How a Lease Extension Works: Every Step From Section 42 Notice to Land Registry

Once you serve a Section 42 notice, the process runs in a fixed order: the freeholder’s counter notice, negotiation, drafting and completion, then registration at HM Land Registry. The law defines each step and gives each one a deadline, and if your freeholder stalls or refuses, two safety nets (the First-tier Tribunal and the County Court) let you keep moving. We do more lease extensions in a month than 99.9% of law firms do in a year, and the statutory steps are the same in each case.

Step 1: Serving the Section 42 Notice

The Section 42 notice starts the process. It’s a legal document served on your freeholder, and anyone else who needs to be served, setting out that you want to extend, the premium you’re offering and the changes you want to the lease.

The rules on its content, who receives it and how are strict. It has to be served in hard copy, for example, and email won’t do unless agreed in advance. Get one small detail wrong and the notice is invalid, your freeholder can charge you thousands of pounds to tell you so, and you start again.

Served properly, the notice does three things:

• Before it arrived your freeholder could ignore you. Now you’re exercising a statutory right and they have to engage.
• The valuation date freezes on the day you serve. Serve with 81 years left and your premium is calculated at 81 years, even if the extension takes a year.
• You should file a unilateral notice (a UN1) on your landlord’s title at HM Land Registry. It protects you if the freeholder tries to sell or transfer the freehold mid-process.

What the freeholder can do next

• Ask for a deposit of £250 or 10% of the premium you’ve offered, whichever is greater. On a £15,000 offer that’s £1,500, payable within 14 days of them asking.
• Send their valuer to inspect the flat, at your cost, with at least 3 days’ notice. The valuer is checking the floor plan and any breaches of the lease, not how tidy you keep the place.
• Reply within 2 months with a Section 45 counter notice.

The Counter Notice

The freeholder can admit your claim and come back with counter proposals on the premium and the lease changes. They can deny it, either because of a mistake in your Section 42 notice or in very limited circumstances, such as a planned redevelopment. Or they can miss the deadline, which happens more with smaller freeholders, councils and housing associations, where things can be a bit disorganised. Admission is by far the most common path, and it takes you into negotiation.

Step 2: Negotiating the Premium and the Lease

Negotiation runs from around month two to month eight, with the numbers and the words negotiated in parallel.

The premium

Negotiating a premium is nothing like haggling over a used car. The formula is set out in law, and you’re arguing about its inputs. To do right by their client, the freeholder’s valuer has to push for the highest premium they can get, so expect a combative process where they fight for every penny. A solicitor alone won’t do this. It’s technical work that valuers charge for separately, and it comes down to who knows the area best and who has the better data.

The lease terms

Two changes are fixed by law: you get 90 extra years on top of what you have, and the ground rent drops to a peppercorn (zero). Freeholders will push for more. The 1993 Act limits them to two kinds of change, but that doesn’t stop them trying.

The first is fixing errors, such as missing pages, or a plan in black and white when the lease describes it in colour. Fixing those benefits everyone.

The second is modernisation, which is more of a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string question. A £10 fee from the 1980s for permission to make an alteration might reasonably go up to £60 or £70 to account for inflation. We once had a lease that made the leaseholder responsible for filling the gas lamps on the street outside, and we removed that clause as a modernisation because the lamps no longer exist. Because the term is so vague, freeholders will try to pass off changes in their own favour as modernisation.

Safety Net 1: The First-tier Tribunal

If you can’t agree the premium or the terms, you can apply to the First-tier Tribunal, an independent panel (in most cases a solicitor and a valuer) that hears evidence from both sides and issues a binding decision. Each side pays for its own tribunal work, which shifts the balance of power. Until then the freeholder has only paid for negotiation, but tribunal costs far more, with bundles of hundreds of pages of evidence that take days to prepare.

Safety Net 2: The County Court

The tribunal settles disagreements. The County Court steps in when your freeholder isn’t meeting their legal obligations, and two scenarios come up.

In the first, the freeholder misses the counter notice deadline and doesn’t engage after that either. You have 6 months from the missed deadline to apply for a vesting order, where the court forces the lease through on the terms in your Section 42 notice. If your offer was too low, that could invalidate the notice and you’d start again, but if the notice is right, the court can grant your lease at the figures in it.

In the second, everything is agreed but the freeholder won’t sign to complete, and the court can compel them. This happens more often than you’d expect. A few months ago a large council we were dealing with had only one person able to sign the lease, and that person was on holiday, so we had to force them to engage.

Court and tribunal sound daunting, but between them the law gives you a way to extend your lease however difficult your freeholder is being.

Step 3: Drafting, Completion and Registration

Negotiation, tribunal and a missed counter notice all lead to the same place: drafting the new lease. This stage has the tightest deadlines in the process, four of them, each 14 days:

1. The freeholder’s solicitor drafts the lease once terms are agreed.
2. Your solicitor responds with comments.
3. The freeholder’s solicitor sends back a revised version.
4. Your solicitor responds again.

If either side misses a deadline, the other side’s draft is deemed accepted as written, so the terms you fought for only make it into the lease if your solicitor turns each draft round on time. We always try to agree the lease as part of the terms, and push the other side to do the same, because it takes away the time pressure and the risk of a mistake.

At completion you pay the premium, sign the new lease and surrender the old one. In law it’s no different from completing a property purchase, except that you’re buying the extended lease rather than the flat.

The last step is registration at HM Land Registry. Until it’s done, the official title still shows your old lease, which matters if you try to sell or remortgage in the gap. As of 2026 the backlog means registration can take more than a year, but if a sale or remortgage is waiting on it you can ask for it to be expedited and done in a few weeks. If you have a mortgage, send the updated title to your lender so they can update their records.

Where Every Route Ends

At the start you can’t know how long your case will take or whether you’ll need tribunal or court. Whichever route it takes, it ends with a new lease registered at HM Land Registry, with an extra 90 years and no ground rent.

If you’d like to know where you stand first, request your free lease report. It takes 2 minutes to request, and we pull data from more than 30 sources, including HM Land Registry, to show how many years you have left, your ground rent and the kind of premium you’re likely to pay.