Buy-to-let Landlords Are Dodging Tax En Masse

What’s the largest single type of business registered in the UK? Is it corner shops, stocked to the rafters with all manner of essentials, from instant noodles to vape juice? Or is it fast food outlets, bookmakers or charity shops, the backbone of Britain’s fading high streets?

The answer is none of the above. According to research by real estate company Hamptons, the most common type of firm registered in the UK is now buy-to-let businesses. 

The number of companies holding buy-to-let property in the UK rose from 92,975 in 2016 to 401,744 in February 2025. In 2024 alone, a record 61,517 new limited companies were set up – a 23% increase on 2023, which previously held the record. In fact, there are now nearly four times as many buy-to-let businesses registered with Companies House as there are takeaways or hairdressers.

This explosion in buy-to-let firms over the past nine years dovetails perfectly with the gradual withdrawal since 2017 of income tax relief individual landlords used to enjoy on residential property finance costs. These changes didn’t affect UK and non-UK registered companies, so landlords appear to have moved their portfolios en masse from their personal names to limited companies.

Let’s call this what it is: widespread tax avoidance by a workshy, parasite class – and at a time when the Labour government is set to drive through welfare cuts targeting some of the most severely disabled people in the UK.

Being a landlord is not a job. Operating as a buy-to-let landlord means taking a property off the housing market and then allowing someone who needs a home to pay the mortgage on it – with the wages of their work. 

Landlords, then, don’t create housing stock. They don’t create anything – except perhaps anxiety and anger among tenants, often paying huge amounts for substandard, damp and unsafe accommodation. This is why money made from ‘landlordism’ is known as passive income.

But a passive income isn’t enough for landlords. Hamptons itself admitted that the increase in new limited companies is due to landlords realising that there’s more wealth to be hoarded this way. 

“The limited company is now the structure of choice for the next generation of investors,” Hamptons head of research said. “Current tax rules mean that most, although not all, new investors find themselves better off in a company structure than owning an investment property in their own name. 

“This means the number of limited companies is likely to continue its upward trajectory for the foreseeable future.”

These so-called investors are leeches, firmly attached to the bare legs of those who haven’t managed to get on the housing ladder. And they’re not just skimming off renters’ paychecks: in 2024, the average landlord had 8.6 homes in their portfolio, generating a gross annual rental income of around £8k per property. If you live in any London borough bar one, they’re taking an excess of 40% of what you earn each month.

We all need to live somewhere. Thanks to the decimation of social housing stock, you’re likely either living in an asset you’re paying off for yourself – a position of relative security in which you’ll have something to show for that money over the long term, and potentially be able to pass that asset down to your children. Or you’re living in someone else’s asset and paying it off for them, enabling them to buy more assets or fund their lifestyle, while draining the capital reserves you might use to help purchase a bricks-and-mortar asset of your own. 

In his scramble to justify upcoming disability benefits cuts, Keir Starmer dubbed Labour the “party of work”. (Not the party of workers – a key difference – but the party of work.) But the proliferation of buy-to-let businesses shows how Britain has become a playground for people who don’t make things or do things, but just have things. If Starmer means it, then when will Labour crack down on mass tax avoidance by landlords, feeding off their tenants’ labour?