Can you live on a narrowboat without a home mooring?

It is the cheapest legal way to live on the water, and the number of people doing it keeps rising. The 2026 National Boat Count recorded 8,825 boats without a home mooring, up 3.6% on the year before, while the fleet overall shrank.

What you are agreeing to

A licence without a home mooring is granted on the basis that the boat is used for what the British Waterways Act 1995 calls bona fide navigation. In practice that means two things:

• —Not staying in one place longer than 14 days, unless there is a genuine reason
• —Moving over a meaningful range across the licence year — the Trust suggests under about 20 miles is unlikely to satisfy it

Neither is a distance you can look up precisely, which is the source of most of the anxiety around it.

What it costs

You save the mooring fee, which is the point. Against that, boats without a home mooring pay a surcharge on the licence — 15% for 2026/27, rising to 25% by April 2028 — on top of the annual increase, which was 4.85% this year.

You also move more, which means more diesel, more wear, and more time. Continuous cruising is cheaper than a mooring but it is not free, and it costs hours as well as money.

The part people underestimate

Not the cruising — the record-keeping. The Trust assesses your movement at renewal from sightings logged by its own patrol officers, and if that record does not show what it expects, the licence can be refused. Keeping your own dated log as you go is the only thing that lets you answer back.

Winter is the test. Cruising in January in bad weather, with stoppages closing routes, is when the 14-day rule stops being theoretical.