Tenant rights under the Renters' Rights Act: a walkthrough

If you rent privately in England, the Renters' Rights Act 2025 changed the underlying terms of your tenancy on 1 May 2026, whether or not anybody told you and whatever your agreement says. This guide walks through what you actually have now: how secure your home is, when the rent can go up, what you can be asked to pay before you move in, the documents you are owed, the right to ask about a pet, and how to push back when a landlord gets something wrong.

Your tenancy is open-ended, and you decide when to leave

Fixed terms are gone. Assured shorthold tenancies ceased to exist and nearly all existing tenancies converted automatically into periodic assured tenancies, in most cases running month to month. If your agreement still describes a six or twelve month term, that part of it no longer reflects the law.

You can leave whenever you choose by giving at least 2 months' notice in writing, ending on a day when the rent is due or the day before. A shorter period is possible only if the landlord and every joint tenant agree in writing. There is more on how rent periods work in periodic tenancies explained.

You cannot be asked to leave without a reason

Section 21 no-fault eviction was abolished on 1 May 2026 for every assured tenancy, including tenancies that had been running for years. A notice served after that date purporting to rely on section 21 has no effect. Any notice you receive must specify a ground from schedule 2 to the Housing Act 1988, and possession always requires a court order.

With a mandatory ground, the court must order possession if the ground is proved. With a discretionary ground, the court also has to be satisfied that it is reasonable to order possession, which means your circumstances are part of the decision. The most commonly used grounds:

Two protections are worth memorising. A notice on ground 1 or 1A cannot name a date for starting court proceedings earlier than one year after the tenancy began, and a landlord who relies on either of them cannot re-let the property, or market it to let, from the day the notice is served until 12 months after the notice period ends. If you receive a notice, check the ground, the notice period and the date the tenancy began before you do anything else. See section 8 possession grounds for the detail.

Rent: one route, one increase a year

Rent review clauses no longer have effect. The only lawful way to raise the rent is a notice under section 13 of the Housing Act 1988 using the prescribed Form 4A. The notice must give at least 2 months, the new rent must take effect on the first day of a rent period, an increase cannot take effect earlier than 52 weeks after the last one, and there can be no increase during the first 52 weeks of the tenancy.

A worked example

Your tenancy began on 1 June 2026 at £1,150 a month, with rent due on the 1st. Your landlord emails on 10 August 2026 saying the rent goes to £1,300 from 1 September. That fails twice over: it is inside the first 52 weeks, and it is nowhere near two months' notice. It is also not a section 13 notice.

Done properly, the earliest the rent could rise is 1 June 2027, because the first 52 weeks run to 31 May 2027. A Form 4A served on 15 March 2027 proposing £1,300 from 1 June 2027 satisfies all four rules, and no further increase could then take effect before 1 June 2028.

If you think the figure is above market, you can refer the proposed rent to the First-tier Tribunal, but you must do it before the date the increase is due to take effect. The tribunal determines what the property would command on the open market and cannot set a figure higher than the one your landlord proposed. It also cannot backdate: the rent it determines applies from the date of the determination. The full process is in rent increases explained, and you can test a notice against the timing rules with the rent increase checker.

What you can be asked to pay before you move in

No more than one month's rent can be taken in advance, or 28 days' rent where the rental period is shorter than a month, and no rent can be taken before the tenancy agreement is signed. A holding deposit of up to one week's rent is still allowed. Deposits must still be protected in an approved scheme, and the Tenant Fees Act 2019 cap on their size still applies.

The paperwork you are owed

If your tenancy started on or after 1 May 2026, your landlord had to give you a written statement of the prescribed terms before the tenancy was entered into. There are 18 prescribed matters, set out in SI 2026/324, covering the parties, the rent and when it is due, the deposit, and how the tenancy can be ended.

If your tenancy already existed before that date and was written or partly written, you should have received the official Renters' Rights Act Information Sheet 2026 by 31 May 2026. A link in an email does not satisfy the duty: it had to be a hard copy or the official PDF attached. If you never got it, the duty has not expired, and you can simply ask. You can read the Information Sheet on gov.uk yourself in the meantime.

Pets, and being judged before you move in

You have a statutory right to request permission to keep a pet. The request has to be in writing, the landlord must give or refuse consent in writing within 28 days (or 7 days after any further information they reasonably ask for), and consent cannot be unreasonably refused. Silence is not consent, but a court can order a landlord to deal with the request. A blanket no-pets clause in an old agreement does not remove that right. See pet requests.

Before a tenancy even starts, blanket bans and blanket refusals aimed at people who receive benefits, or who have children, are unlawful in relation to letting a property in England. Landlords and agents must also publish an asking rent and must not invite or accept offers above it, so a bidding war is no longer something you can be pushed into. Those rules sit alongside the protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010 rather than replacing them. See discrimination and bidding rules.

What to do when something goes wrong

Put it in writing first, dated, describing the specific duty and asking for it to be put right. Most breaches are administrative rather than deliberate and a short email fixes them. Keep every reply.

If that fails, the paperwork, discrimination and bidding rules are enforced by your local council, which can impose civil penalties of up to £7,000, and up to £40,000 where a breach has become a criminal offence, for example because it carried on after an earlier penalty. Rent increase notices and pet requests work differently: an invalid notice can be challenged at the First-tier Tribunal, and a pet request a landlord ignores can be taken to court. Separately, a tenant can apply to the First-tier Tribunal for a rent repayment order in defined circumstances, and the maximum was doubled from 12 to 24 months' rent. A compulsory landlord ombudsman is expected in 2028 but is not yet available. For free advice, Citizens Advice and Shelter are the usual starting points.