; enter a realistic RPI for a realistic projection.

The verdict bands here are this tool’s own planning guide. For private renting, lenders and landlords use different income tests, such as the 40x rent rule, and the ideal rent calculator works the problem from income backwards; neither is a substitute for the scheme’s formal assessment.

How Home Reach rent is worked out

The rent is a percentage of the part of the home you have not bought. Buy a bigger share and the rent falls in direct proportion; buy it all and the rent is zero.

Two honesty notes on the model. First, the projection always uses RPI + 0.5%, even though newer Home Reach leases may rise by CPI + 1% instead; if your lease is a CPI lease, next year’s figure here will be close but not exact, and the difference compounds over time. Rent growth over longer horizons is a bigger topic, covered by the future rent calculator. Second, amounts are formatted in pounds with two decimals using your browser’s locale settings, so the digit grouping follows your own region.

The verdict bands

The verdict compares total monthly housing cost (monthly rent plus the mortgage estimate) with your gross monthly income, after the cap check. An income over the cap always produces the red cap verdict, whatever the ratio says.

The boundaries are exact: at precisely 40% the verdict is still “Tight but workable”, and at precisely 30% it is “Comfortable”. A £400,000 home at a 25% share on a £45,000 income lands at 33.1% of income, squarely in the Tight band, which is the signal to test a smaller share or a cheaper development before the formal assessment does it for you.

Worked example: £300,000 home, 25% share, £60,000 income

The pre-filled run is a £300,000 home outside London, a 25% share at the standard 2.75% rate, household income of £60,000 and RPI of 3%. Every line below is the tool’s exact output.

The deposit inside that mortgage estimate is 5% of your £75,000 share, which is £3,750, leaving a £71,250 mortgage. That small deposit is the point of the scheme: 5% of a share, not 5% of the whole £300,000.

The costs beyond rent

Rent is only one line of shared-ownership spending. The total in the results box deliberately excludes the rest, so budget for them separately.

• Service charges: most Home Reach homes are leasehold, and the service charge for communal areas, grounds and buildings insurance is billed on top of rent. It can run to hundreds of pounds a month on apartment developments and it rises independently of the rent.
• Repairs and maintenance: unlike a private tenant, you are responsible for repairs across the whole property, not just your share of it. A boiler failure is your bill at 25% ownership just as it is at 100%.
• Buying costs: mortgage arrangement fees, legal fees, a valuation or survey, and possible Stamp Duty Land Tax depending on how the purchase is structured.
• Your actual mortgage terms: the estimate here is fixed at 5% over 25 years with a 5% deposit. A 35-year term or a bigger deposit lowers the real payment, and a higher rate raises it; the verdict moves with it, so re-run the numbers with quotes in hand before committing.

Staircasing: buying more later cuts the rent

You can buy extra shares later, a process called staircasing, and each purchase cuts the rent in direct proportion to the share you take. At 100% ownership the rent stops entirely.

On the worked-example home, staircasing from 25% to 50% changes the tool’s output to a £150,000 share and a £150,000 rental portion: monthly rent falls from £515.63 to £343.75 (£4,125.00 a year), while the estimated mortgage on the bigger share rises to £833.04, giving a total of £1,176.79 a month. Rent saved is £171.88 a month; the trade is a larger mortgage and the cost of the extra share itself, bought at its value on the day you staircase, plus valuation and legal fees each time. Shares bought later are priced at the market value then, not the price when you moved in, so staircasing into a rising market costs more per percent than the first share did.

What competing calculators miss

Generic shared-ownership tools get the rent sum right and stop there. Home Reach buyers need the scheme specifics around that sum:

• BraveCalculator’s shared ownership rent calculator: clean rent-only math with a clear formula, but no income caps, no next-year uplift, no mortgage estimate and no verdict, so it cannot tell you whether the home is affordable or whether you are eligible at all.
• AS Mortgages’ shared ownership calculator: mortgage-led and generic to all shared ownership, with the rent treated as a side note. No Home Reach caps, no 2.75% scheme framing, no uplift projection.
• Legal & General Affordable Homes’ cost guides: a good plain-English explanation of the 2.75% convention, but it is guidance for their own homes, with no working calculator and nothing Home Reach specific.
• Official developer examples (Countryside and Heylo): trustworthy, but static tables at a 50% share with their own assumptions (a 10% deposit, 4.75% over 35 years in one current example). You cannot test your share, your income or your location against the caps.
• The gap this page fills: the Home Reach numbers themselves, the 2.75% standard rate, both income caps with the at-cap edge handled correctly, an RPI + 0.5% next-year projection, a mortgage-inclusive affordability verdict with published bands, and proper pound formatting throughout.

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