Housing Ombudsman Maladministration League Table 2026

The Housing Ombudsman maladministration rate tells you how often a social landlord is found to have failed its residents. It is the single clearest measure of complaint-handling performance across the sector because it normalises for portfolio size and focuses purely on the outcome of formal determinations.

Norwich City Council currently sits at the top of the league table, with 100% of its 39 published decisions resulting in an adverse finding. Across the 603 landlords with sufficient data in our index, the average maladministration rate is 81.1%. This guide explains what the rate means, how we calculate it, and what you should bear in mind when you read the table.

How to read the table

A maladministration rate of 50% means that half of the published decisions against that landlord resulted in an adverse finding. It does not mean that half of all complaints are upheld, because many complaints are resolved before they reach the Ombudsman, and the Ombudsman only publishes decisions on complaints it has formally investigated. What the rate does tell you is that, among the complaints that reached a formal determination, the Ombudsman found the landlord at fault in half of them.

You should always read the rate alongside the absolute number of decisions. A landlord with two published decisions and one adverse finding has a 50% rate, but that is far less reliable than a landlord with two hundred decisions and one hundred adverse findings, even though the rate is identical. The table shows both numbers so you can judge reliability for yourself. We also include the landlord type — local authority, housing association, or arm's-length management organisation — because each operates under a different regulatory framework.

Click any landlord name to open its dedicated profile. The profile lists every decision we hold for that landlord, the compensation ordered, the complaint categories involved, and the themes that recur most often. This lets you move from the high-level rate to the individual cases that drive it.

Rate versus volume

We publish separate rankings that look at raw volume rather than rate. The worst-landlords-overall ranking lists landlords by the total number of adverse findings, and the severe-maladministration ranking lists them by the count of severe findings. These two views answer different questions, and you should use them together.

The volume ranking tells you which landlords generate the largest absolute number of adverse decisions. That matters for policymakers and regulators because it shows where the bulk of poor practice is occurring. The rate ranking — the table you are reading now — tells you which landlords are most likely to be found at fault when a complaint reaches a formal determination. That matters for residents choosing a landlord, for journalists investigating performance, and for boards trying to benchmark their own organisation.

A landlord can rank highly on volume but modestly on rate, or vice versa. For example, London & Quadrant Housing Trust leads the volume ranking with 914 adverse findings, while Norwich City Council leads the rate ranking at 100%. Both pieces of information are true and useful; they simply measure different things.

The severe-maladministration ranking adds another lens. London & Quadrant Housing Trust currently leads that list with 220 severe findings. A landlord can have a moderate overall rate but a high severe count if its failings tend to be serious when they do occur. You can explore all three views from our rankings page.

Caveats: what the rate does not tell you

No single metric captures everything, and the maladministration rate is no exception. First, portfolio size matters. Small landlords can have volatile rates because a single adverse decision moves the percentage significantly. We therefore exclude landlords with very few published decisions from the rate calculation, but even among those included, smaller portfolios show more variance than larger ones. A landlord with ten decisions and five adverse findings has the same rate as a landlord with a thousand decisions and five hundred adverse findings, yet the latter is far more statistically reliable.

Second, landlord type matters. Local authorities, housing associations and arm's-length management organisations operate in different regulatory contexts, serve different tenant profiles, and manage different stock ages and conditions. You should compare like with like where possible, and treat cross-sector comparisons as indicative rather than definitive.

Third, the data reflects published decisions, not all complaints. The vast majority of complaints are resolved by landlords before they reach the Ombudsman, and the Ombudsman filters out complaints that are premature or outside its jurisdiction. The rate therefore measures performance at the formal-determination stage, not overall complaint volume or early-resolution success.

Fourth, the time period is continuous. Our index includes decisions from the earliest available published determinations up to the present day. A landlord that has improved its performance recently will still be affected by older decisions until they age out of the dataset. We show the total number of decisions so you can assess how much historical data is contributing to the rate. If you need to understand recent performance, look at the decision dates on the landlord profile page.

Methodology and data sources

We download published Housing Ombudsman determinations, extract structured data including the landlord name, complaint categories, outcomes, orders and compensation, and match each decision to a landlord record in our database. The maladministration rate is calculated as:

maladministration rate = adverse findings ÷ total published decisions for that landlord

An adverse finding is any decision that contains at least one outcome of maladministration, partial maladministration or severe maladministration. A single decision can contain multiple complaint heads with different outcomes; we count the decision as adverse if any head receives an adverse outcome. This is the standard approach used in Ombudsman reporting and aligns with how the Housing Ombudsman itself describes its determinations.

Only landlords with enough published decisions to produce a reliable rate are included in the league table. This threshold prevents tiny samples from distorting the ranking. The exact threshold is set so that the rate is statistically meaningful while still including as many landlords as possible. Landlords that fall below the threshold are excluded from the table but are still available to browse and search on the site.

All data is derived from material published by the Housing Ombudsman Service under the Open Government Licence v3.0. We do not alter the outcomes or the compensation figures. We do not receive data directly from the Ombudsman; we work exclusively from the publicly published decisions. If you spot an error, please contact us and we will investigate.