Social housing in Belfast
26.3% of households in Belfast are social housing — council or housing-association homes. That is above the UK average of 17.5%.
26.3%Social housing
39,203Social homes
149,191All households
How much social housing is there in Belfast?
Belfast ranks 30th of 374 UK local authorities by social-housing share. Of its 149,191 households, 39,203 are social homes (26.3%) — renting from the council or a housing association.
How does Belfast compare with the UK average?
At +8.8 percentage points versus the UK average of 17.5%, Belfast sits above the national level.
Explore Belfast
See Belfast through the other lenses on the interactive map — house prices, recorded crime and anti-social behaviour, road & rail noise, deprivation and broadband:
Which areas are similar to Belfast?
“Social housing” means households renting from a council/local authority or a
housing association, counted on census day (2021 in England, Wales & Northern Ireland;
2022 in Scotland). Local-authority figures are aggregated by this site from small-area Census
data and may differ from official totals; Scotland reports a combined social-rented figure.
Sources: ONS Census 2021 (TS054), National Records of Scotland Census 2022 (UV404) and NISRA
Census 2021, under the Open Government Licence
v3.0. See the full notes and disclaimer.
Figures: 2021–22 Census · Page updated 18 July 2026 · Download the full dataset (CSV, all 374 councils).
Figures: 2021–22 Census · Page updated 18 July 2026 · Download the full dataset (CSV, all 374 councils).