Right to Buy: The Discount Your Family May Repay

If you bought your home under Right to Buy and you die within the discount repayment period, your family does not automatically have to pay the Right to Buy discount back. Death is treated as an exempt disposal: the home passing under your will, or under the intestacy rules if you left no will, does not trigger the repayment on its own. That is the reassuring half of the answer.

The other half is the one that catches people out. The repayment obligation does not vanish when you die — it passes to whoever inherits the property, for whatever is left of the five-year period. If the family then sells a Right to Buy house within 5 years of the original purchase, that sale is the trigger, and a percentage of the sale value goes back to the council. The discount was designed to follow the house, not the person, so a death simply moves it into the next pair of hands.

That makes the real question a practical one rather than a legal one. It is rarely "do we owe the discount because he died". It is "can the family afford to keep the house long enough that they never have to hand a slice of it back". This page maps the five-year repayment scale and the ten-year right of first refusal against the thing that actually forces the decision after a death: a household that has just lost an income.

The short answer: death is exempt, a later sale is not

Right to Buy comes with a covenant written into the transfer that requires some of the discount to be repaid if the property is sold or otherwise disposed of within a set period. For homes bought since early 2005 that period is five years; for older purchases it was three. The covenant is registered against the title, so it binds not just you but anyone who owns the house during the period.

The law lists a number of exempt disposals that do not trigger repayment, and a transfer made when the owner dies is one of them. Whether the house passes under your will or, if you made none, under the intestacy rules, the transfer to your beneficiaries carries no repayment charge. The same applies to certain transfers between members of the family and to a transfer to a former spouse or civil partner under a court order.

Source: Housing Act 1985, sections 155 to 160, at legislation.gov.uk, and GOV.UK, Right to Buy: buying your council home.

What the exemption does not do is cancel the covenant. It hands it on. Your beneficiary takes the house subject to the unexpired part of the repayment period, counted from your original purchase and not from the date of death. So if you bought four years ago and die, and your daughter inherits and sells a year later, she sells inside the five-year window and the repayment applies to her sale. If she can hold the house past the fifth anniversary of your purchase, it does not.

How the repayment scale falls each year

The amount that has to be repaid reduces the longer the property has been owned, measured from the original completion. It starts at the full discount and drops by one fifth for each complete year that passes.

Source: GOV.UK, Right to Buy: repaying your discount, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Read that against a death and the timing matters enormously. A family that inherits in year two and is forced to sell quickly faces repaying most of the discount; a family that can find a way to wait until year five hands back a fifth; a family that can hold on past the anniversary hands back nothing at all. Nothing about the grief changes, but a year of breathing space can be worth a great deal of money.

Why a rising house price raises the bill

The figure people carry in their heads is the discount they were given at the time of purchase. That is not the figure that gets repaid. The repayment is worked out as a percentage of the property's value at the point it is sold, using the same percentage discount that was originally applied.

So if the home was bought with a discount worth, say, two fifths of its value, a sale in year three would mean repaying 60% of that two-fifths share — a little under a quarter of whatever the house now fetches. If prices have risen since the purchase, the sum handed back is larger than the discount ever was in cash terms. This is the detail that turns a manageable-sounding clause into a real dent in what the family keeps, and it is why the market, and not only the calendar, decides how much is at stake.

Working out roughly what is at stake

You do not need a formal valuation to get a sense of the exposure. Four things set it, and you can sketch them on the back of an envelope.

1. The discount percentage. This is on the original Right to Buy paperwork and the transfer. It is the starting share the repayment is based on.
2. The year a sale would fall in. Count from the completion date, not from the death. That fixes whether the multiplier is 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, 20% or nothing.
3. What the house would sell for now. The repayment is a share of this, so use a realistic current figure rather than the price once paid.
4. The outstanding mortgage. This is what decides whether the family can hold on at all, and therefore whether the repayment is ever triggered.

Apply the year's multiplier to the discount percentage, then apply that to the current value, and you have a rough idea of the repayment a sale would cost. Set it beside the mortgage balance and you can see the two forces at work: the debt that pushes towards a sale, and the clawback that punishes selling too soon.

The ten-year right of first refusal

There is a second string attached to a Right to Buy home, and it runs longer than the discount clause. For ten years after the purchase, an owner who wants to sell must first offer the property back to the former landlord — the council, or the housing association it has passed to. The landlord is given a period to decide, and the price is either agreed between the parties or fixed by the district valuer if they cannot agree. Only if the landlord declines, or does not respond in time, is the owner free to sell on the open market.

For a bereaved family this is rarely a disaster, but it is a delay, and delay is exactly what a household under financial pressure can least afford. If the mortgage still has to be paid every month while the first-refusal process runs, the weeks add up. It is worth knowing the requirement exists before you assume the house can simply be put on the market the moment probate allows.

The rules also differ depending on how the tenant came to own the home. If a secure tenant died before ever buying, the position is not about repaying a discount at all but about whether the right and its discount survive — we cover that in what happens to Right to Buy after the tenant dies.

What actually forces a sale after a death

The discount clause only bites if the family sells. So the whole problem reduces to one thing: whether the household can keep paying for the home on the income that remains. If you bought under Right to Buy, you almost certainly bought with a mortgage, and that mortgage does not shrink or pause because a borrower has died. If it was a joint mortgage, the survivor is liable for the whole balance; if it was in one name, the payments still fall due from an estate that may be short of ready money.

This is where the shape of any life cover matters. A Right to Buy purchase is usually a repayment mortgage whose balance falls over time, which is the pattern a decreasing term policy is built to follow: the sum insured steps down roughly in line with the debt. Cover written to clear the mortgage does two jobs at once here. It removes the monthly pressure that forces a quick sale, and by doing so it lets the family wait out the discount period rather than selling inside it and paying a chunk back. If you want to see what cover against your own balance and term would look like, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker price it properly.

The pressure is worst where one income was carrying several people. If you are supporting children and an older relative at the same time, a forced sale of the home is only one of the things that unravels — we set out how to think about that in sizing cover when two generations depend on you.

If the home is shared ownership or a housing association property

Not every discounted purchase is a classic council Right to Buy. Housing association tenants may have bought through Right to Acquire or a shared ownership scheme, and the rules on repayment and resale are not identical. Shared ownership in particular usually gives the housing association a say in any sale and, on the death of the owner, a right to be involved in what happens to the share. If that is your situation, whether the provider can take the share back is a separate question, covered in whether the housing association can buy the share back when you die.

One point applies across all of them. Whoever inherits needs to know which scheme the home was bought under before they make any decision about selling, because the covenant, the repayment figure and any first-refusal right all depend on it. The paperwork from the original purchase, held with the title deeds, is where that answer lives.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

Right to Buy is not a single UK scheme, and the discount clawback described here is the England position. Wales abolished the Right to Buy for new purchases in 2019, and Scotland abolished it in 2016, so in those nations no new discounted purchases are being made — though homes bought under the old schemes were subject to their own repayment conditions at the time. Northern Ireland ran a comparable House Sales Scheme, which has since closed to new applicants and carried its own discount repayment period.

Where you are also matters for who inherits the home in the first place, which is the thing that decides whether a sale even arises. In Scotland the way co-owned property passes on death can be built into the title itself — see how a survivorship destination passes a Scottish home. And across the UK, if you were separated but had not divorced, the person who inherits under the intestacy rules may not be who you assume; we explain that in why a separated spouse still inherits. Whatever the scheme, the wider picture of how a death reshapes a family's finances sits in our guide to life events that change who depends on you.

Frequently asked questions

Does my family repay the Right to Buy discount if I die?

Not because of the death itself. A transfer on death, whether under your will or the intestacy rules, is an exempt disposal, so no repayment is triggered when the home passes to your family. The obligation carries on, though, for the rest of the original five-year period. If your family then sells within that window, the repayment applies to that sale, calculated as a percentage of the sale value.

How much of the discount is repayable?

It reduces for each year of the repayment period that passes. A sale in the first year means repaying the full discount percentage of the sale price; the share then falls by one fifth each year, to 80%, 60%, 40% and 20%, reaching nil after the fifth anniversary of the purchase. Because the figure follows the current value rather than the original discount, a rising market increases the amount handed back.

What is the right of first refusal?

For ten years after the purchase, an owner who wants to sell must first offer the property back to the former landlord, at a price agreed between them or set by the district valuer. It runs longer than the discount repayment period and applies even once no discount is repayable, so it can delay a sale by a bereaved family who need to move quickly.