/ Home / Living Here / Housing / Finding housing
Finding housing
How to contact us
At your nearest Housing and Property Office. You can also get housing application forms and information and advice from any of the Council's Service Points.
Who can apply for Council housing?
To be eligible to apply for council housing in the Highlands, you need to be 16 and over. You can apply from anywhere in the country to be on the waiting list, but priority is given to people who need to reside here - because they live here or need to be here for work or family reasons. From April, the Highland Housing Register will be in operation. This means that people can apply for housing with the Council and with any or all of its partner housing associations in the Highlands simply by completing one application form. You can link to more information on the register below.
Homelessness
If you are homeless or threatened with homelessness, you can get information on what to do from the Homelessness page.
Obtaining Housing
In most parts of the Highlands, there is a very great demand for Council houses, but very few become available for relet each year. This means that, although there are thousands of households on our waiting lists (currently over 10,000) only a small number can be housed each year. There is a much greater demand for accommodation than we are able to meet and it will not be possible to house everyone who applies. Our first priority is to give houses to people in the most housing need - to families with children or to other people who may be vulnerable in some way, because of age or health, who are homeless or who live in insecure, overcrowded or substandard accommodation.
Because of this, we have developed the Housing Options Manual, to offer information on what else you can do to find housing that suits you. You can access the information in the manual by following the link below. You can also find paper copies of the manual in Service Points.
For further information, please see: