Ealing Landlord Licensing Guide — Selective, Additional and HMO

Ealing cancels your application and keeps the fee if a single document is missing. Most landlords find out the hard way.

Ealing Council runs three licensing schemes for private rented homes — selective, additional HMO and mandatory HMO — and enforces a strict 14-day completion window on every application. If you submit through the MetaStreet portal without the right Gas Safety Certificate, a correctly marked EICR, a valid EPC or a properly annotated floor plan, the council closes your application after 14 days and keeps the Part A fee. That is £250 for a selective licence, £300 for an additional HMO licence, or £500 for a mandatory HMO licence — gone, with no licence to show for it.

The rules are all published on ealing.gov.uk. The problem is that the selective licensing designations use pre-May 2022 ward boundaries — not the current electoral wards — and the fees, documents, discount eligibility and physical HMO standards are scattered across disconnected PDF files and separate web pages. A landlord trying to work out whether their property in Acton or Greenford needs a selective licence, an additional HMO licence or a mandatory HMO licence has to reconcile outdated ward maps, cross-reference multiple council documents, and assemble a complete application file — all before opening a live portal session with a 14-day deadline ticking.

The Ealing Licensing Pre-Flight System: assemble offline, submit once, pass first time

This guide is not another summary of Ealing's licensing rules. It is a pre-flight system — a single, dated reference that organises every scheme Ealing runs into a step-by-step process you work through offline, at your own pace, before you touch the MetaStreet portal. You verify which licence your property needs using the correct pre-2022 ward boundaries, check every document against the council's exact requirements, record room measurements in the right format, calculate fees and discounts to the penny, and prepare your application answers on paper — so that when you log in, you are copying from a completed worksheet, not researching under pressure.

You get a 47-page guide covering all three licensing schemes, a dated compliance checklist, and seven printable worksheets — scheme decision, address verification, document audit, fee calculator, compliance tracker, licence lifecycle tracker and council communication log — all in one download.

What is inside

• Scheme decision workflow — start with your property address and work through ward boundaries, occupancy count and household composition to identify whether you need a selective licence, additional HMO licence or mandatory HMO licence, without guessing
• Pre-May 2022 ward boundary reference — the 3 wards under Selective Designation 1 (East Acton, Southall Broadway, Southall Green), the 12 wards under Designation 2, and the borough-wide scope of additional HMO licensing, with guidance on verifying your property against the correct boundaries
• Full selective licensing walkthrough — both designations, their start and end dates, the Part A and Part B fee stages, documents, discounts, and what happens at each step of the portal application
• Additional HMO licensing walkthrough — how the 3-or-4 person, 2-household test works borough-wide, the different fee structure, and the extra room-dimension and amenity requirements that catch landlords who assume it matches selective
• Mandatory HMO licensing — the 5-or-more person threshold, the scaled fee structure, national minimum room sizes and how the requirements sit alongside Ealing's local conditions
• Section 257 converted blocks — when a converted block of flats counts as an HMO, who applies and how it differs from a standard HMO application
• Pre-submission document checklist — Gas Safety CP12 (no unresolved "At Risk" or "Immediately Dangerous" codes), 5-year EICR (must state "Satisfactory"), EPC rated A–E, landlord accreditation, and a floor plan with room dimensions, doors, windows, room uses and alarm positions — with verification steps so you confirm every document meets the council's requirements before you upload
• Hand-drawn floor plan guide — what the council accepts, what measurements to include, how to annotate smoke detector and carbon monoxide alarm positions, and a sample layout showing exactly what a compliant floor plan looks like
• Fee calculator with discount rules — every Part A and Part B amount for each scheme, the £75 accreditation discount, the £50 EPC A–C discount, the £100 paper application surcharge, and the £50 council application assistance fee, so you know exactly what to pay and when
• Fit-and-proper person test — what the council checks, what disqualifies an applicant, how to prepare a management declaration, and what a managing agent needs to provide
• Licence conditions and post-grant duties — room occupancy limits, fire doors and fire safety hardware, waste management, annual certificate renewals, and a compliance tracker for staying in good standing after the licence is issued
• Enforcement and penalties — civil penalties up to £40,000 per offence, Rent Repayment Orders covering up to 24 months of gross rent, the £454.50 minimum housing hazard enforcement charge, and what triggers each one
• Article 4 Direction and planning cross-reference — why a property licence does not grant planning permission to convert to an HMO under Ealing's borough-wide Article 4 Direction, and what to check before changing the household arrangement
• Renters' Rights Act and PRS Database cross-reference — how the new national duties interact with Ealing's local licensing and what to prepare for the PRS Database rollout

Who this is for

• Self-managing landlords in Ealing with one or two properties who want to apply for their own licence without paying an agent £300–£650
• Accidental landlords who inherited a property or kept a former home in Ealing and have just discovered a licensing scheme applies
• Landlords who received a warning letter from Ealing's Housing Enforcement team and need to understand what the council is asking for
• HMO landlords who are unsure whether their shared house in Ealing needs an additional HMO licence, a mandatory HMO licence, or both
• Landlords using a letting agent who want an independent audit tool to verify the agent submitted the right application with the right documents
• UK landlords living abroad who self-manage an Ealing property remotely and need a single reference that explains the local rules without requiring a visit to the council

Why not free resources?

Every designation notice, fee schedule and application form is published free on ealing.gov.uk and the MetaStreet portal. We link to all of them.

The problem is not access — it is assembly, sequence and the ward boundary trap. Ealing's two selective licensing designations use pre-May 2022 ward boundaries. The additional HMO scheme is borough-wide but has a separate fee structure. The fee schedules are in a council PDF appendix. The document requirements are on a different page. The MetaStreet portal is on a different subdomain. And a landlord who enters the portal without complete documents faces a 14-day deadline that ends with the council keeping the Part A fee and closing the application.

A landlord working out whether a selective licence or an additional HMO licence applies to a property in Acton has to check the pre-2022 ward boundaries, count occupants and households, look up the correct fee tier, compare discounts across two schemes, assemble the documents in the order the portal expects, and complete the floor plan to the council's annotation standards — all before opening a live application session. One missed document and the Part A fee is gone.

The pre-flight system puts all three schemes in a single document, in execution order, with verification steps you complete offline so the portal session is a copy-paste exercise, not a research project.

Dated to the rules it describes

Landlord licensing in Ealing changes when designations expire and are renewed. Selective Designation 1 runs from 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2027. Designation 2 runs from 3 January 2023 to 2 January 2028. The borough-wide Additional HMO scheme runs to 31 March 2027, with a renewal consultation conducted between July and September 2026. The guide carries a clear "rules as at" date and separates the current operative rules from upcoming national changes, so you can see at a glance which rules apply now and which are on the horizon.

Full refund, no time limit

If the guide does not help you get your Ealing property licensed correctly, email [email protected] and we will refund you in full. No form, no deadline, no questions.

The free checklist gives you the steps. The full guide gives you the pre-flight system — ward boundary verification, document audit worksheets, fee calculators, compliance trackers, a floor plan guide, and a step-by-step MetaStreet portal walkthrough — everything a self-managing landlord needs to get the right Ealing licence first time, without losing a Part A fee to a preventable error.