Home Lifts

Through-floor lift or shaft lift: the choice that decides everything else

Most guides sort home lifts by how they are driven, which is the wrong first question. Hydraulics, screws, cables and air are all ways of moving a car up and down, and you can find any of them inside either of the two shapes a domestic lift actually comes in. What changes the price, the building work and the room you lose is whether the lift travels through an open hole in the floor or inside an enclosed liftway.

Drive type still matters for noise, smoothness and price. Screw and nut drives, used by Aritco and sold in the UK through Gartec, are the common choice for shaft lifts because they need no machine room. Terry’s Harmony FE is hydraulic and travels at 0.06 m/s, less than half the speed of a typical through-floor lift. Vacuum lifts move the car in a sealed tube using air pressure, which makes them easy to retrofit and the most expensive of the lot. Our types of home lift guide goes through each one.

What a home lift really costs in the UK

There is no independent price index for home lifts. Which? describes through-floor lifts in its stairlift guide and deliberately prices only stairlifts. Age UK, Citizens Advice and Scope publish grant ceilings and nothing else. So the honest position is that the public evidence comes from manufacturers, from a handful of dealers, and from the occasional local authority that shows its working.

Who will not tell you. Terry Lifts, Gartec, Level Lifts, Axess2 and Wessex Lifts all publish no price and route you to a survey instead. That is normal in this trade, and it is the main reason quotes are so hard to compare. Aritco publishes prices, but only in Swedish kronor.

The comparison trap. Stannah’s £15,000 says it includes building works. Stiltz’s £17,000 excludes VAT and excludes about £2,500 of building work. Those two numbers describe similar lifts and are not comparable. Ask every installer the same three questions: does this include the builder’s work, does it include VAT, and does it include the first year’s service.

Servicing. No UK home lift manufacturer we could find publishes a service plan price, so treat any figure you are quoted as a negotiable part of the deal rather than a market rate. For scale, Thrive Homes tendered a three-year contract to service stairlifts, hoists and domestic through-floor lifts at £180,000 excluding VAT, and North Yorkshire Council put £6m over four years behind supply, installation and maintenance of stairlifts and through-floor lifts. Neither gives a unit price, which tells you something about how the market prices this work.

Most buyers should pay no VAT, and most quotes still show it

This is the single largest saving available on a home lift and it is routinely missed. Under HMRC’s VAT Notice 701/7, section 6.5, a supplier may zero rate the work of installing a lift where the customer is a disabled person and the lift is designed to help that person move between floors of their private residence. It is not limited to the labour. HMRC’s internal manual is explicit that item 18 “extends zero-rating to the lift and operating equipment”, so the machine itself is zero rated too.

Three conditions do the work. The person must be chronically sick or disabled, meaning a physical or mental impairment with a long-term and substantial adverse effect on their ability to carry out everyday activities. The lift must go into a private residence, which HMRC defines as where a person lives, and not a communal setting such as a nursing home. And the customer gives the installer a written eligibility declaration. There is no certificate to obtain from HMRC and the declaration is never sent there, it is kept in the supplier’s records.

On a £17,000 lift that is £3,400. If a quote shows VAT and the lift is for a disabled person in their own home, ask the installer to apply the relief rather than assuming they have already considered it.

Retailers vary a lot in how they handle this. We checked what 20 UK mobility retailers tell customers about VAT relief, and four of them get the rules wrong.

Planning permission and building regulations

Planning permission is the easy part. The Planning Portal states plainly that “planning permission is not required for the installation of an internal stair lift, platform lift or enclosed lift”. Three exceptions matter:

• Listed buildings. Listed building consent is needed for work affecting the building’s special interest, inside as well as out. There is no fee, and carrying out the work without consent is a criminal offence.
• Flats and maisonettes. The permitted development rights that apply to houses do not apply to flats. Your lease will usually decide the matter first in any case, so check whether alterations need the freeholder’s written consent before you get quotes.
• Anything outside the walls. An external shaft or an extension to house a lift is judged as an extension, with the usual size limits, and those limits are tighter in conservation areas and other designated land.

Building control is the part people underestimate. Cutting an opening through a floor is a material alteration under regulation 3 of the Building Regulations 2010, which pulls in Part A for structure, the fire safety requirements B1 to B5, and Part M. In practice the questions on site are: what carries the load once the joists are cut, what stops someone falling through the aperture, and what happens to the fire separation between floors.

Two specifics worth knowing before an installer tells you otherwise. Approved Document K requires barriers where they are needed to stop people falling from a floor, which is exactly what the trapdoor and landing arrangement of a through-floor lift has to satisfy. And Approved Document B, paragraph 2.7, says a passenger lift serving any storey more than 4.5 m above ground level should sit either within the protected stairway enclosure or in a fire resisting lift shaft of at least REI 30. In an ordinary two-storey house that rule does not bite. Reaching a second floor, it does, and it can decide whether a through-floor lift is viable at all.

The work goes through either a building notice or a full plans application, to your local council’s building control team or to a registered building control approver. Note the terminology: what used to be called an approved inspector is now a registered building control approver. A completion certificate normally follows within eight weeks of the work finishing, and it is the document a future buyer’s solicitor will ask for. If a steel beam needs to bear into a party wall, the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 also applies and your neighbour needs two months’ notice. Our planning and building regulations guide goes through the process in detail.

Grants and funding

A Disabled Facilities Grant is the main route, and home lifts are squarely within it. The government’s DFG delivery guidance for councils in England states that “for larger items such as stairlifts and through-floor lifts which may require structural works to the property, help is normally provided through the DFG”, as opposed to equipment that can be installed and removed easily, which is social services’ responsibility. That sentence is worth quoting back if you are told a lift is not DFG work.

Disabled children under 18 are assessed without their parents’ income being counted, and landlords are assessed without their income or savings being counted. Two practical points decide most applications. The first is that the process starts with an occupational therapist assessment arranged through the council, not with a quote from an installer. The second is timing: start the work before the council approves your application and you may get nothing.

Beyond the grant, VAT relief above is worth 20 per cent to most applicants, charitable funding can be searched through Turn2us, and some charities such as Independence at Home accept applications only through a health or social care professional. Our funding and grants section covers the wider picture.

Home lift or stairlift

For most households this is the real decision, and the gap in price is wide enough that it should be settled before anyone visits. A stairlift is a fraction of the cost and needs no building work. A home lift is the answer when a stairlift cannot do the job, usually because of a wheelchair, a transfer that is no longer safe, or a staircase that will not take a rail.

Our full comparison works through the cases where each one wins, and the cost of staying put calculator puts an adaptation against the cost of moving.

Safety and servicing: what the law actually asks of you

Home lift marketing tends to be vague here, and the vagueness usually runs in the seller’s favour. Three points are worth having straight.

It is machinery, not a lift. HSE states that the Lifts Regulations cover lifts permanently serving buildings but exclude those operating at less than 0.15 metres per second, which fall instead under the Supply of Machinery (Safety) Regulations. Both BS 5900 and BS EN 81-41 cap domestic products at exactly 0.15 m/s, so essentially every home lift sold in the UK is placed on the market as machinery. If a supplier tells you their lift is certified under the Lifts Regulations 2016, that claim deserves a question rather than a nod.

There is no six-monthly inspection duty in a private home. The six-month thorough examination people quote comes from LOLER, and LOLER applies to lifting equipment used at work. HSE’s own guidance says that stair lifts installed in private dwellings and platform lifts provided for disabled customer access in shops “are not subject to LOLER or PUWER in these circumstances”. A lift in the common parts of a block, or one used in the course of a business, is a different matter.

Annual servicing is a recommendation, not a rule. No British Standard or regulation we could find sets a service interval for a domestic home lift. The lift industry’s own code of practice for maintenance says outright that it “does not define a frequency or minimum duration for maintenance visits”. Stiltz recommends servicing once a year, and that is the norm across the trade, but it is a manufacturer’s position rather than a legal one. What it does affect is your warranty, so read what the contract requires before deciding to skip a year.

On the machine itself, the features to confirm in writing are battery-powered descent so the lift lands during a power cut, sensors above and below the car plus a light curtain across the opening, an emergency alarm, and a way of lowering the car manually from outside if someone is inside and the power is off. Every mainstream product has these. Getting them listed on the quote is how you check you are comparing like with like. More detail is in our servicing guide.

What a home lift costs to run

Almost nobody publishes real energy data, and the estimates that circulate are far too low. The exception we found is an energy classification for the Aritco HomeLift, produced by the manufacturer under SS-EN ISO 25745-2:2015 and dated April 2023. It rates the lift energy class A, with annual consumption of 409 kWh and a standby draw of 39 watts.

That standby figure is the interesting one. Left on all year, 39 watts is about 342 kWh, so roughly five sixths of the lift’s annual consumption is spent doing nothing at all. At the July to September 2026 price cap rate of 26.11p per kWh, 409 kWh is about £107 a year, of which around £89 is standby. Retailer claims of £15 to £20 a year cannot be reconciled with a 39 watt standby draw, and most of them date from 2022 energy prices in any case.

Two practical consequences. Ask for the ISO 25745 energy classification for the specific model you are quoted, because a manufacturer that has one will hand it over. And ask what the standby draw is, since that, not the number of trips you make, is what will actually appear on your bill. Our running costs guide covers power cuts and battery behaviour.

Compare home lifts by what you actually need

Home lift terms explained

Homelift

The term used in BS 5900:2012 for a powered lift with a partially enclosed carrier and no liftway enclosure, installed in a private dwelling and travelling at no more than 0.15 m/s. In other words, a through-floor lift.

Vertical lifting platform

The term used in BS EN 81-41:2024 for a platform lift travelling in an enclosed liftway. Not restricted to homes, which is why the same product turns up in shops and offices.

Liftway

The enclosure the car travels in. A through-floor lift has none, which is precisely what makes it cheap to fit and limits it to two floors.

Material alteration

Building control’s test, set out in regulation 3 of the Building Regulations 2010. Work counts if it would make the building fail a requirement it previously met, or make an existing failure worse. Cutting through a floor qualifies.

REI 30

A fire resistance rating of 30 minutes for load-bearing capacity, integrity and insulation. Approved Document B asks for a lift shaft of at least REI 30 where a lift serves a storey more than 4.5 m above ground.

Zero rating

VAT charged at 0 per cent rather than not charged at all. It matters because the supplier still records the sale, which is why they need your written eligibility declaration on file.

Thorough examination

The formal LOLER inspection of lifting equipment used at work, every six months where the equipment carries people. It is not a duty on a household with a lift in its own home.

Screw and nut drive

A drive where the car climbs a threaded column. Common in shaft lifts because it needs no machine room, no counterweight and no hydraulic tank.

Official sources

• GOV.UK: Disabled Facilities Grants, what you’ll get
• DFG delivery guidance for local authorities in England
• Scottish Government: funding adaptations to your home, a guide for homeowners
• HMRC VAT Notice 701/7, reliefs from VAT for disabled and older people
• HMRC internal manual VRDP24000: lifts
• Planning Portal: accessible adaptations
• GOV.UK: building regulations approval, how to apply
• Approved Document K: protection from falling, collision and impact
• Approved Document B: fire safety
• HSE: LOLER overview
• HSE: UK law on the design and supply of products
• The Party Wall etc. Act 1996 explanatory booklet

Frequently Asked Questions