The TV Licence When You Move House

It’s an easy assumption to make: you paid for a TV Licence, so surely it covers you and your television wherever you go. It doesn’t. A TV Licence is registered against a specific property, not a specific person, so nothing about it updates itself when you change address — whichever direction you’re moving in. Move into a home where someone else already held a licence, and you’re not automatically covered by it. Move out and forget to tell TV Licensing, and your old licence keeps running against a property you no longer live in, while your new address may have no licence covering it at all.

“TV Licensing” itself is a trade mark of the BBC, used under licence by the company currently contracted to administer and enforce collection — Capita Business Services Ltd — with the BBC, in its own words, retaining “overall responsibility” as a public authority for its licensing functions. It’s worth knowing that before you assume a letter about your address is a scam; the underlying system is genuine, even when individual pieces of enforcement mail can look alarmist.

The rule most people know is the old one: you need a licence to watch television “live,” as it’s being broadcast. That’s still true, and it now explicitly covers streaming services, not just an aerial:

The rule that genuinely catches people out is the second one. Plenty of people believe they’re exempt because they only stream on-demand and never watch anything “live” in the traditional sense. That reasoning doesn’t hold for one specific service:

In other words, a household that has cancelled every live TV service and streams everything on-demand can still need a licence for the sole reason that someone in it opens BBC iPlayer. And as with the rest of this page, a licence covers the address, not the device or the person watching — TV Licensing is explicit that “you only need one TV Licence per household, even if you use more than one of the devices listed above.”

If you currently hold a valid TV Licence and you’re moving to an address that doesn’t already have one covering it, the fix is simple, but it is a step you have to take — nothing happens on its own:

That three-month window is worth using — updating the address as soon as you have a confirmed moving date, rather than leaving it until moving week, avoids the gap where you’re technically unlicensed at the new address before you’ve gotten round to it. If you know you genuinely won’t be watching or downloading anything that requires a licence at the new address — no live TV on any channel or streaming service, and no BBC iPlayer — you can tell TV Licensing that instead of transferring cover you don’t need.

This is the point that catches out the most people, because it’s genuinely counter-intuitive: a property having a valid TV Licence already attached to it does not mean you, as a new occupant, are covered. Whether you are depends entirely on your relationship to the existing licence holder, not on the property itself.

In practice, this is the exact scenario that trips up renters most often: you move into a flat, the broadband and the landlord’s furniture are already there, and it’s easy to assume the TV Licence is part of the same “comes with the property” bundle. It isn’t. Check as soon as you move in — either by asking whether the previous occupant is transferring or cancelling their licence, or by starting your own — rather than assuming silence means you’re covered.

If you’re moving somewhere you won’t need a licence — moving in with someone who already has one as their spouse or partner, for instance, or simply not planning to watch anything that requires one — cancelling your existing licence isn’t just tidy admin. Because TV Licences are paid for in advance, letting one run on unused can mean paying for months of cover you’ll never use.

1. 1

   Apply up to 14 days ahead

   You can apply for a refund up to 14 days before the date you no longer need the TV Licence, so there's no need to wait until moving day itself.

2. 2

   TV Licensing works out the amount

   Refunds are based on the complete unused months left on your licence — at least one full month has to remain for you to qualify at all.

3. 3

   Paid within about 21 days

   TV Licensing aims to process and issue refunds within 21 days of receiving your application, by cheque or BACS transfer directly to your bank account.

One more wrinkle worth knowing: if you’re moving out and someone else is moving in who’ll be covered anyway — a new joint tenant taking over the tenancy, for example — you can give TV Licensing written permission to transfer your licence to them instead of cancelling it outright, in writing to TV Licensing, Darlington DL98 1TL. That only works while they’re moving in at the same time as you move out, not for whoever happens to take the property on later.

For 2026/27, a standard colour TV Licence costs £180 a year, set by statutory instrument:

That’s a £5.50 rise on the previous year’s fee, consistent with the CPI-linked uplift written into the BBC’s current Charter and Framework Agreement period. A genuinely obscure exception: if a household only ever watches on a black-and-white set — no colour receiver anywhere in the property — the licence costs just £60.50 a year, though this is a niche case almost nobody moving house will actually qualify for. Because the fee is reviewed and can change every April, treat £180 as the figure for the year in force now rather than a permanently fixed number, and check TV Licensing’s own costs page for whatever you’re reading this close to a 1 April.

Older guidance — and plenty of undated articles still online — says everyone over 75 gets a free TV Licence. That stopped being true UK-wide in August 2020. Today, a free licence for the over-75s is means-tested, not age-tested alone:

Pension Credit itself is means-tested — a benefit for pensioners on a low income, covering those who receive Guarantee Credit, Savings Credit, or both — so the free licence is really an extension of that eligibility, not a separate age-based entitlement. If you’re already receiving Pension Credit and turn 74, you don’t need to wait: TV Licensing will “update your payments to cover you until your 75th birthday, and then you’ll be covered by your free licence.” A qualifying licence also covers everyone else living at that main address, not just the named holder — which matters if you’re moving an elderly relative in with you, or moving in with one, since it changes who the household’s licence should actually be registered to. Anyone over 75 who doesn’t receive Pension Credit pays the standard fee like everyone else.

Using a TV receiver without a valid licence isn’t an unpaid bill in the way overdue Council Tax is — it’s a criminal offence under the Communications Act 2003, section 363, which is exactly why moving without sorting out your licence is worth taking seriously rather than filing under “deal with it eventually.” TV Licensing’s own description of how it checks is more mundane than the “detector van” image most people have in their head, though vans are genuinely part of it:

In other words, the everyday mechanism is a record-matching system plus officer visits to addresses the database flags as unlicensed — not a van cruising every street. The vans themselves do still exist and TV Licensing does describe using them at “specifically targeted addresses,” but they’re one part of the detection process, not the whole of it, and not deployed at random. If you’re actually caught watching or downloading without a valid licence, the consequence is real and specific:

(That maximum is £2,000 rather than £1,000 for addresses in Guernsey, which runs its own arrangement.) The practical takeaway for a move is straightforward rather than alarming: the address-based database is exactly why a stale record — your old licence still showing as active at a property you’ve left, or your new address showing no licence at all — is the kind of thing that eventually gets a letter or a visit, so it’s worth closing the loop in both directions rather than assuming it’ll sort itself out.