The New Renters' Rights Reforms: Why Landlords Shouldn't Panic

The Renters' Rights Act got Royal Assent on 27 October 2025, and the part that touches your tenancies started on 1 May 2026. So this is not something coming down the track. If you let property in England, the rules you are operating under today are not the ones you signed your last tenancy agreement under.

Most of the landlords I speak to are still working from the headlines. That is understandable, because the headlines were about the end of no-fault eviction and not much else, and if that is all you read then it does sound like you have handed over control of an asset you own. The Act is long and dull and almost nobody has read it. Having gone through it, I think the honest summary is that it makes life harder if you were relying on Section 21 to solve problems you should have been solving another way, and it makes very little difference to the day-to-day if you were not.

What actually changed on 1 May

Assured shorthold tenancies are gone. Every private tenancy in England is now a periodic assured tenancy with no end date, and that applied to existing tenancies as well as new ones on the commencement date. There is no fixed term any more. A tenant can leave by giving two months' notice whenever they like.

You do not need to reissue your existing agreements. The government produced an information sheet explaining the change, and that is what goes to the tenant. But the practical effect is worth sitting with for a second: you no longer have a date in the diary when the tenancy ends and you get to decide what happens next. If you want the property back, you need a ground.

You can still get your property back

This is the part that gets lost. Section 21 is abolished. Possession is not. The grounds were rewritten and expanded, and the ones that matter for most private landlords are these.

• Ground 1, you or a family member moving in. Four months' notice, and you cannot use it in the first twelve months of the tenancy.
• Ground 1A, selling the property. Four months' notice, and again not in the first twelve months.
• Ground 8, at least three months of rent arrears. Four weeks' notice.
• Grounds 9 to 18, discretionary, covering breach of tenancy, damage to the property, antisocial behaviour, persistent late payment and false statements. The court decides whether possession is reasonable.

That twelve-month restriction is the one to plan around. You cannot move a tenant in and then decide four months later that you would rather sell with vacant possession. And once you have used the moving-in or selling ground, you cannot market or re-let the property for twelve months afterwards. That rule exists because everyone knew the alternative was landlords claiming to sell and then quietly re-letting at a higher rent, and it has real teeth.

Ground 8 also moved, and it moved against you. The mandatory arrears threshold went from two months to three, and the notice period from two weeks to four. In practice a tenant who stops paying now costs you roughly two extra months before you can even start, on top of whatever the court listing takes. If your cash flow assumed you could act at two months, redo that calculation.

None of this is fast. Four months of notice and then a court listing is a long time to be carrying a mortgage on a property you have decided to exit. If your plan involves selling within the next couple of years, think about that timeline before you sign a new tenancy, not after.

The registration rule that decides everything else

Here is the provision I would put in front of every landlord, and it is barely mentioned in the coverage. You must register yourself and each of your properties on the new PRS database, and you must join the landlord ombudsman scheme. If you have not registered, a court will not grant you possession. The only exception is where the ground relates to the tenant's own behaviour.

Read that again, because it is the whole ballgame. Every ground I listed above is worthless to an unregistered landlord. You can have perfect paperwork, four months of notice served correctly and three months of arrears documented, and you will still lose, because you skipped an online form. The same applies to an unprotected deposit.

The penalties on top are not trivial either. A council can issue a civil penalty of up to £7,000 for a first breach, and up to £40,000 or a criminal prosecution for serious or repeated ones. Councils were given their new investigatory powers on 27 December 2025, so this is already live.

Rent increases

Once a year, by serving a Section 13 notice at market rate, with at least two months' notice. Rent review clauses in the tenancy agreement no longer do anything for private landlords.

A tenant who thinks the increase is above market can take it to the First-tier Tribunal, and the tribunal decides what market rent is. Two details in that process favour the tenant and are worth knowing before you set a number. The tribunal cannot award more than you asked for, so there is no upside to a speculative figure. And the new rent applies from the date of determination rather than the date on your notice, so a challenge that takes months is months you spend on the old rent. The practical answer is to price increases where you can defend them with comparable evidence, which is what a sensible landlord was doing anyway.

Rent in advance has been curtailed as well, which caught a few people out. You cannot ask for or accept any rent before the tenancy is signed, and after signing you can take at most one month up front. Taking six months in advance from a tenant who would not otherwise pass referencing is no longer available as a way of de-risking a let, and if that was part of how you handled thinner applicants, you need a different answer.

Smaller changes worth knowing

You have to advertise an asking rent and you cannot accept offers above it, so bidding wars are out. You cannot refuse a pet unreasonably, though you can still refuse where your own head lease prohibits animals. Blanket bans on tenants with children or on benefits are unlawful, and any clause in a mortgage or superior lease attempting to impose one has no effect. Affordability checks are fine. Refusing someone because of the source of their income is not.

The Decent Homes Standard is being extended to the private sector, and Awaab's Law with it, which will put fixed timescales on responding to damp and mould. The exact timescales are still out for consultation, so I would not make firm plans around them yet. The direction is obvious enough.

If you do one thing this month

Register. On the database, and with the ombudsman. It is administrative and boring and it is the single point of failure for everything else, because an unregistered landlord has no route to possession at all. Everything else on your list can wait behind that one.

After that, go and look at your deposits and confirm every one is protected and the prescribed information was actually served, because that is the other thing that will stop a possession claim dead. Then read your own tenancy agreements and find the rent review clauses, which no longer do anything, so that you do not accidentally rely on one. None of this is difficult. It is just the sort of task that sits on a list for eight months until the week you urgently need it to have been done.

What I see from the sourcing side

Two things have changed in how I look at a deal since May, and neither is what people expected.

The first is that exit timing has become part of the underwriting. A property you might need vacant within eighteen months is a different proposition now, and if a deal only works on a quick resale with vacant possession then the notice periods are a real cost that belongs in the numbers rather than a footnote.

The second is that condition matters more than it did. A tired property let to a tenant who was never going to complain was a viable, if unattractive, strategy while a Section 21 notice could end the conversation. With the Decent Homes Standard arriving and an ombudsman a tenant can escalate to for free, the cheap-and-cheerful refurbishment is now a liability rather than a saving. That has pushed my refurb estimates up on some stock, and it has made a couple of deals not work that would have worked last year. I would rather find that out at the appraisal stage than eighteen months in.

For what it is worth, I do not think the reforms are the disaster the trade press suggested, and I also do not think they are the non-event that some of the more relaxed commentary claims. They are an administrative burden with real penalties attached, landing on a sector where a lot of people were operating informally. If you were already registered, insured, compliant and maintaining your properties, this is paperwork. If you were not, it is genuinely a problem, and it is a problem that gets more expensive the longer it is ignored.

The landlords I know who are relaxed about all this are not the ones with the biggest portfolios. They are the ones whose paperwork was already in order.

This is general information rather than legal advice, and the phased commencement dates are still moving. Check the current gov.uk guidance before acting on any of it, and take proper advice on anything specific to your own tenancy.