What Tenants Say: Social Housing 2024/25

Every year, social landlords in England with 1,000 or more homes survey their tenants and report their own records on repairs, complaints, safety checks and the condition of their homes. The Regulator of Social Housing publishes the results as the Tenant Satisfaction Measures. The league table ranks landlords one by one; this report steps back and asks what the figures say about the sector as a whole.

Throughout, "the typical landlord" means the median: half of landlords score higher and half lower. Each landlord counts once, whatever its size, unless we say otherwise.

What Tenants Are Happiest And Least Happy With

Tenants are asked about twelve things. At the typical landlord, the highest score is for "treated fairly and with respect" (78%) and the lowest for "satisfied with complaints handling" (35.6%).

Show as a table, with the spread between landlords

Measure	Typical landlord	Bottom quarter scores up to	Top quarter scores at least	Landlords
Satisfied with the overall service	72.4%	64.7%	79%	350
Satisfied with repairs	73.6%	66.7%	79.7%	350
Satisfied with time taken for repairs	69.7%	63%	76.7%	350
Home is well maintained	72%	65.5%	77.8%	350
Home is safe	77.7%	71.8%	83%	350
Landlord listens and acts	61.8%	54.1%	69.5%	350
Kept informed	72.1%	65.9%	77.3%	350
Treated fairly and with respect	78%	72.6%	84%	350
Satisfied with complaints handling	35.6%	29.6%	42.1%	349
Communal areas clean and well maintained	66.7%	60.7%	72.8%	349
Positive contribution to the neighbourhood	64.6%	57.8%	71.8%	350
Satisfied with handling of anti-social behaviour	59.6%	54.7%	66.4%	350

What Matters Most To Tenants

Across England's landlords, "home is well maintained" goes hand in hand with overall satisfaction more closely than anything else tenants are asked about (a very strong link, correlation 0.96), followed by "landlord listens and acts" (0.92) and "home is safe" (0.90). The weakest link is "satisfied with handling of anti-social behaviour" (0.70).

How we worked it out: for each measure, we checked how closely landlords' scores on it rise and fall with their overall satisfaction scores. The figure is a correlation: 1 means they move in step, 0 means no link at all. A link isn't proof that one causes the other.

Landlords' own records tell a different story. Compared with overall satisfaction:

• Non-emergency repairs done on time: weak link (0.22), higher goes with more satisfied tenants.
• Homes not meeting the Decent Homes Standard: weak link (-0.31), higher goes with less satisfied tenants.
• Complaints per 1,000 homes: weak link (-0.37), higher goes with less satisfied tenants.
• Anti-social behaviour cases per 1,000 homes: little or no link (0.09).
• Ombudsman findings of maladministration: moderate link (-0.48), higher goes with less satisfied tenants.

A negative figure means the two move in opposite directions.

Councils And Housing Associations

At the typical council landlord, 68.5% of tenants are satisfied overall, against 75.5% at the typical housing association: councils are 7 points lower (158 councils and 192 housing associations, 2024/25).

Councils here are councils that own social homes and report to the regulator as landlords. Fewer complaints isn't always better: a landlord that makes complaining easy can record more. Gaps under one point (or 0.5 complaints per 1,000 homes) are shown as about the same.

Landlords with 1,000 to 2,499 homes have a median overall satisfaction of 76.3%, against 63.7% for landlords with 50,000 or more homes. The smallest landlords score higher than the largest. Councils and housing associations are counted together.

By region, landlords based mainly in the North score highest (76.6%) and those in London lowest (61.2%).

The ten biggest landlords own 729,678 homes between them (17.6% of all the homes covered here). Their median overall satisfaction is 63.4%, against 72.7% for all the other landlords.

Do The Regulator And The Ombudsman Agree With Tenants?

The regulator inspects landlords against its consumer standards and grades them C1 (best) to C4 (worst). Median overall satisfaction by grade: C1 77.1%, C2 68.1%, C3 67%, C4 70.3% (only 7 landlords). Landlords graded C1 have the most satisfied tenants, but the lower grades don't line up neatly with what tenants say: the regulator checks whether a landlord meets its standards, which isn't the same as how its tenants feel.

When a complaint reaches the Housing Ombudsman, it decides whether the landlord got things wrong. For the 202 landlords with at least 5 decided cases, the typical landlord had maladministration found in 61.6% of the Ombudsman's findings about it. The quarter found at fault least often (53.7% or less) have a median overall satisfaction of 75.5%; the quarter found at fault most often (71.4% or more) have 63.1%, 12.4 points lower.

Repairs, Homes And Safety

The typical landlord says it completed 82.5% of routine repairs within its own target time, and 94.9% of emergency repairs. Each landlord sets its own targets, so these figures compare landlords against their own promises rather than against each other.

The 348 landlords in England that reported it say about 155,450 of their 4,132,396 homes (3.8%) did not meet the Decent Homes Standard. At the typical landlord the figure is 0.5%; 30 landlords had more than one home in ten failing, and 106 reported none. A decent home is in reasonable repair, has reasonably modern facilities, is warm enough and has no serious hazards.

The share of homes or buildings that needed each check and had it done. Landlords with nothing to check, or whose figure wasn't published, are left out.

Complaints And Anti-Social Behaviour

The typical landlord received 53.5 complaints per 1,000 homes and answered 90.1% of them within the time limits in the Ombudsman's complaint handling code. Landlords with more complaints don't necessarily have tenants who are less happy with how complaints are handled: the link between the two is weak (-0.20). A landlord that makes complaining easy can record more complaints and still handle them well. Anti-social behaviour cases run at 36 per 1,000 homes at the typical landlord.

Scotland

The Scottish Housing Regulator publishes its own figures for every social landlord. Across the 102 Scottish landlords with 1,000 or more homes (604,004 homes in all), the typical landlord has 87.6% of tenants satisfied overall and 86.3% satisfied with repairs; 91.4% of its homes meet the Scottish Housing Quality Standard.

Typical (median) Scottish landlord, 2025/26. Scotland asks its tenants different questions in a different way, so its scores shouldn't be compared point for point with England's.

Use The Figures

Every number on this page comes from public data, worked out by us at the date shown below. Download the figures for all 350 English landlords (CSV), free to reuse under the Open Government Licence: please credit the Regulator of Social Housing, the Housing Ombudsman and Mutual Home Exchange.

To see where your own landlord stands, use How Does Your Landlord Compare?. To look up one landlord, use the landlord league table or the landlord directory. For how many people are waiting for a social home in each council area, see council housing waiting lists.

What These Figures Can't Tell You

Each score is an average across a whole landlord. Your own experience depends on your estate, your local team and your home. Landlords run their own surveys within the regulator's rules, so methods differ a little, and landlords with under 1,000 homes aren't included. Links between measures show what tends to go together, not what causes what.

Thinking Of Swapping?

With a mutual exchange you take on the other tenant's landlord, so it's worth checking how that landlord scores before you agree. Search homes to swap or read how it works.