Do you need a licence to put scaffolding on the pavement?

If a scaffold is going to stand anywhere on the public highway — and this includes the pavement outside a house, not just the road itself — a licence from the local council is required before it goes up. This applies even for scaffolding on a private residential job, since the requirement is about the scaffold's footprint on public land, not the nature of the property being worked on.

Getting this licence is the responsibility of the builder or scaffolding company carrying out the work, not the homeowner directly. That said, it's worth understanding as a customer that it is, in practice, your responsibility to check the licence is actually in place before work starts and that it doesn't lapse before the job is finished, since it's your property the scaffold is serving and any problems with an expired or missing licence can cause delays or complications for your project regardless of whose formal obligation it technically was.

Licence costs vary quite significantly by local council, and there's no single national rate — each council sets and administers its own scheme. To give a sense of the range as of 2026: Durham charges around £40 per week (or part of a week) for the first 20 metres of scaffold, with an additional £40 per week for each further 20 metres; Suffolk charges around £260 for the first four weeks and around £130 per four-week extension after that; Dorset charges around £93 for a new licence valid for 28 days, or around £47 to renew an existing one for a further 14 days; Surrey charges around £208 per 28-day period; Devon charges around £158; and St Helens charges around £150 per calendar month. Because every council runs its own scheme with its own pricing structure and terminology, the specific local authority covering the job is the only reliable source for an accurate current figure — these examples are illustrative of the range rather than a substitute for checking directly.

Beyond the fee itself, most councils have similar underlying requirements for granting a licence. Proof of public liability insurance is commonly required, often to a minimum of £5 million, since the council is effectively allowing a private structure to occupy public land and wants assurance against any resulting harm or damage. A deposit against potential damage to the highway or pavement surface is also commonly required by some councils. Applications typically need to be submitted a matter of days before the scaffold is actually needed on site — commonly around three working days' notice cited by at least one council, though this varies — so a licence application isn't something that can realistically be sorted out at the very last minute if a project's start date moves forward unexpectedly.

Unlicensed scaffolding on a public pavement or highway isn't a minor technicality — it's an unlawful obstruction of public land, and a council can require it to be removed, which causes real delay and disruption to a project quite apart from any other consequences. Beyond the legal issue itself, a scaffolding company willing to skip this step is worth treating as a broader red flag about how they operate generally, since cutting a corner on something as visible and checkable as a highway licence raises reasonable questions about what else might be handled loosely.

Before work starts, it's worth asking the scaffolding company directly whether a pavement or highway licence application has actually been submitted to the relevant council, whether it's been confirmed and is running for the full expected duration of the job (including a reasonable buffer, given how common project overruns are), and who exactly is named on the licence. These are simple, reasonable questions, and a professional company should have straightforward, confident answers to all of them well before the scaffold goes up.

Frequently asked questions