Guide
You buy a share of the home and pay rent on the rest. It gets people onto the ladder with a smaller deposit, but the catches are real and every shared-ownership home is leasehold.
Shared ownership lets you buy a slice of a property and pay rent to a landlord, usually a housing association or council, on the slice you don't own. The appeal is the lower barrier: you need a mortgage and deposit on your share, not the whole home.
In England you can buy between 10% and 75% of the full market value, most commonly 25% to 75%. Your deposit is typically 5% to 10% of your share's value, not the whole property. On top of the mortgage you pay rent on the unowned share, plus a service charge, and usually ground rent. Add those up before you decide it's cheaper than renting, because sometimes it isn't.
You can buy more shares later, which is called staircasing, and the more you own the less rent you pay. The catch is that each extra share is priced at the home's current market value, so if prices have risen, buying up costs more than when you started.
Every shared-ownership home, house or flat, is leasehold. So the whole leasehold checklist applies: the lease term, the ground rent, the service charge, and who controls the building. Read the leasehold guide alongside this one.
There's an income cap and other eligibility rules, so check you qualify first. And look hard at resale: you usually sell through the housing association, sometimes only to another shared-ownership buyer, which can make getting out slower than a normal sale.