Landlord compliance timeline: every date and duty in order

The Renters' Rights Act 2025 did not land in one piece. It arrived as a sequence: an Act, a commencement date, a short deadline for catching up existing tenants, a longer deadline for clearing out old possession notices, and a set of duties still to come. This guide walks the sequence in order, explains what each date actually required of a landlord, and sets out what is left to do now that the fixed deadlines have passed.

The timeline at a glance

27 October 2025: Royal Assent

The Act received Royal Assent on 27 October 2025 and became the Renters' Rights Act 2025 (c. 26). Royal Assent is not commencement. Nothing about any tenancy changed that day, and a landlord who served a section 21 notice on 28 October 2025 was doing something entirely lawful.

What Royal Assent did do was fix the text and start the clock on the secondary legislation: the commencement regulations that would choose the date, and the regulations prescribing the content of the written statement of terms. You can read the Act as enacted on legislation.gov.uk.

1 May 2026: the reforms took effect

Commencement regulations (SI 2026/421) brought the main tenancy reforms into force on 1 May 2026, for England only. Four things changed at once, and all of them applied to existing tenancies as well as new ones.

• Section 21 was abolished. No further notices could be served, whatever the agreement said - see section 21 abolition.
• Assured shorthold tenancies ceased to exist. Nearly all existing tenancies converted automatically into periodic assured tenancies, in most cases monthly.
• Rent review clauses stopped having effect. Increases became possible only through a section 13 notice on the prescribed Form 4A.
• The pet request, advertising, bidding and advance rent rules began to apply, along with the 28-day response period.

For any tenancy granted on or after this date, the written statement of the prescribed terms must be given to the tenant before the tenancy is entered into. That is a pre-condition, not a follow-up, and it carries a civil penalty of up to £7,000. The 18 prescribed matters are covered in the written statement of terms, and the site's written statement builder produces one that covers them.

31 May 2026: the Information Sheet deadline

This was the only genuinely short deadline in the reforms, and the one most often missed. Every tenant on a written or partly written tenancy that already existed on 1 May 2026 had to be given the official Renters' Rights Act Information Sheet 2026 by 31 May 2026. Wholly oral pre-commencement tenancies needed a written statement of terms by the same date.

Service had to be a hard copy or the official PDF attached to an email or text message. A link to the gov.uk page did not discharge the duty, which caught out a number of landlords who sent a tidy email in good faith. The sheet is published on gov.uk.

A worked example. A landlord let a flat on a written agreement starting 12 January 2024. The tenancy was still running on 1 May 2026, so the Information Sheet was due by 31 May 2026. He served it on 3 August 2026 by email with the PDF attached. He was late, and the breach happened. But the duty did not lapse with the deadline, so serving it stopped the breach continuing, and he kept the sent email as evidence of the date. That distinction between a corrected slip and an unaddressed one is the difference the penalty tiers are built around. See the Information Sheet duty.

31 July 2026: old notices ran out

The Act did not void every notice in circulation on commencement day. Section 21 and section 8 notices served under the old law kept their effect through a transitional window, on one condition: the landlord had to issue possession proceedings in the county court by 31 July 2026, or sooner if a section 21 notice's own time limit or a section 8 notice's 12-month limit ran out first. Serving the notice was not enough, and neither was preparing a claim. It had to be issued.

Notices not backed by issued proceedings by that date simply lapsed. In practice this means every possession claim beginning now runs entirely on the new rules: a section 8 notice specifying a ground, the notice period attached to that ground, and a court order.

Ongoing duties from this point

With the fixed deadlines behind us, what remains are event-driven duties. They have no date of their own - they bite when something happens.

• New tenancy: written statement of the prescribed terms before the tenancy is entered into. No more than one month's rent in advance, or 28 days' where the period is shorter, and no rent before the agreement is signed.
• Advertising: publish an asking rent, and do not invite or accept offers above it. No blanket refusals of tenants on benefits or with children. See discrimination and bidding rules.
• Rent increase: Form 4A, at least 2 months' notice, at least 52 weeks after the last increase, none in the first 52 weeks, effective on the first day of a rent period.
• Pet request: give or refuse consent in writing within 28 days (or the extended date), and refuse only for a reasonable reason.
• Possession: a section 8 ground, the correct notice period, and a court order. A ground 1 or 1A notice cannot name a date within the tenancy's first year.

What is expected next

Two measures remain to be commenced. The private rented sector database, under which landlords will register themselves and their properties, opens as the "Register your rental property" service on 15 December 2026, starting in the West Midlands and reaching the other regions of England month by month. Landlords get a 3-month window once their region opens, and every region is due to be covered by 14 November 2027. A compulsory landlord ombudsman handling tenant complaints is expected in 2028. Neither imposes an obligation today. The sensible preparation is record-keeping rather than watching for an announcement, which is set out in the database and ombudsman guide. If you are behind on any of the duties above, the consequences and the appeal route are in what happens if you get it wrong.