More than half of leaseholders say they don't fully understand what they're being charged for in their service charge. That's not usually because anyone's hiding anything from them. Itemised reporting and a proper audit trail were simply never built into how block management traditionally works.

Bills arrive as a total, the total goes up most years, and there's rarely an easy way to see exactly what changed and why. We wanted to know what a full breakdown actually looks like in practice.

So we pulled the real costs for two buildings and laid them out line by line. Here's what a managing agent charges for each service, and what the equivalent costs when the same building is self-managed. For the legal side of what you're entitled to see, our service charges guide covers your rights in full.

Building A: the full breakdown

For this building, we compared the real managing agent bill against the equivalent self-managed cost, using the building's actual insurance premium rather than an estimate.

Service	Managing agent	Self-managed
Fire checks	£1,000	£350
EICR	£762	£180
Insurance	£4,830	£2,800
Cleaning	£250	£250
Electricity	£294	£294
Management	£1,171	£300 (estimated)
Accountancy fees	£402	£180
General repairs	£800	£800
Total	£9,509	£5,154
Saving		£4,355 (45.8%)

Even with a genuine cost included for the software itself, rather than assuming self-management is free, the saving still comes to nearly half the annual bill.

Building B: two years of comparison

This building's leaseholders had two years of managing agent budgets to compare against the real cost of self-managing the same services.

Service	Agent budget 2024	Agent budget 2025	Self-managed
Accountancy	£330	£450	£80
Management fee	£2,100	£2,207	£0
Property insurance	£5,650	£5,650	£4,200
Insurance re-valuation	£660	£0	£166
Fire alarm maintenance	£700	£700	£350
Fire risk assessment	£695	£550	£99
EICR	£175	£175	£175
Communal electricity	£650	£400	£280
Communal cleaning	£290	£290	£290
Repairs and maintenance	£2,000	£2,000	£2,000
Total	£13,250	£12,422	£7,645
Saving	42.3%	38.4%

A few things stand out once it's laid out this way. The management fee, over £2,100 a year, disappears in this building's comparison, because there's no longer a party being paid specifically to coordinate the other line items. Property insurance is noticeably lower self-managed, even before shopping around for a better rate.

A few line items, like communal cleaning and repairs, stay exactly the same, because they're genuinely the cost of the actual work rather than a markup.

Why the gap exists

None of this means every managing agent is overcharging, or that self-managing is right for every building. Some agents do a genuinely good job, and self-managing takes real time and a willingness to get involved that not every group of leaseholders wants to take on.

What these two buildings show is more structural than that. A management fee pays for coordination and admin that a self-managing group either does itself or doesn't need in the same way. Insurance is often placed through arrangements that aren't fully visible to leaseholders, and nobody may have checked in years whether a better rate is available.

Whether self-managing makes sense for your building depends on how much time your board or committee can genuinely give it, not just on the numbers above.

If you're ready to see your own numbers

If you already have control of your building, through a residents' management company, share of freehold, or after taking Right to Manage, the fastest way to know what self-managing could save you is to run your own real bills against this same comparison.

If you're not yet in that position, because your freeholder currently appoints your managing agent, Right to Manage may be your first step. Once you have control, this is exactly the transparent, itemised view Freehold.Pro is built to give you automatically. See how it works.

Start by pulling last year's service charge accounts and matching each line item against what's above. That single exercise usually tells you more than the headline total ever did.