At a Glance
- Continuous cruising means moving to a new place at least every 14 days and genuinely travelling; it’s a way of life rather than a free mooring.
- A permanent mooring costs anywhere from around £1,000 a year to upwards of £15,000 in London, depending on where it is and whether you can legally live there.
- Boats without a home mooring pay a licence surcharge on Canal & River Trust (CRT) waters, 15% in 2026-27 and rising to 25% by 2028.
- Which suits you depends on work, family, post and how much you enjoy moving, not on the maths alone.
If you’re planning to live on a narrowboat, the mooring decision comes before almost everything else, because it shapes your costs, your routine and your address.
Narrowboat mooring costs are part of that decision, but the real choice is whether you want to be mostly moored up or mostly cruising.
This piece is about that choice on the canals and rivers of England and Wales run by the Canal & River Trust (CRT).
Scotland’s canals are run by Scottish Canals with their own rules, and other navigations, from the Thames to the Broads, have their own too, so check the guidance for the water you’ll actually be on. For the full budget of boat life, read our guide to how much it really costs to live on a narrowboat.
What Continuous Cruising Means
A continuous cruiser is a boat licensed without a home mooring. In return, the CRT expects you to be genuinely navigating.
Its own guidance says you shouldn’t stay longer than 14 days on ordinary unsigned stretches, that you must keep moving from place to place rather than “shuttling back and forth”, and that a boat which spends most of the year in a five-mile patch with one long trip doesn’t meet the test. You can read the detail on the Canal & River Trust’s continuous cruising page.
In practice that means a new spot at least every fortnight, a proper range over the year, and no expectation of parking near a job or a school.
Plenty of people do it happily. It just isn’t a way of getting a mooring for nothing.
The CRT reviews each boat’s movements when the licence comes up for renewal, and can restrict or remove the licence of a boat that hasn’t been genuinely cruising.
What a Permanent Mooring Means
A home mooring is a berth you rent by the year, in a marina or on a towpath stretch, and it’s what lets you license the boat as having somewhere to return to. The important split is between leisure and residential.
A leisure mooring is for a boat you visit, and living aboard on one full time can breach both the site’s planning status and your mooring agreement. A residential mooring is one where the site operator holds planning permission for people to live there, and those are scarce.
If you live aboard on a residential berth as your main home you’ll usually be liable for council tax, often at the lowest band, though it’s worth checking the rates for the area where the mooring sits.
Ask the site, in writing, whether it has residential consent before you sign anything.
Because residential berths are scarce, it’s worth starting your search well before you plan to move aboard.
Narrowboat Mooring Costs
Moorings are usually priced per foot of boat per year, and location decides almost everything. Published 2026 guides put a basic rural leisure mooring with few facilities at roughly £1,000 to £3,000 a year, and a leisure berth in a Midlands or northern marina at around £45 to £70 per foot, or about £2,500 to £4,000 for a 57ft boat.
Residential moorings run from about £4,000 to £6,000 a year for a 57ft boat in the Midlands and North, with per-foot rates of £75 to £110, and a residential berth in London can exceed £15,000 a year.
Marina berths usually add electricity, pump-out and parking on top, while a towpath mooring rented from the CRT, on the canal itself rather than in a marina or basin, is often cheaper and comes with fewer services. Residential moorings are sometimes sold with the boat, and a boat that comes with one usually sells for more.
To compare two moorings fairly, multiply each per-foot rate by your boat’s length in feet, then add whatever the site charges for electricity, pump-out and parking.
Licence Costs and the Surcharge
Every boat needs a CRT licence whichever way you go.
Fees rose by 4.85% from 1 April 2026, and boats without a home mooring pay a surcharge on top, which the CRT has set at 15% for 2026-27, rising to 20% from April 2027 and 25% from April 2028, as set out in its licence pricing announcement. Wider boats pay more again.
To put that in real terms, a 57ft narrowboat with a home mooring pays around £1,400 a year for its licence in 2026-27, and the same boat cruising without one pays around £210 more.
The CRT’s online calculator gives the exact figure for your length and beam.
The surcharge is real, but it’s small next to a year’s mooring.
The Practical Trade-Offs
On paper, cruising is cheaper, because you’re paying the surcharge instead of a mooring. In practice it comes with additional costs.
They include diesel to keep moving, hours at locks in the rain, water and waste stops on someone else’s schedule, and doing without a car unless you’re happy to shuttle it along behind you. Post has to go to a friend or a forwarding service, and winter cruising is harder work than summer cruising.
A mooring, by contrast, costs more and usually gives you a postcode, a car space, a tap and a neighbour who’ll watch the boat while you’re away.
If you’d be happy moving every fortnight then cruising definitely works out cheaper, but if not the time and effort it takes can outweigh what you save on a mooring.
Deciding Which Suits You
If you work somewhere fixed, have children in school, need a car or want a settled address, a permanent mooring is the honest answer, and a residential one if you can find it.
If your work travels with you, you’re comfortable with a fortnightly move all year, and the point of boat life for you is seeing the network, continuous cruising will suit you and save you the mooring fee.
Plenty of liveaboards do both over time, cruising through the summer and taking a winter mooring from November to the end of February, which the CRT also offers.
Winter mooring permits usually go on sale on 1 October and are sold first come, first served, so it’s worth booking early if you want a particular site.
Final Thoughts
Continuous cruising and a permanent mooring are two completely different lives. One costs a surcharge and a lot of moving. The other costs a mooring fee and gives you somewhere to be.
Run the numbers for your own length of boat and part of the country, then be honest about how you want to spend a wet week in February.
To find out more about off-grid living return to our Reading Room.