There is a lot to read about the Renters' Rights Act, and not much of it is calm. Law firms write for landlords who already have a solicitor. Software companies write to sell software. The trade press writes for clicks. The result is that a piece of legislation which lands in phases over several years gets reported as if all of it lands at once.
Most of it does not.
Some of the Act is already in force, and a small number of things genuinely need your attention in the next few weeks. A larger group of changes is now the ongoing reality of letting in England and worth knowing well, even if no single one of them needs to be sorted by Friday. Some pieces are coming but not for a year, or two, or three. And a handful of the things the headlines are still chewing on do not apply to most small landlords at all.
This page is a plain-English summary of where each bit actually sits, organised in that order. Two things to do this month. The rules of the new game from 1 May. What's coming and roughly when. And what the news cycle has hyped that you can, in most cases, ignore.
It's not legal advice. It's a starting point, with links out to the source documents at each step.
Where the law isn't yet settled, or where the case law that will eventually pin down what phrases like "reasonable refusal", "genuine intention to sell" or "market rent" actually mean in practice doesn't yet exist, the article says so. Part of why the noise around the Act is so loud is that several of the most consequential pieces are still genuinely unsettled. Secondary legislation hasn't been published. The first tribunal and ombudsman decisions haven't been made. A lot of the confident writing being done right now will need rewriting once those decisions land. This page tries to be honest about where that will matter, rather than papering over it.
Do this now
Two items, both transitional, both with hard deadlines in the next few weeks. If nothing else from this page sticks, these are the bits to action.
Serve the Information Sheet on every existing tenant by 31 May 2026
The Renters' Rights Act requires every landlord in England with a tenancy that was already in place on 30 April 2026 to serve the official GOV.UK Information Sheet on each tenant by 31 May. That's a one-off requirement covering the transition. New tenancies starting from 1 May onward fall under a different rule (see "Live and ongoing" below).
The civil penalty for failure is up to £7,000 per offence, with a starting point of around £4,000 under the Statutory Guidance. If the breach continues for more than 28 days after a penalty is issued, or if the landlord has previously been penalised for a similar breach within five years, the next civil penalty rises to up to £40,000, or the council can prosecute instead.
There is also a live question about whether failing to serve the Information Sheet invalidates Section 8 possession notices on certain grounds, particularly Ground 1 (landlord moving in) and Ground 1A (landlord selling). Some commentary reads the Act as having that effect. The NRLA, gov.uk guidance, and the major law firms describe only the civil penalty, with no mention of possession being blocked. The text of the Act doesn't put the question beyond doubt either way, and until the first contested case decides it, nobody can say for certain. The operational point is the same regardless: serve the sheet. It's cheap, it's simple, and there's no upside in being the test case.
The sheet itself is a fixed PDF on gov.uk. You don't need to draft anything. You can serve it by email, by hand, or by post, but the email route requires the actual PDF as an attachment, not a link to the page. Keep the proof of service: which date, which method, which tenant. A landlord who can produce a clear record of service is in a different position to one who cannot, regardless of whether enforcement action is ever taken.
We've written about this in more detail on The Record. If you haven't done it yet, today is a reasonable day to do it.
Get any pre-1-May Section 21 notices to court by 31 July 2026
Section 21 is abolished from 1 May 2026, but the Act includes a transitional rule for notices that were validly served before that date. If you served a Section 21 notice before 1 May and your tenant hasn't left, you have until 31 July 2026 to file the possession claim at court. After that date, the Section 21 notice lapses. To recover the property after a lapsed notice, you would need to start again under Section 8, which means establishing one of the statutory grounds and producing evidence to support them.
If you have a live Section 21 notice that you served before 1 May, put 31 July in the diary now. If the tenant hasn't left by mid-July, that's the point at which you need to be filing, not thinking about filing. We've written about what the Section 8 shift means for record-keeping on The Record.
Live and ongoing
The rest of the Act is now the regulatory backdrop to letting in England. None of it has a one-off deadline, but each piece is the new normal for any tenancy starting or running from 1 May 2026 onward. Five things sit inside it that most landlords will encounter routinely.
1. Written Statement of Terms for every new tenancy
The Information Sheet covered tenancies that already existed on 30 April. For every new tenancy from 1 May onward, the equivalent obligation is the Written Statement of Terms. Before the tenant signs, you have to give them, in writing, a defined set of information about the tenancy: your name and a service address, deposit details, the rent and how it's paid, the notice periods that apply, repair obligations, and any prior notices required for special possession grounds. The full content list is in the gov.uk guidance, "Tenancy agreements: written information for your tenant", published 20 March 2026.
The fine for getting this wrong is the same as the Information Sheet: up to £7,000 per offence, rising to £40,000 for repeat or continuing breaches.
In practice, most landlords' tenancy agreements already cover most of this. The change is that certain items are now required, which means a working agreement from 2024 will not automatically clear the new bar. The cleanest move is to check yours once against the gov.uk list and bring it into line.
2. Pet requests, and the 28-day clock
Tenants now have a contractual right to ask if they can keep a pet. You have 28 days to respond. Miss the deadline and consent is deemed given by operation of law: a "no" you never sent becomes a "yes" by default. This sounds trivial, but nobody wants to end up with a house full of cats because they didn't send an email in time.
You can refuse, but only on reasonable grounds. The Act doesn't define "reasonable" precisely, which means the operating definition is going to be shaped by First-tier Tribunal decisions and Ombudsman rulings over the next few years. The cases most commentary agrees on as clearly reasonable refusals: the property is genuinely unsuitable for the pet (a Great Dane in a studio flat). A freeholder restriction prohibits it. An HMO licence condition rules it out. Beyond those, the boundary is up for grabs. A blanket "no pets" policy is no longer enforceable, whatever the tenancy agreement says.
One thing to be careful about. The original Bill included a clause allowing landlords to require tenants to take out pet damage insurance, or to charge them the cost of the landlord taking it out. That clause was removed by amendment before the Bill became an Act and is not part of the law. Asking a tenant to take out pet insurance, or to pay your costs of doing so, is a prohibited payment under the Tenant Fees Act. Pet damage still comes out of the deposit at end of tenancy in the usual way, but no extra insurance can be required.
The other thing worth doing is keeping a note: when the request came in, what you said, when you said it. If a tenant later disputes a refusal, that note is the difference between an obvious record and trying to remember what was in WhatsApp four months ago.
3. Rent increases now go through Section 13
Whatever your tenancy agreement says about rent reviews, set it aside. Contractual review clauses are no longer effective. The only way to increase the rent during a tenancy is to serve a Section 13 notice.
Three rules govern when. No more than once every 12 months. At least two months' notice. The new rent has to align to the start of a rent period.
The harder rule governs how much. The increase has to be to the market rent for the property, which is the rent it would achieve if let on the open market today. The Act doesn't define "market rent" with anything like the precision it applies to, say, the Section 8 grounds. In practice, what you can defend is what comparable properties in the same area are currently asking. Rightmove and Zoopla list rentals continuously and are the most accessible source for a self-managing landlord. A local letting agent will give you a valuation, often for free, if you ask. The NRLA and ONS both publish rent data, though they tend to lag.
This is genuinely hard. We're trying to build a way of checking it inside Harthing, and we're struggling, and two of us are accountants and the other has a maths degree from Cambridge. It will get easier as Tribunal decisions accumulate and the rough shape of "what's reasonable" becomes clearer, although that's scant consolation if you're one of the first to try. The case law that would settle the practical questions ("how recent do comparables need to be?", "how close geographically?", "what about properties with materially different EPCs?") doesn't yet exist. The first contested cases under the new regime will start to build it.
The tenant can challenge the proposed rent at the First-tier Tribunal, and two things have changed about how that works. First, the Tribunal can no longer set the rent any higher than the figure you proposed. The historic gamesmanship of "ask for less than market, hope the Tribunal goes higher" is gone, and the worst case for the tenant is your proposed figure. Second, the Tribunal cannot backdate the new rent to before the hearing. Hearings are running months out. The practical effect is that a tenant who challenges gets a free delay even if the challenge has no merit. Plan around that, particularly if the new rent is paying for something specific.
4. Section 8 is now the only way to recover the property
With Section 21 gone, every possession claim has to be made under Section 8, and Section 8 requires you to establish a specific ground. The full set is in Schedule 2 of the Renters' Rights Act 2025. There are 37 grounds in total, but most landlords will only ever meet four or five. The ones worth knowing in outline:
Ground 1 (you or a family member want to move in) and Ground 1A (you want to sell). Four months' notice. The notice itself can be served at any time, but it cannot take effect within the first 12 months of the tenancy: practically, this means a notice served in month 8 will expire just after month 12. After you've used either ground, you cannot re-let the property for 12 months from the date the notice was due to expire. The last bit is there to stop the obvious workaround of evicting on Ground 1, then putting straight back on the market.
Ground 8 (rent arrears). The threshold is now three months of arrears, up from two (or 13 weeks if you charge weekly or fortnightly). The notice period is four weeks. The arrears must be at the threshold both when the notice is served and at the hearing. If the tenant clears the arrears below the threshold before the hearing, the ground falls away. Arrears that exist only because the tenant has not yet received a Universal Credit housing payment they are entitled to are disregarded.
Ground 4A (student HMO let, recovering at the end of the academic year, between 1 June and 30 September). Only available if you served a prior notice flagging that you might use it, in the tenancy agreement or as a written statement. No prior notice, no ground. Note that prior notices in the start-of-tenancy sense apply to a defined list of grounds: 2ZA to 2ZD, 4, 4A, 5 to 5H, and 18. Ground 1 and Ground 1A do not require a prior notice.
Across the board, Section 8 requires evidence the ground is met. Rent arrears means a payment record that holds up. "Genuine intention to sell" means evidence of that intention: agent instruction letters, valuations, marketing materials, dated correspondence about the sale. The Act doesn't specify a minimum evidence standard, and the first contested cases haven't been heard, so the safer side of the line is to keep more than you think you need rather than less. "Anti-social behaviour" means a dated, detailed log of incidents.
This is the heart of why record-keeping matters more under the new regime than under the old, and we've written about that on The Record.
5. A few smaller rules worth knowing
Three more rules sit alongside the above. Bundled together because they're quicker to know in a single breath than to navigate one at a time.
The rent you advertise is the rent you have to accept. Bidding wars, where prospective tenants compete by offering above the asking rent, are banned. The advert has to show a specific rent figure, not a range and not a "from".
You can't refuse a tenant for having children, or for being in receipt of benefits. This formalises something a lot of landlords already did, but not all.
You can't ask for more than one month's rent up front once the tenancy is signed. Deposit rules are unchanged: you can still take a deposit up to the statutory cap and protect it through one of the schemes. But the practice of asking for, say, six months' rent in advance from a tenant whose credit is thin, that's no longer permitted.
Be mindful
Several pieces of the Act are coming, but coming later. None of them require action this year, and in most cases the detail is still being written. Worth knowing exists, not worth losing sleep over.
The PRS Database, regional rollout from late 2026
The Act creates a national Private Rented Sector Database. Every landlord letting a property in England will be required to register, and provide some basic information about the property: address, EPC, possibly licence details, possibly more. The point of it is to give councils and tenants a single place to verify whether a property and the person letting it are in good standing.
The Implementation Roadmap published by the government in November 2025 sets out a phased introduction. A regional rollout begins late 2026. Mandatory registration is then phased through 2027. The exact date by which every landlord must be registered, and the exact required content, will be set in secondary legislation closer to launch.
The fine for failing to register is up to £7,000, rising to £40,000 or criminal prosecution for continuing or repeated breaches. And once it's live, certain Section 8 grounds (broadly the ones that aren't about tenant fault) become unavailable to unregistered landlords, which is the more practical lever than the fine.
Nothing to do today. Worth keeping an eye on for the rollout schedule.
The PRS Landlord Ombudsman, expected 2028
A new statutory ombudsman service for the private rented sector, modelled loosely on the existing schemes for letting agents. Every landlord will be required to join. Tenants will be able to raise complaints through it as a free alternative to going to court.
In practice, this matters mainly for disputes that currently end up in deposit scheme adjudications, small claims, or letters from a tenant's solicitor. The Ombudsman will handle them in a single forum. Decisions will be binding on landlords. There's no fee for tenants, and the government has indicated landlords will be charged a fair and proportionate annual fee per property, with the exact figure confirmed closer to launch.
The Implementation Roadmap states mandatory landlord registration is expected in 2028, once the Secretary of State is satisfied the service is ready for delivery. The administrator will be appointed 12 to 18 months before that.
Decent Homes Standard, extension to the PRS
The Decent Homes Standard is the minimum quality standard that already applies to social housing. The Act extends it to private rented homes. In rough terms, that means: free from serious hazards, reasonably modern facilities, in a reasonable state of repair, with effective heating and insulation.
Most professionally maintained properties already clear this bar without difficulty. The change is that what was an aspirational standard becomes an enforceable one, with councils empowered to act on breaches.
The government has confirmed the Decent Homes Standard will apply to private rented homes from 2035. That sits in Phase 3 of the implementation roadmap, alongside the extension of Awaab's Law to the PRS. Worth knowing the standard exists. Not worth retrofitting anything in advance of seeing the regulations.
Don't worry about
A handful of things that are getting airtime and shouldn't be giving most small landlords sleepless nights. None of these are made up; they're all real parts of the Act or the wider regulatory backdrop. They're just not, on closer inspection, things you can do anything about today.
The 2029 EPC change and the 2030 C rating
Two related things, often run together in the press, neither needing action this year.
The new Home Energy Model methodology becomes mandatory for new EPCs from 1 October 2029. From that date, EPCs will be graded slightly differently, with more weight given to the fabric of the building and less to heating-system assumptions. The new grades will not be directly comparable to the current ones.
The minimum EPC rating required to let a property in the private rented sector rises from E to C on 1 October 2030. Government confirmed this and the supporting framework in the Warm Homes Plan in January 2026. The cost cap on improvement spend is £10,000 per property. Qualifying expenditure has been backdated to 1 October 2025, so improvements you make now count.
The grandfathering position is the bit most landlords miss. If a property holds an EPC C under the current methodology before 1 October 2029, that EPC remains valid for the rest of its 10-year life, which can be as far out as 2039. An EPC issued in 2027 at a C rating doesn't get re-tested under the new methodology until it expires.
The action today is: know your current EPC, know when it expires, and know roughly which side of the C line your property sits on. If you're at D or below and the rating is close to expiry, a new EPC under the current methodology before 1 October 2029 is worth thinking about. If you're already at C, your current certificate sees you through. Either way, not worth replacing a working boiler this week.
The £100k high-rent exemption
The Act includes a carve-out: tenancies where the annual rent is over £100,000 are largely outside its scope. The reason is essentially that the policy intent of the Act is the protection of ordinary renters in ordinary homes, and a property letting at £100k+ is by definition not that. Sensible enough.
In practice, this exemption affects almost nobody. The threshold is set high enough that even most prime central London lets fall under the new rules. Worth knowing exists. Not worth a moment's thought unless you happen to be letting a Mayfair townhouse, in which case it's a problem for Knight Frank and your private banker.
The student HMO ground
Ground 4A allows landlords of student HMOs to recover possession at the end of an academic year, to let to a new student cohort. The whole ground exists to keep the student rental cycle workable, which would otherwise break under the new rules.
If you actually let to students in a recognisable HMO, this is genuinely useful and worth understanding properly (and worth getting the prior notice right at the start of the tenancy, since without it the ground isn't available). If you let to working professionals, families, or anyone other than students, this ground is not relevant to you and the noise around it is just noise.
The general air of "everything is changing"
This one isn't a specific provision; it's the meta-level worry. The Act is real, the changes are real, and there are things to do (see "Do this now"). But the volume of coverage has run well ahead of the operational reality for most landlords. A landlord with a reasonable property, paying tenants in good standing, current compliance certificates, and an ordinary tenancy agreement has very little to fear from 1 May 2026.
The main thing that actually changes for that landlord is the shape of evidence required if something does go wrong: rent arrears, a dispute, a possession claim. The Act is structurally about shifting the burden of proof, and the landlords who already keep good records are the ones who'll notice the change least.
If you're in that group, the headlines are loud and the actual impact is quiet. The headlines will calm down. The impact will be felt mainly when, and only if, you need to make a claim or defend one.
A note on Awaab's Law
Awaab's Law gets tangled up with the RRA in conversation, partly because the timing is close and partly because both are widely covered in the trade press. They are separate pieces of legislation.
Awaab's Law, named after Awaab Ishak who died in 2020 from prolonged damp exposure in a Rochdale social housing flat, came into force for social landlords on 27 October 2025. Phase 1 covers damp and mould plus all emergency hazards. The headline timelines are: emergency hazards must be investigated and made safe within 24 hours; significant damp and mould hazards must be investigated within 10 working days of being reported, with a written summary of findings provided to the tenant within 3 working days of the investigation concluding, and the property made safe within 5 working days. Phase 2 in 2026 extends to a wider set of hazards. Phase 3 covers the remaining HHSRS hazards.
The RRA contains provisions to extend Awaab's Law to the private rented sector. The Implementation Roadmap places that in Phase 3 alongside the Decent Homes Standard, with the timescales described as "subject to consultation". No firm date for the PRS extension has been set; commentary suggests it could be aligned with the 2035 Decent Homes Standard timeline, but until the regulations are published, none of the social-housing timelines apply to private landlords as a matter of law.
When the PRS version does land, it will be the regulation that most rewards careful records. The whole mechanism turns on dates: hazard reported, investigation started, findings shared, remedy complete. A dated, time-stamped log answers all four questions. A WhatsApp thread that says "yeah will sort that" answers none of them.
Worth knowing it's coming. Not worth retrofitting anything to a deadline that doesn't yet legally apply.
Where this leaves you
If you've read this far, the picture is hopefully less alarming than the headlines suggested. There are two things to do this month. There's a new set of rules to keep in mind as you let property from now on. There are pieces coming over the next few years that will need attention when they arrive, not before. And there's a fair amount of noise that, on closer inspection, isn't really about most landlords at all.
The single thread running through the Act is the shift from "the landlord's word" to "the landlord's record." Section 21 didn't need much evidence; Section 8 does. The Ombudsman will want it. The Tribunal already does. Most of what's changing rewards landlords who can show what happened, when, and what they did about it.
That's what we're building Harthing for. Every action you take in the platform, every document, every payment, every maintenance log, becomes part of a timestamped, tamper-evident record that you can produce in full whenever someone asks. We think that's where this is all heading. The Act is the proximate reason. The deeper reason is that a property and a tenancy are too important to be run on WhatsApp threads and a folder called "Stuff."
If any of this is useful and you want to see what the product looks like, we're at harthing.co.uk. If not, the page above stands on its own. Either way, good letting, on the record.