It starts with a call or an email to the council. Our guide to negotiating a payment arrangement instead of a wage arrestment covers how your position shifts as recovery moves along.

Your council tax reference number and a written income and expenditure breakdown behind the monthly figure you are offering. Councils will consider spreading arrears beyond the current financial year where affordability is evidenced.

What you can offer to send

There is no prescribed form and no statutory checklist here. This is what puts your figure on paper rather than leaving it on the phone.

• The council tax reference number from your bill, so nothing is logged against the wrong account.
• A written income and expenditure breakdown behind the monthly figure you are offering.
• Payslips, or a benefit award letter, if you are asked to evidence the income figure.
• The amount of any deduction already coming off your pay or benefits, and how often it is taken.

The reference sits on any bill, and our council tax billing guide explains how the annual charge and its instalments are put together.

Ask for the balance split by financial year, including any 10% surcharge added. Different years can sit at different stages of recovery.

What is fixed by law, and what a council can decide

Some of what you might try to negotiate is not open to negotiation at all. Knowing which is which keeps the conversation on what can move.

The deduction figures come from Schedule 2 as substituted by the Diligence against Earnings (Variation) (Scotland) Regulations 2024, in force since 6 April 2025. A sheriff cannot reduce a Schedule 2 deduction because you cannot afford it.

Check the bill is right before you offer to pay it

Start with whether you are the person liable at all. Our council tax liability guide sets out the hierarchy running from resident owner to non-resident owner.

Single person discount is 25% where one adult lives in the property, and there are further discounts and disregards for students, apprentices, care leavers under 26 and live-in carers. A disabled band reduction charges the bill one band lower where a disabled resident needs an extra room or wheelchair space indoors.

Council Tax Reduction can cover up to 100% of your liability, and Scotland runs its own scheme. Working-age awards can be backdated up to six months where there was continuous good cause for applying later.

Add up your income, take off essential outgoings and what you are already committed to, and offer what is genuinely left. A smaller figure you can keep to is worth more than a generous one you cannot.

Council tax reaches your wages through a route ordinary consumer debt does not have. Under a summary warrant the council can move to an earnings arrestment without first serving a charge for payment.

Do not leave this year’s bill out of the figure

The current year is billed separately and keeps falling due while you clear the arrears. Work out what you can put towards both, not just the older balance.

Ask for the two numbers separately. Our council tax debt advice page covers what to ask a recovery team for.

How long can you spread the arrears over?

There is no statutory maximum. Councils commonly work to the current financial year and will consider longer where affordability is evidenced, so the period is a matter of council discretion.

What a wage arrestment would take instead

It helps to know the alternative. Deductions come off net pay under Schedule 2 to the Debtors (Scotland) Act 1987, on tables in force since 6 April 2025, so net monthly pay of £1,800.00 gives £172.50 a month.

Your employer may also take £1.00 per deduction on top. Our wage arrestment calculator runs your own figure, and the banded amounts are not open to offer.

Before a summary warrant, the council’s recovery team. After one, sheriff officers may hold the file, and where you send a payment matters.

Ask for the recovery team, or for the council’s own welfare rights or money advice team. The general billing line handles the bill rather than the arrears.

Who holds your account, and where the payment should go

If sheriff officers already have the file

The council instructs a sheriff officer firm, and the firms working for Scottish councils include Scott & Co, Stirling Park, Walker Love and Alex M Adamson.

They are officers of the court, appointed by and accountable to the sheriff, and they are not bailiffs.

Complaints go to the firm, then the Society of Messengers-at-Arms and Sheriff Officers, then the sheriff principal. They cannot force entry over ordinary council tax arrears.

You can still ask the council about an arrangement after the file is passed on.

Which year your payment clears

Payments are normally allocated to the oldest year of arrears first unless you specify otherwise. That is unhelpful when you are trying to keep the current year out of recovery.

If you want a payment credited to a particular year, say so in writing at the time.

Sometimes, and it is at the council’s discretion rather than a right. Once the final notice window has passed, the right to pay by instalments is gone.

The usual sequence is a reminder notice typically about two weeks after a missed instalment, usually with 7 days to put it right, up to two reminders in a year, then a final notice usually giving another 7 days. Day counts vary by council policy.

Discretion, not entitlement

Once the right to instalments has gone, ask the council about a special payment arrangement covering the whole remaining balance. Reinstating instalments is at the council’s discretion rather than a right.

Put the request in writing

The decision itself is not yours to make. What you can control is that your offer exists on paper with a date on it.

• The council tax reference number, and the financial years the offer covers.
• The monthly figure, the date it would start and the payment method.
• Whether that figure covers the current year’s instalments as well as the arrears.
• Anything you are sending as evidence of what you can afford.

Ask for the council’s answer in writing, whatever it is.

Our guide to where to go for help lists the free services that will build the budget and put the offer in with you.

You pay the agreed amount on the agreed dates and keep the written confirmation. An arrangement is a discretionary agreement rather than a statutory protection, so tell the council before a payment is going to be missed.

Keeping it alive

Confirm any phone agreement by email the same day, setting out the amount, the start date and the years covered. Check a statement a few months in.

Tell the council before you miss a payment rather than after, and ask whether a lower figure can be agreed for a period. Ask for a review if your hours drop or a benefit changes.

If the arrangement breaks anyway

A council can apply for a summary warrant, and a 10% statutory surcharge is added to the outstanding council tax when it is granted.

What happens if you do not pay your council tax in Scotland runs through the stages that follow.

Ask what the council would accept and put a revised offer in writing. A summary warrant adds a 10% surcharge to the balance without closing the door on an arrangement.

A summary warrant is granted on the council’s application supported by a certificate, with no hearing, under Schedule 8 to the Local Government Finance Act 1992.

Putting a revised offer in

Ask what figure would be accepted rather than guessing at a second offer. Put the revised figure in writing with the special payment arrangement you are asking for named in it.

Two things a summary warrant does not do

It does not appear on your credit file, because council tax is not reported to credit reference agencies. It also cannot lead to prison, because the committal power that exists in England and Wales does not apply in Scots law.

A Time to Pay Order at the sheriff court

A Time to Pay Order is competent against a summary warrant, and where the sheriff grants one the sheriff must recall any existing earnings arrestment. For other diligence the sheriff only may recall.

The balance has to be £25,000 or less excluding interest, and the test is what is reasonable in all the circumstances. A Time to Pay Direction is not available, because a direction responds to a court action.

Whether an earnings arrestment alone satisfies the entry conditions is not settled, so treat this as a route to check. A money adviser or the sheriff clerk at your local sheriff court can confirm competency.

Four routes are worth comparing: an informal arrangement, a special payment arrangement, a Time to Pay Order and a Debt Payment Programme under the Debt Arrangement Scheme. Where the debt is beyond all four, a protected trust deed or sequestration may fit instead.

The four routes side by side

What separates them is who decides, what it costs and what it does to enforcement already running.

The Debt Arrangement Scheme

A Debt Payment Programme under the Debt Arrangement Scheme lets you repay in full over an agreed period, with interest, fees and charges frozen. The Accountant in Bankruptcy runs it through the DAS Administrator, and the average programme lasts about six years.

Once approved, a programme stops an existing earnings arrestment and blocks new diligence, which is why it appears in our guide to stopping a wage arrestment. Council tax arrears can go into one, and your current-year liability cannot.

A moratorium and the formal insolvency routes

A statutory moratorium gives six months of protection and you get one per rolling 12 months. It stops service of a charge for payment, stops new diligence and stops creditor petitions for sequestration.

It does not stop a creditor obtaining a decree, and interest and charges keep accruing throughout.

Whether a creditor can carry on an earnings arrestment your employer is already operating is treated differently in the Accountant in Bankruptcy’s adviser guidance from the general statement of the rule. Ask a money adviser to confirm the position on your facts before relying on it.

A protected trust deed ends an earnings arrestment on the date of protection, not on signing, under s.173 of the Bankruptcy (Scotland) Act 2016. Sequestration ends one on the date of sequestration.

Money already deducted before either date is credited against the debt rather than refunded. A free money adviser can say which route fits.