A very few households, whose need to move is considered to be urgent, may be placed in a priority band for a fixed amount of time.

As long as you are eligible your application will be placed on the housing register. We do not have any of our own council housing and all our housing is provided by housing associations, also known as registered social landlords.

To apply for social housing in West Dorset you must complete a housing application form (pdf, 1Mb) (opens in a new window) and return the form to us. For help in filling in the form, please read the guidance notes or contact us.

To help you assess how long you may have to wait for a social rented home in West Dorset, we can tell you how many vacancies we allocated in the last year and how long people had to wait and give you some information about the size of our housing register.

We use choice based lettings to allocate vacancies. In West Dorset Choice Based lettings is known as Dorset Home Choice (opens in a new window) . Our leaflets access to housing (pdf, 183kb) (opens in a new window) and priority banding (pdf, 177kb) (opens in a new window) explain more about the scheme and how it works.

View our list of current properties.

• West Dorset HomeChoice

  All housing association properties that become available in West Dorset are advertised so that people on the housing register can say if they want to be considered.