Convenience store owners across the UK are heading into the Autumn Budget with a business rates bill that has very nearly doubled in two years. The Association of Convenience Stores (ACS) published its 2026 Local Shop Report ahead of Chancellor John Healey’s first Autumn Budget statement on Wednesday 28 October 2026, and the numbers explain why rates have become the sector’s loudest complaint: the total business rates bill paid by convenience stores nationwide has climbed to around £356m, up from roughly half that two years ago.
Why the bill has jumped so sharply
Two changes landed at once. The 40% retail, hospitality and leisure business rates relief that had been propping up shop margins since the pandemic ended on 31 March 2026, and the 2026 business rates revaluation took effect in the same window, resetting rateable values across England and Wales. For a sector that the ACS counts at 50,925 stores across mainland Britain, forecasting combined sales of £49.1bn this year, the combined effect has been a step change in fixed costs rather than a gradual rise.
It isn’t the only cost line moving upward. Employer National Insurance contributions now cost the convenience sector over £400m a year following last year’s increase, and the ACS’s own Crime Report 2026 puts the sector’s spending on CCTV, security tagging and other crime prevention at a record £313m — working out, the ACS calculates, at roughly an 11p “crime tax” on every transaction in a local shop.
Shopkeepers are feeling it personally
The Local Shop Report’s most telling figure may not be a cost at all: one in five independent retailers told the ACS they had taken on more hours themselves and gone without a holiday in the past year just to keep their shop’s costs under control. Investment by the sector, which peaked at over £1bn in 2024, has since slipped back to around £900m a year as owners hold off on refits, new equipment and expansion while they absorb the rates and NI increases.
The industry’s case to the Treasury
The ACS took that evidence straight to Westminster, launching its “Checkout the Cost of Trading” campaign in Parliament on 9 September — seven weeks ahead of the Budget — to press MPs on what local shops already contribute in tax before any further rises are considered. The campaign’s central ask is straightforward: keep business rates relief for the sector and avoid loading further costs onto shops that, in many towns, are the only food retailer within walking distance. Whatever the Chancellor announces on 28 October, it will shape convenience store costs for the next financial year, so it’s worth watching the Budget coverage directly rather than relying on headlines alone.
What it means for your shop
A few practical steps are worth taking now, whatever the Budget brings. Check your current rateable value against the 2026 revaluation — a figure that looks wrong is worth challenging through the Valuation Office Agency’s formal process rather than simply absorbed. Build the higher rates bill into this year’s cash flow planning rather than treating it as a one-off shock, and keep clear records of what you’re spending on security and loss prevention, since that figure is part of the case the ACS and others are making to government. None of this changes overnight, but shops that go into the Budget with their numbers in order are better placed to react to whatever is announced — whether that’s run from a single site or a convenience store in Worthing, Yeovil or Heworth.
For the full figures behind this article, the ACS’s own report and its coverage of the campaign are worth reading directly: ACS: tax and inflation outpacing investment and sales at local shops.
