The Renters' Rights Act came into effect on 1 May 2026. It is the biggest single change to private renting in England since the Housing Act 1988. If you own a buy-to-let in London, your tenancies, your eviction rights, and your rent-setting powers have all changed, whether you knew about it or not.
This article is a plain-English overview. No legal jargon. Just the changes that actually matter, what they cost you if you ignore them, and what to do next.
The five changes that matter most
1. Section 21 'no fault' evictions are abolished
For thirty-eight years, Section 21 of the Housing Act 1988 gave landlords a route to recover their property without giving a reason. Two months' notice, the right paperwork, and the property came back. That route is now gone.
From 1 May 2026, you can only evict a tenant by using a specific, legally defined possession ground. The grounds have been expanded, selling the property, moving in yourself, moving in family, persistent rent arrears, anti-social behaviour are all now valid. But you must be able to evidence the ground in court, and you can no longer simply end a tenancy because the fixed term has expired.
2. Every AST is now an APT
Assured shorthold tenancies (ASTs), the standard contract used in private renting since 1996, have been abolished for new tenancies and converted for existing ones. Every tenancy is now an assured periodic tenancy, also called a 'rolling tenancy'.
What that means in practice: there is no longer a fixed end date. Your tenant can stay until either (a) they give two months' notice to leave, or (b) you serve a valid possession notice and obtain a court order. You can no longer agree a 12-month fixed term with a landlord-favourable break clause. That structure does not exist any more.
3. Rent in advance is capped at one month
Asking for six months' rent up front to de-risk a tenancy with thin affordability has been a common workaround. It is now illegal. You can require up to one month's rent in the window between signing the tenancy and the tenancy starting, nothing more. Once the tenancy has begun, you cannot collect rent before it is due.
4. Rental bidding is banned
You must publish a specific asking rent in any written property advertisement. You cannot ask prospective tenants to bid above it. You cannot encourage offers above it. You cannot accept offers above it. The marketed rent is the maximum rent.
5. Rent increases are limited to once per year, with two months' written notice
The mid-tenancy rent rise is now a structured legal process. You can only do it once in any twelve-month period, and you must serve a formal notice setting out the proposed new rent at least two months before it takes effect. Tenants can challenge the proposed rent at the First-tier Tribunal.
The smaller changes that also matter
- Pet requests must be considered. You can still refuse, but you need a valid reason and you must respond within a set timeframe.
- Discrimination against families and benefits recipients is illegal. You cannot withhold a property, refuse a viewing, or refuse a tenancy because the applicant has children or receives benefits.
- The 'How to Rent' guide is largely replaced. Most landlords will instead need to issue the new Renters' Rights Act Information Sheet by 31 May 2026.
The cost of getting it wrong
Local councils can impose a civil penalty of up to £40,000 for non-compliance with the new rules. In some cases, particularly repeated or deliberate breaches, councils can pursue criminal prosecution. The new framework is not a soft-touch regulatory regime. Enforcement teams across London boroughs have been resourced to act.
The risk is concentrated in three places: paperwork (issuing the right notices and documents on time), evictions (using the wrong ground or filing badly), and rent (asking for the wrong amount up front or raising it the wrong way).
What this means for the average West London landlord
If you have a 2 to 4 bedroom house in Ealing, Hounslow, Fulham, or any of the other West London boroughs we cover, the practical shift is this: you have more obligations, less control over your tenant's exit, and longer exposure to any problem tenant who refuses to leave.
For landlords who self-manage, that means the operational burden has gone up materially, and the compensation for taking that burden has not. Rents are capped at one annual increase. Voids are still your risk. Court delays are still your risk. Maintenance is still your responsibility.
This is the conversation we are now having with most of our landlord clients. The Renters' Rights Act has not made buy-to-let unworkable, but it has shifted the risk profile. Some landlords are choosing to take that risk on themselves. Others are choosing to outsource it.
What we recommend you actually do
- Send the Renters' Rights Act Information Sheet to every existing tenant by 31 May 2026.
- Review any tenancy advert you have running, make sure it includes a specific asking rent and does not invite bidding.
- Audit any rent in advance arrangements. If you are holding more than one month's pre-tenancy rent, take advice.
- If you have a difficult tenancy you were planning to end via Section 21, get professional advice on the correct possession ground before serving notice.
- Take a hard look at whether the time, legal exposure, and operational stress of self-managing is still worth it for your portfolio.
Three months in: what enforcement attention looks like
With the Act now bedded in for a full quarter, the pattern of enforcement attention is becoming easier to describe. Council teams work from paper trails, because paper trails are cheap to check. The information sheet duty is verifiable from a single request to a tenant. Advertised listings are public, so a listing that invites offers over the asking rent is evidence that writes itself. Deposit protection has been checkable for years. The landlords most exposed are not the deliberately rogue, who have always existed and always been pursued, but the accidentally non compliant: owners of one or two properties who did not hear about a deadline, or heard and assumed it applied to someone else.
The defensive posture is not complicated. Every tenancy should have a file that answers, in under five minutes, the questions an enforcement officer would ask: when the tenancy began and on what terms, when the information sheet went to the tenant and how, where the deposit is protected, when the gas and electrical certificates were issued, what the EPC says, and what licence the property holds if the borough requires one. If assembling that file for your own property would take you an afternoon of searching, that afternoon is the cheapest insurance available to you this year.
The paperwork spine every tenancy now needs
It helps to think of the new regime as demanding a spine of documents that runs the length of the tenancy. At the start: the written statement of terms, the information sheet, the deposit protection paperwork with its prescribed information, the certificates, and the licence where applicable. During: records of every repair report and what was done about it, every rent notice served, every inspection. At the end, whenever it comes: the evidence supporting whichever possession ground is relied on, built before it is needed rather than reconstructed afterwards.
Landlords who kept this spine under the old regime found the transition in May administrative rather than frightening. Landlords who ran tenancies from a shoebox and memory are the ones for whom the Act genuinely changed the risk of being in this business. The work of maintaining the spine is exactly the sort of systematic, unglamorous discipline a professional manager exists to carry, which is why the question we hear most since May is not whether the rules can be met, but whose job the meeting of them should be.
The possession grounds, in one plain paragraph each
Because the exit routes now define the risk, it is worth knowing the main ones in ordinary language. If you genuinely intend to sell, there is a ground for that, with four months' notice and a bar on re-letting for a year if you change your mind. If you or close family genuinely intend to move in, there is a ground for that too, on similar notice. Serious rent arrears remain a mandatory route once the tenant is three months behind at notice and at hearing. Anti social behaviour has its own strengthened ground with fast notice in the worst cases. And a set of narrower grounds covers situations like employee accommodation and student HMOs. Every ground shares one feature: it must be evidenced, which is why the record keeping described below has stopped being administrative hygiene and become the substance of your legal position.
Do not forget licensing while looking at the Act
One trap we keep seeing: landlords absorbed by the new national rules while missing the local ones. Property licensing runs borough by borough, with mandatory HMO licensing everywhere and additional or selective schemes covering swathes of individual boroughs, each with its own boundaries and renewal dates. An unlicensed property that should be licensed exposes you to civil penalties and rent repayment orders regardless of how beautifully your Renters' Rights paperwork is arranged, and it undermines possession claims too. Whenever we onboard a property, the licensing check is done against the exact address on the borough's current scheme, not against a general impression of the area, because schemes change and streets sit on boundaries.
Your next quarter, planned
If you self manage and want this handled by Christmas, the sequence is short. This month: confirm every tenant has had the information sheet, check your deposits and prescribed information, and diarise every certificate expiry. Next month: check your borough's licensing schemes against each address, and read your tenancy agreements to see which clauses the Act has overridden so nothing in them misleads you. The month after: build the comparables file for any rent that has drifted below market and open the renewal conversation properly. None of it is glamorous, all of it is finite, and a property manager exists to make the whole list someone else's job, which since May has become the honest core of what management is for.
Questions landlords keep asking us about the Act
Can I still choose my tenant? Entirely, on legitimate grounds: affordability, referencing, guarantors and suitability remain your call. What the Act removes are blanket bans on children and benefits, and bidding above the advertised rent. Selection by evidence is untouched; selection by prejudice and auction is what has gone.
Do I have to accept pets now? No. You must consider a request and refuse only with a sensible reason, within the set timeframe. A written policy applied consistently, and a record of each decision, keeps this obligation painless.
Is buy to let still worth it? That is a portfolio question rather than a legal one, but our honest observation is this: returns have not vanished, they have migrated toward landlords who run properties professionally, because the casual approach now carries penalties it never used to. The Act rewards exactly the disciplines a good manager already runs, which is why the calmest landlords since May have been the ones with the strongest files.
A last word on perspective, because the commentary around the Act has run hot all year. The private rented sector has absorbed larger shocks than this and repriced around every one of them; the landlords who did badly out of each eras change were rarely those with the most property and nearly always those with the least process. The Act is now simply the operating environment. It can be met with an afternoon of dread every few months, or with a system that meets it automatically while you get on with your life. Our entire argument, here and across this site, is that the second of those is now the only sensible way to hold residential property in London, whether the system is yours or ours. What the Act punishes is improvisation; what it leaves untouched is the return available to landlords who run their properties like the businesses they have always quietly been.
Morgan Prescott was founded by former finance professionals. We operate on guaranteed-rent leasing and full corporate property management, structures that align us with you: we only do well when your asset performs. If you would like a free 24-hour property valuation and a frank conversation about whether guaranteed rent fits your portfolio, get in touch.