Your children share a bedroom with you and someone sleeps on the sofa every night. It feels like overcrowded housing, but England's legal test is old and sets the bar low. Many homes that feel cramped are not overcrowded in law.
The council can still help. It can rate crowding as a hazard, and overcrowding can count towards a homelessness application or housing register priority. This post covers private renters in England. Wales has its own renting and homelessness law.
How does the Housing Act 1985 overcrowding test work?
Under section 324 of the Housing Act 1985, a home is overcrowded if the people sleeping there break either of two standards.
The room standard in section 325 is broken when the rooms leave no choice but for two people of opposite sexes, both aged 10 or over, to sleep in the same room, unless they live together as a married couple or civil partners. The law counts a living room as somewhere to sleep, so a teenager on a sofa bed in the lounge does not break it.
The space standard in section 326 caps how many people can sleep there. Babies under 1 are not counted, and children aged 1 to 9 count as half a person. The limit is the lower of two figures. One comes from how many bedrooms and living rooms the home has, the other from adding up what each room's floor area allows. A room under 50 sq ft does not count at all.
| Bedrooms and living rooms | People allowed |
|---|---|
| 1 | 2 |
| 2 | 3 |
| 3 | 5 |
| 4 | 7½ |
| 5 or more | 2 per room |
| Floor area of each room | Counts as |
|---|---|
| 110 sq ft (about 10.2 sq m) or more | 2 |
| 90 to under 110 sq ft | 1½ |
| 70 to under 90 sq ft | 1 |
| 50 to under 70 sq ft | ½ |
What is classed as overcrowding in a 2 bed house?
Take a 2 bed house or flat with a living room. That is 3 rooms, so the room count allows 5. If both bedrooms are over 110 sq ft and the living room is 90 to 110 sq ft, the room sizes give 5½, so the lower figure of 5 applies. Five counted people could be two parents, a teenage boy, a teenage girl and two children under 10, plus a baby. That is seven people, and the home is not overcrowded in law, because the three rooms let the parents, the boy and the girl sleep apart. A smaller bedroom can bring the number down.
What is classed as overcrowding in a 3 bed house?
A 3 bed house with one living room has 4 rooms, so the room count allows 7½. That could be two parents, four teenagers and three children under 10, if every room is big enough. A separate dining room makes it 5 rooms, allowing 10. The room sizes can still bring that down, and the room standard is checked separately.
What is statutory overcrowding?
Statutory overcrowding means breaking the 1985 Act's room or space standard, and it can be an offence. You commit one if you cause or allow it, under section 327, and so does the landlord under section 331. Each carries a fine at level 2 on the standard scale, the second lowest band, plus a daily fine if it continues after conviction.
A landlord is only treated as causing it in three narrow situations, such as letting a home they had reason to believe would be overcrowded, or ignoring a council notice.
A family whose children have grown is unlikely to be the target. Section 328 protects you when a child turning 1 or 10 tips the home over the limit, as long as you have applied to the council to be rehoused and no one else moves in. Turning down a suitable offer loses that protection.
If the overcrowding is an offence, the council can serve you notice to end it within 14 days, and then, if it is still overcrowded in the 3 months after that, ask the county court under section 338 to order you to hand the home back to your landlord. If you have an assured tenancy, as most private renters do, a landlord who wants you out needs a Section 8 ground proved in court. Council action over overcrowding can give them one, as the next section explains.
How to report overcrowding in a house
Report it to your council's private housing or environmental health team. An officer can inspect and score "a lack of adequate space for living and sleeping" as one of the hazards the council scores under the Housing Health and Safety Rating System. If it is a category 1 (High band) hazard, the most serious kind, the council must act under section 5 of the Housing Act 2004. The answer can be a prohibition order capping the number of occupants, not a repair. Our guide to reporting a landlord to the council covers the evidence to gather.
Know the risk before you report. Since 1 May 2026, Ground 6B gives a private landlord a mandatory possession ground, with four months' notice, if an improvement notice names overcrowding as the problem, a prohibition order bans a use of the home that is incompatible with you staying on, or a licensed shared house, or a home under a selective licence, holds more people than its licence allows. Ask the council which action it is considering, and apply for rehousing at the same time.
In a licensed shared house (an HMO), the licence sets the maximum number of occupants, and each sleeping room must be at least 6.51 sq m for one person over 10 or 10.22 sq m for two people over 10, under Schedule 4 of the Housing Act 2004. Our HMO licensing guide has more.
A council cannot take enforcement action against its own homes. If you rent from the council or a housing association, use the landlord's complaints process first, then the Housing Ombudsman.
Does overcrowding give you priority for council housing?
It can. Every council in England must give "reasonable preference" in its allocation scheme to people "occupying insanitary or overcrowded housing or otherwise living in unsatisfactory housing conditions", under section 166A(3). Put simply, an overcrowded home should move you up the waiting list. Each council decides how to measure overcrowding, and its rules can be far stricter than the 1985 test.
The government's allocation guidance recommends a bedroom standard as a minimum. It gives a separate bedroom to each couple, each adult aged 21 or over, each pair of same-sex 10 to 20 year olds, and each pair of children under 10. Check your own council's allocation scheme for its rules.
Overcrowding can also matter for homelessness. You count as homeless if it would not be reasonable for you to keep living in your home, under section 175(3) of the Housing Act 1996. Under section 177(2) the council can compare your home with general housing conditions in its area, so the answer can depend partly on how your home compares with others nearby, as well as on your household's circumstances. Our guide to council homelessness help explains how to apply.
Remedy can work out whether your home breaks the legal standards, weigh the eviction risk before you report, and help you gather the evidence for a homelessness or housing register application.
Frequently asked questions
Under the bedroom standard in government guidance, a boy and a girl can share until one of them turns 10. Your council's allocation scheme sets its own rule, so check it.
Yes. You count as homeless if it is not reasonable for you to keep living in your home, and severe overcrowding can meet that test. The council looks at your circumstances against general housing conditions in its area, so apply to its housing options team with evidence of how you live.
Under the Housing Act 1985, yes, if it is the kind of room normally used locally for sleeping or living. The bedroom standard counts bedrooms, so under most councils' schemes a family sleeping in the lounge can show they are a room short.
It can be. Breaking the 1985 Act's room or space standard is an offence for the occupier, usually the tenant, and in three set situations, the landlord. A family pushed over the limit by a child's birthday is protected if it applies to the council for rehousing, no one else moves in, and it does not turn down a suitable offer. In a licensed HMO, a landlord or manager who knowingly lets more people live there than the licence allows commits a separate offence.
