Use classes decide what a building can lawfully be used for, and whether changing that use counts as development at all. Moving between uses inside the same class is not development, so it needs no permission. Moving out of a class does, unless a permitted development right covers it.
Get the current use class wrong and every assumption after it is wrong too — the conversion route, the fee, the programme. This guide sets out the classes as they stand in England as at September 2026, and how to establish which one a building is in.
What are use classes, and why they decide your route
They are set out in the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 1987, substantially rewritten for England on 1 September 2020. The English version now has two schedules: Schedule 1 holds the B and C classes, Schedule 2 holds Class E and the two F classes.
The use class answers three questions before you have spent anything:
- Can you change the use without applying at all, because it stays within the same class?
- Is there a permitted development right for the change you want, needing only prior approval?
- Or does it need a full planning application, with everything that brings?
The use classes developers need to know
| Class | What it covers |
|---|---|
| E | Commercial, business and service: retail, food and drink consumed on the premises, financial and professional services, indoor sport, recreation and fitness including swimming pools and skating rinks, medical and health services, crèches and nurseries, offices, research and development, and light industry |
| C3 | Dwellinghouses used as a sole or main residence |
| C4 | Houses in multiple occupation used by not more than six residents |
| B2 / B8 | General industrial / storage and distribution |
| F.1 | Learning and non-residential institutions: education, museums, public libraries, halls, places of worship, law courts |
| F.2 | Local community: a shop of no more than 280 sq m mostly selling essential goods where there is no other such facility within a 1,000 m radius, community halls and meeting places, outdoor sport and recreation, indoor or outdoor swimming pools and skating rinks |
Class E is the one that matters most, because it is deliberately wide. A shop can become an office, a gym or a nursery with no application at all, and the whole of it is the starting point for Class MA.
Sui generis: the uses that sit in no class
Article 3(6) of the Order lists the uses that belong to no class. Every change into or out of one is development and needs planning permission. The list includes:
- Public houses, wine bars and drinking establishments with expanded food provision;
- Hot food takeaways;
- Cinemas, theatres, concert halls, live music venues, night-clubs, bingo halls and dance halls;
- Betting offices, pay day loan shops, amusement arcades and casinos;
- Launderettes, petrol filling stations, car showrooms, taxi businesses and scrapyards;
- Hostels and retail warehouse clubs.
Large houses in multiple occupation — seven or more occupiers — are not in the list but are not in any class either, so they are sui generis by omission.
What the 2020 reforms changed, and what they did not
On 1 September 2020 the old A1 shops, A2 financial and professional services, A3 restaurants and cafés and B1 business classes were folded into the new Class E, along with the medical, crèche and indoor sport parts of D1 and D2. Swimming pools and skating rinks were added to Class E on 21 April 2021.
What did not move is the point people get wrong. A4 drinking establishments and A5 hot food takeaways did not become Class E. They became sui generis. A former pub is not a Class E building, however commercial it looks, and no amount of Class E flexibility applies to it.
The Use Classes Order has not been amended for England since 2021. The 2022 changes on legislation.gov.uk apply to Wales only.
How use classes affect your conversion route
A Class E building can become C3 dwellings under Class MA permitted development, provided it has been in a qualifying commercial use for two continuous years. That is prior approval in 56 days rather than a planning application.
A sui generis building has no equivalent route, with narrow exceptions — Class M covers betting offices, pay day loan shops, launderettes and hot food takeaways, and Class N covers amusement arcades and casinos. Outside those, a former pub or nightclub means a full application.
The use class also gates airspace rights under Part 20, and those read on the Use Classes Order as it stood on 5 March 2018 rather than on Class E — so a gym that is Class E today still fails, because it was D2 then.
Where developers get caught out
- Assuming Class E means everything commercial. Pubs, takeaways, nightclubs and betting offices are not in it.
- Article 4 directions. A council can remove the Class E to C3 right across a defined area. Our guide to Article 4 directions explains how to find and read one.
- Undocumented use history. Class MA turns on two continuous years of qualifying use. If the history is unclear, a lawful development certificate is how you establish it — and it is cheaper before exchange than after.
- Mixed and ancillary uses. A building can be in one class with an ancillary element of another. The planning unit, not the shopfront, is what the class attaches to.
How to check a property’s use class
BOOM!’s Use Class layer, built on Ordnance Survey’s Land Use dataset, shows the assigned use of a site along with the primary and secondary land use classifications. It sits in SiteSeeker as a layer you can read and as a sourcing constraint you can apply, so you can target Class E stock or filter sui generis out of a search rather than checking addresses one at a time.
Pair it with the planning application search to see what has been applied for and consented nearby, and with the Article 4 Direction layer to see whether the right you are relying on still exists at that address. Where the history is genuinely unclear, a lawful development certificate is still the only thing that settles it.
