All bills included means your rent, gas, electricity, water and broadband are wrapped into one weekly price per person, with nothing extra to set up and nothing to split with housemates at the end of the month. In Stoke-on-Trent almost every student house is quoted per person per week, so a four-bedroom house is advertised at what each of you pays, not what the house costs.
That sounds simple, and usually it is. The trouble is that all bills included is a marketing phrase rather than a legal one. Nobody has to include a fixed list of things in order to use it, so two houses can both advertise it and mean genuinely different things. This guide sets out what the phrase should cover, what it almost never covers, and the questions that tell you which kind of house you are looking at before you sign for a year of it.
What all bills included should cover
A genuine all bills included price covers the utilities you would otherwise have to open accounts for yourself:
- Gas and electricity for heating, hot water and everything you plug in. This is the big one, and it is the bill that moves the most.
- Water and sewerage. In Staffordshire that is Severn Trent, and it is billed to the property rather than to a person.
- Broadband. The thing worth checking is not whether it is included but whether it is already installed and live on move-in day.
Some houses go further and add a TV licence for the shared living room, or contents insurance for your belongings. Neither is standard. Both are worth asking about rather than assuming.
What it almost never covers
Three things catch students out most often, and none of them is a sign of a bad landlord. They simply sit outside what a letting includes:
- Your own contents insurance. The landlord insures the building and their own furniture. Your laptop, your bike and your course kit are yours to cover.
- A personal TV licence if you watch live television or BBC iPlayer on a device in your own room. More on this below, because the rule is not what most people assume.
- Anything you sign up for yourself after you move in, from a streaming account to a second broadband line because somebody wanted faster uploads.
Council tax: you are almost certainly exempt
Full-time students are disregarded for council tax. If everyone in the house is a full-time student, the property is exempt and you should not be paying it at all. This is a national rule rather than a local concession, and it is set out on the government council tax page for students.
Exempt does not mean automatic. The council has no way of knowing who lives in a house until somebody tells it. What normally happens is that a bill addressed to The Occupier arrives a few weeks after the tenancy starts, everyone panics, and it turns out to be a formality. To clear it:
- Get a council tax exemption certificate from your university. At Staffordshire University this comes from student services, and it is usually a download rather than a paper form.
- Send it to Stoke-on-Trent City Council with the address and the names of everyone living there.
- Tell your landlord, so they know it has been dealt with and can chase if the council does not update its records.
The TV licence question
This is the most misunderstood bill in student housing. A TV licence is not about owning a television. It is about watching or recording live broadcast television on any channel, or using BBC iPlayer at all, on any device, including a laptop or a phone.
For a shared house the answer turns on your tenancy. If you have a joint tenancy covering the whole house, one licence normally covers everybody. If you each have your own agreement for your own room, which is common in student lets, then each person watching live TV or iPlayer in their room needs their own licence. TV Licensing publishes the student rules in full, and two minutes of reading beats a fine.
On-demand services that are not iPlayer do not need a licence on their own.
Fair usage caps, and why they exist
Some all-inclusive lettings apply a fair usage cap: a stated energy allowance for the year, with anything beyond it billed to the house. It is easy to read that as a catch, and sometimes it is. But a landlord putting energy inside a fixed price is absorbing a bill that moves with the weather and with the wholesale market, which the Ofgem price cap resets four times a year. A usage cap is one way of managing that.
What matters is whether the cap is honest. A fair one is generous enough that a household living normally never notices it, and it is written into the tenancy agreement as a number rather than described vaguely as reasonable use. Ask three things:
- Is there a cap at all, and is it in the agreement?
- What is the number, and how is it split across the house?
- What happens if we pass it, and will we be warned at the time rather than billed at the end of the year?
A landlord who cannot answer those clearly has either not thought about it or would rather not say. Both are better to find out in March than in June.
What a fair price looks like in Stoke
Stoke-on-Trent is one of the cheaper student cities in England, and per person per week prices in Shelton and Stoke town sit well below what the same house costs in Manchester or Birmingham. Our own houses start at £105 per person per week with everything included, which is a reasonable number to hold in your head while you compare.
Be careful comparing an inclusive price against an exclusive one. A house advertised at a lower weekly rent with bills on top is not cheaper until you have added the bills, and you will not know that figure until the first winter. When you do the sum, remember the exclusive house also costs you the work: four accounts to open, four housemates to chase every month, and a conversation about whose name the bill sits in when somebody moves out.
Why per person per week is the honest way to quote
Plenty of agents advertise a student house at a monthly figure for the whole property. There is nothing dishonest about that by itself, but it hides the number you actually care about. You have to divide by the number of bedrooms, convert months into weeks, then estimate bills on top, and what you end up with is a guess.
Per person per week removes all three steps. It is the amount that leaves your account, it compares directly against every other house on your list, and it does not shift depending on how the year divides into months. Quoted that way with bills inside it, the figure you are shown is the figure you pay.
Before you sign: the questions that matter
Take this list to a viewing. The answers tell you more about how a house is run than the photographs do:
- Exactly which bills are inside the weekly price, in writing in the tenancy agreement rather than in an advert?
- Is there a fair usage cap on energy, what is it, and what happens if we pass it?
- Is the broadband installed and working now, and what speed does it actually get?
- Is the house an HMO with a licence, and can we see it?
- Who do we call for a repair, and how quickly do they come out?
- Will our deposit go into one of the government-backed protection schemes, and which one?
- Is the tenancy joint or individual? It changes both the council tax position and the TV licence one.
If a price looks too good
A weekly figure noticeably below everything else in the same area is usually explained by something. Sometimes the explanation is perfectly fine: a house further from campus, a smaller room, a landlord who has owned the property outright for twenty years. Sometimes it is that the energy allowance is tight, the broadband is not in yet, or the house is not licensed for the number of people being put in it.
None of that is a reason to walk away from a cheap house. It is a reason to ask the questions above and get the answers in writing before you commit to a year.
Our own prices, and exactly what each one includes, are on our houses page. Every house is HMO licensed, and gas, electricity, water and wifi sit in one weekly price per person. If you are renting from overseas, our guide for international students covers the parts that work differently when you are booking before you arrive.