The works side of your portfolio

Your lettings software handles rent, certificates and tax. It does not help you work out what a retrofit should cost, whether the quote is fair, or what a fortnight of slippage does to your year. That is the job this does.

Level Best takes a description of the work in plain English and turns it into a costed plan: a budget with best and worst brackets, stages with dates, the trades you need to line up, and a running position you can actually check a quote against. It was built for people running building work who are not builders, which is most landlords most of the time.

Start free, one property

No card. One project free, then £7 a month for as many as you like.

Why now: EPC C by October 2030

If you let in England or Wales, this is the largest piece of forced spending in the sector's recent history, and it lands on people who are professionals about money and amateurs at running building work. Here is the shape of it, checked in August 2026.

One date, not two
Every privately rented home in England and Wales must reach EPC band C or above by 1 October 2030. The earlier plan for a separate, earlier deadline on new tenancies was dropped in favour of a single date.
A £10,000 cap, and the clock started last year
You are not expected to spend without limit. The cap is £10,000 per property including VAT, and it counts the EPC assessment itself. Qualifying spending counts from 1 October 2025, so work you have already paid for may already be on the meter. For properties worth under £100,000 the cap is 10% of value instead.
Spend the cap and you can register an exemption
If you spend the cap and the property still will not reach C, a cost cap exemption can be registered on the PRS Exemptions Register. It is expected to run for around ten years. Registering it needs evidence: the invoices, the assessment, the post-works certificate.
The fine is going up sharply
Penalties are set to rise to £30,000 per property, and enforcement moves toward councils checking rather than waiting for a complaint.
The certificate itself is being rebuilt
This is the part being missed. EPCs are moving from one score to four separate ones: fabric performance, heating system, smart readiness and running cost. The standard is expected to be fabric at band C plus one of the others, so a good boiler will no longer carry a cold house, and fossil fuel heating is expected to be capped below C on the heating metric whatever its efficiency. Insulate first is not advice any more, it is arithmetic.

Scotland runs a separate regime on a different timetable and is not covered above. These are the rules as they stand in August 2026 and they have moved before, so check the current position before you commit money. This is a plain-English summary, not legal advice.

What that means for a plan

The order of work changes. Under the old single score, a new boiler was often the cheapest route to a better letter. Under a fabric metric that has to stand on its own, the money goes into the loft, the walls, the windows and the draughts first, and the heating decision comes after, by which point it is usually a smaller decision. The retrofit template in Level Best is built in that order, and it asks for the things that actually change the answer: wall construction, what is already in the loft, the age of the glazing, and what you have spent since October 2025.

What works today

Ready now

  • Describe the works, get a costed plan with best and worst brackets
  • An energy retrofit template that asks the fabric-first questions
  • Check my quote: upload what a contractor sent and have it read back to you
  • Cost benchmarks for the common jobs, with their sources shown
  • As many properties as you like on the paid plan
  • Keep invoices, assessments and certificates against the project
  • Share a project with your letting agent as a viewer, with the money hidden if you want
  • A weekly email on where every job stands

Not built yet

  • A cost cap meter: cap spend counted and the evidence listed beside it
  • Void cost: your weekly rent against the schedule, so slippage shows as lost rent
  • Repair or improvement tagging, and an export your accountant will accept
  • A portfolio view: projects grouped by property with totals per property
  • Retrofit cost benchmarks, sourced the same way the existing ones are

These are the landlord-specific pieces. Whether they get built, and in what order, depends on what the list below says.

Tell me when the landlord features land

One email when there is something real to show. Nothing else, and no forwarding your address anywhere.

On the list. You will hear from me when the cap meter and the portfolio view are real, and not before.

Read first, decide later

Where this sits

It is not lettings software and it is not trying to be. It does not do rent, arrears, tenancy agreements, certificates or Making Tax Digital, and there are good tools for those. Keep them. This is for the weeks when a property is being worked on rather than let, which is when the money moves fastest and the least software exists.

Start with one property

Free, no card, and the retrofit template is in there now.

Start free