Housing in NI: What are HMOs, how many are there, and who lives in them?

Houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) have recently featured in public and political debate about immigration. Specifically, they have become a topic of discussion around accommodation for refugees.

But what exactly are HMOs? HMOs are not a distinct form of migrant or asylum housing. They are a legally-defined type of shared accommodation used by a range of people, including students, young professionals, migrant workers and people on lower incomes.

This explainer examines what legally counts as an HMO, how many licensed and known unlicensed HMOs there are in Northern Ireland, and what the available evidence can—and cannot—tell us about the people living in them.

This explainer article explores this issue in detail, gathering data from multiple sources and trying to put figures in some context.

• A house in multiple occupation (HMO) is generally a rental property occupied as a main residence by at least three people who form more than two households using shared facilities.
• HMOs have become a hot topic of public discourse based on the fact that some such houses are home to immigrants, including asylum seekers.
• Until a few months ago an online registry of all HMOs in Northern Ireland was available online. However, this was taken down when a so-called ‘hit list’ of addresses to target began circulating online among anti-immigrant groups.
• With the registry no longer available, FactCheckNI instead gathered information about the number of HMOs from a variety of alternative sources including local councils and the Assembly.
• HMOs must be licensed by the relevant council. Landlords operating an unlicensed HMO can face fines of up to £20,000. Based on the latest figures, there are 3,609 registered HMOs in NI.
• The vast majority of these (2996, or around 83%) are in the Belfast City Council area. Most of the rest are split between the Causeway Coast and Glens (214) and Derry City and Strabane (250) areas (which, as with Belfast, are home to some of NI’s largest university campuses).
• Seven of NI’s eleven council areas are home to fewer than 20 HMOs.
• Not all HMOs are registered and, by their nature, it is impossible to be certain how many there are. However, there are currently 64 known unregistered HMOs in NI, again mostly in Belfast.
• Councils do not routinely record whether people living in HMOs are students, professionals, migrant workers, asylum seekers or members of other groups. It is therefore not possible to provide a complete demographic breakdown.
• Figures from Mears Housing – the group contracted by the Home Office to provide accommodation to asylum seekers in the UK – indicate that around 250 HMOs are currently in use by refugees.
• According to the Department of Finance, NI’s total housing stock currently sits at almost 850k. Based on all this, HMOs in general make up around 0.4% of all Northern Ireland’s housing, with HMOs used by refugees amounting to around 0.03%.

For more information, read on.

• What are HMOs?

While the term ‘house in multiple occupation’ (HMO) is a more recent concept, shared housing has existed in some shape or form for centuries. Back-to-back housing during the Industrial Revolution in England, lodgers and boarders in 20^th century Dublin, student digs in 1960s Belfast: accommodation where occupants are unrelated but share facilities is nothing new.

The first “HMO” came into existence as a legal construct in the UK Housing Act of 1985. Since then, HMOs have had multiple legislative overhauls, the most recent being the current NI HMO Licensing Scheme that came into effect on 1 April 2019.

According to Section 1 of the HMO Act (NI) 2016, a HMO or ‘house in multiple occupation’ is any place that meets the following criteria:

(a)  it is living accommodation (see section 2),

(b)  it is occupied by 3 or more persons as their only or main residence (see section 3),

(c)   those persons form more than two households (see section 4), and

(d)  rents are payable or other consideration is to be provided in respect of the occupation by at least one of those persons of the living accommodation.

In simpler terms, an HMO is generally a property occupied as a main residence by at least three people who form more than two households, with rent or another form of payment made by at least one occupant.

The Belfast City Council website provides a definitive guide on HMOs in NI, which have undergone some changes in recent years.

As of 1 April 2019 all HMOs must be licensed in accordance with the Houses in Multiple Occupation Act (Northern Ireland) 2016. This updated legislation transferred the responsibility for HMOs from the Housing Executive to individual local councils.

• Why have HMOs become part of the immigration debate?

In recent years however, HMOs have come under the spotlight for a new reason: they are being incorrectly treated as synonymous with asylum or migrant accommodation, and have been identified as an issue of debate when it comes to migration.

Northern Ireland has also seen incidents of racist violence and rioting flare up in Ballymena in 2025 and at various places in 2026.

• Why did the public register disappear?

When the research for this piece began, the online registry of licensed HMOs was still publicly available. This list showed the addresses of all registered HMOs in Northern Ireland.

However, following an 8 June knife attack in North Belfast – which resulted in a charge of attempted murder for the suspect, who is an immigrant – a so-called ‘hit list’ of South Belfast HMOs was circulated online by anti-immigration accounts on social media (see news report here).

These lists will not be shared here for obvious reasons but, based on the posts seen by FactCheckNI, the addresses in question were generally labelled as ‘Belfast council licensed HMOs’ rather than asylum or migrant housing.

It was implied in some news reports that this list contained the residences of migrants or asylum seekers, rather than a simple record of all HMOs. However, further reports of students fleeing their homes in the Holylands after their addresses appeared on this list suggests there are some misconceptions regarding HMOs, and that for some people the term may have become synonymous with immigrant and asylum accommodation when that is not the case.

This illustrates an important limitation: an address being registered as an HMO does not reveal who lives there. Councils do not routinely collect information about occupants’ migration status or other demographic characteristics.

• How many licensed and known unlicensed HMOs are there?

Following the withdrawal of the online registry of HMOs, FactcheckNI reached out to each of Northern Ireland’s councils requesting information on the number of HMOs in each area. This process was confusing at times, as our requests were dealt with differently in different areas.:

• Derry City and Strabane District Council handled the query as an Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) request, with a response turnaround of up to 20 days.
• Mid Ulster Council incorrectly claimed the Housing Executive was responsible for HMOs, redirecting us back to the Housing Executive who had already directed us to the council. The Housing Executive has not been responsible for HMOs for over 7 years at this point.
• Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council treated the question as a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, which has a similar wait time as an EIR.
• Mid and East Antrim, Ards and North Down Borough Council advised that we contact Belfast City Council directly as they hold the HMO data for all councils.
• Antrim and Newtownabbey sent a link to the (now inaccessible) online HMO license registry.
• Other councils like Fermanagh and Omagh, Causeway Coast and Glens, Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon, and Newry, Mourne and Down all failed to acknowledge the enquiry.

While we eventually received responses for the FOI and EIR requests for some individual councils, it was ultimately Belfast City Council that provided us with the HMO data for each of the 11 councils. The figures below are correct at 31 March 2026:

Figure 1 – source: Belfast City Council via direct correspondence

Belfast contained 2,996 licensed HMOs, or approximately 83% of the Northern Ireland total. Most of the remainder were in Derry City and Strabane and Causeway Coast and Glens. All three council areas contain major university campuses.

Seven of Northern Ireland’s 11 council areas had fewer than 20 licensed HMOs.

However, these figures only relate to licensed HMOs.

• Registered, unregistered, known and unknown

Illegal/unlicensed HMOs are more difficult to quantify. They are by definition unregistered and landlords that unlawfully overcrowd their properties can be fined up to £20,000 and therefore try to avoid detection.

While it is impossible to be sure about the true number of unlicensed HMOs, there are some known unlicensed HMOs operating in NI. SDLP MLA Mark Durkan in May tabled a written question to the Communities Minister covering this issue.

The Minister’s response was placed in the NI Assembly Library. FactCheckNI contacted the library to get this information. The number of known unlicensed HMOs per council in 2025/2026 is as follows:

Figure 2 – source: NI Assembly Library via direct correspondence

When combining the most recent figures of both legal and known illegal HMOs in NI (acknowledging that the figures cover slightly different points in time), the total comes to 3,673 – the vast majority of which are located in Belfast City Council.

As of 2026, the Belfast City Council area has 2,996 licensed HMOs and 35 unlicensed HMOs: 3,031 in total. In other words, 82.5% of all known HMOs operating in NI are located in Belfast.

As can be seen from the table in Figure 2, the number of known unregistered HMOs is broadly much lower than the number of registered HMOs so this second set of figures does not change the overall picture much.

Overall, most of NI’s councils have a few dozen known HMOs at most – with both the Fermanagh and Omagh and the Lisburn and Castlereagh council areas only home to single figures of HMOs.

• Who lives in HMOs?

There is no comprehensive demographic information about the people living in Northern Ireland’s HMOs.

According to the Department for Communities, HMOs are “an important part of the private rented sector and can provide affordable housing for some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in society, or those on low incomes, students and migrant workers” and that due to the higher risks of living within HMOs “they are subjected to a higher level of regulation than other rented housing.”

FactCheckNI asked each local council to provide us with any relevant data recorded to the demographics or general status of people living within the HMOs in their area – however, according to Belfast City Council these details are not recorded.

Questions about the specifics of HMO occupants’ age profile, education status, and welfare status have been put to the Communities Minister, who indicated that these details are not recorded.

However, some information does exist about asylum seekers living in HMOs. The Mears Group is a private company contracted by the Home Office to provide housing for those seeking asylum in the UK.

The types of asylum housing that Mears provide fall under 4 main categories:

• hotels
• hostels
• shared houses (including HMOs)
• self-contained flats or houses

As of October 2025, “approximately 250 HMOs are currently in use by MEARS across Northern Ireland to provide accommodation for asylum seekers and refugees” according to the Minister for Communities, Gordon Lyons.

Comparing this to the figure for licensed HMOs in Northern Ireland, we see that around 250 out of 3609 HMOs (again noting these figures come from slightly different points in time) are being used, via Mears Housing, for asylum seekers, or around 6.93% of the NI total.

The remaining 93% of those HMOs will include students, young professionals, migrant workers and those in supported/sheltered housing and assisted living accommodation.

• HMOs and all housing

HMOs make up just a fraction of the overall housing landscape.

According to the Department of Finance, in April 2026 the total housing stock (number of all residential dwellings) in NI was 848,541.

This means that HMOs – both licensed and known unlicensed HMOs– represent 0.43% of all housing in NI.

Furthermore, the number of HMOs acting as dedicated asylum or refugee housing makes up 0.03% of NI’s total housing stock.

• Changes in HMO numbers

FactcheckNI did obtain some data detailing changes in HMO numbers and distribution over time, but only as far back as 2022 for licensed HMOs and 2024 for unlicensed.

Accessing and comparing data from before 2022 is challenging due to major legislative changes. The Houses in Multiple Occupation Act (Northern Ireland) 2016 transferred regulatory power from the Housing Executive to each of the 11 councils, with Belfast City Council in charge of the central NIHMO unit.

Overall, there has been a decrease in the number of HMOs in NI in part due to the HMO regime change, with the new licensing scheme putting tighter restrictions on the number of HMOs in certain areas to tackle over-provision. News reports indicate that some longstanding HMOs had their license renewals denied (for more information on licensing, including how it might have affected total numbers of HMOs, the Department for Communities published a report about just that in June 2023).

The table below details the change in numbers of licensed HMOs in NI from March 2022 to March 2026:

Figure 3 – source: Data provided by Belfast City Council.

The decreases in HMOs in Causeway Coast and Glens and in Derry City and Strabane between 2022 and 2023, and in Antrim in Newtownabbey after 2023, are due to a reorganising of university accommodation in alignment with new legislation: The Houses in Multiple Occupation (Specified Educational Establishments) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2019.

The table below shows the known numbers of unlicensed HMOs in NI. This data set is very small and it is difficult to glean any reliable conclusions.

The figures do show an increase in the number of known unlicensed HMOs in NI – including a 40% jump in the number of known unlicensed HMOs in Belfast from 2025 to 2026 – but again it is difficult to interpret much from these figures.

For example, an increase in figures could represent growth in the underlying amount of unlicensed HMOs, could represent better detection by authorities, or a combination of both.

Figure 4 – source: Data provided by the NI Assembly Library.

• What can we conclude?

Northern Ireland had 3,609 licensed HMOs at 31 March 2026, with around 83% located in Belfast. Councils also knew of 64 unlicensed HMOs, but the true number operating without a licence cannot be established.

HMOs accommodate many different groups, and council licensing data does not identify who lives in individual properties. The available figures suggest that the approximately 250 HMOs used by Mears represent a small minority of Northern Ireland’s licensed HMOs and around 0.03% of the total housing stock.

An HMO address alone therefore provides no reliable basis for determining the identity, nationality or immigration status of its occupants.