The Renters' Rights Act transitional deadlines: where things stand after 31 July 2026
The Act's three transitional deadlines — 1 May, 31 May and 31 July 2026 — have all now passed. A pre-commencement section 21 notice with no claim issued is spent, and the missed information sheet duty carries a penalty of up to £7,000. Where each stands today.
Published ·6 min read
The Renters' Rights Act 2025 set three transitional deadlines. On 1 May 2026 existing tenancies converted to assured periodic tenancies and section 21 was abolished. By 31 May 2026 landlords had to give existing tenants the official information sheet. And 31 July 2026 was the last day to issue a possession claim on a pre-commencement section 21 or section 8 notice. All three have now passed.
What matters now is which side of each date you landed on. A section 21 notice served before commencement is spent unless the claim reached the court by 31 July — there is no way to revive it. The information sheet duty, by contrast, can and should still be remedied.
The transitional timeline
| Date | What it is |
|---|---|
| 27 October 2025 | Royal Assent |
| 28 April 2026 | Practical last day to serve a section 21 notice by first-class post, so that deemed service landed before commencement |
| 1 May 2026 | Commencement. Existing assured and assured shorthold tenancies convert to assured periodic tenancies; fixed terms end; section 21 abolished |
| 31 May 2026 | Deadline to give existing tenants the information sheet or written statement |
| 31 July 2026 | Pre-commencement section 21 and section 8 notices expired unless a possession claim had been issued |
If you served a section 21 before 1 May 2026
A notice served before commencement was not wiped out on 1 May. It survived on a shortened fuse: the possession claim had to be issued by the earlier of the notice's ordinary six-month validity from service, or 31 July 2026 — the Act's long-stop date. A notice served by first-class post on 28 April 2026 would ordinarily have run to late October; under the transitional rule the claim had to be issued before 1 August 2026.
If your claim was issued in time, the case proceeds under the old rules. There is a second limb to this that gets missed: where a section 21 or section 8 notice was served before commencement and proceedings have not concluded, the tenancy stays an assured shorthold tenancy until they do. It did not convert on 1 May, and it will not convert until the case ends.
If no claim was issued by 31 July 2026, the notice is spent. There is no second attempt at section 21 — it no longer exists. The tenancy has converted to an assured periodic tenancy, and recovering possession means starting again under a section 8 ground, with its own notice period and a court prepared to test whether the ground is made out. Grounds 1 and 1A, for landlord occupation or sale, carry four months' notice and generally cannot be used in the first twelve months of the tenancy.
If you never gave the information sheet
Every landlord of an existing tenancy had to give tenants written notice of the changes within one month of commencement — by 31 May 2026.
- Tenancy wholly or partly in writing — the government's official Renters' Rights Act Information Sheet 2026, downloaded from GOV.UK. Your own summary of it does not discharge the duty.
- Wholly oral tenancy — a written statement setting out the key terms.
Failing to do so on time is a civil penalty of up to £7,000 for a first offence. If the failure continues after a penalty has been issued, a further offence carries up to £40,000.
Two things follow. First, if you are outside the deadline, serve it now anyway — a breach that has been remedied is a materially better position at a penalty hearing than one still running. Second, if a pre-commencement notice kept a tenancy as an AST while proceedings run, the duty is deferred: it bites one month after those proceedings conclude, not on 31 May.
What happened automatically on 1 May 2026
No re-signing was needed and none of this depended on the landlord doing anything:
- Fixed terms ended. Every converted tenancy is periodic and open-ended.
- Section 21 stopped being available for any notice served on or after 1 May 2026.
- Possession now runs through a section 8 ground plus a court order.
- Rent increases run through a section 13 notice on the prescribed Form 4A — once in any 12 months, with at least two months' notice, and rent-review clauses in the old agreement no longer operate.
- The tenant can end the tenancy on two months' notice at any point.
The old agreement does not become void — its terms survive to the extent they are compatible with the new regime. But any clause that assumed a fixed term, a break clause, or a section 21 route is now dead text, and a tenancy issued today should not contain it.
If you are a tenant
Two checks are worth making. If you were given a section 21 notice before 1 May 2026 and no claim was issued by 31 July 2026, that notice is now spent — it cannot be revived, and any possession attempt has to begin again from a section 8 ground. And if you never received the information sheet, your landlord is in breach of a duty that the local housing authority can enforce; the sheet itself is a free download and you are entitled to it.
What changes next
The transitional phase is over, but implementation is not. Two pieces of the Act are still to come:
- The private rented sector database. Landlords will be required to register themselves and their properties, with civil penalties for non-registration and a bar on marketing unregistered properties. The rollout is expected to begin in late 2026, phased by region.
- The PRS ombudsman. A mandatory redress scheme for private landlords, expected to follow the database — the government has indicated landlords will be required to join once the service is ready, currently anticipated around 2028.
Neither has a fixed commencement date yet. Registration will be the next hard deadline for landlords, so watch for the regulations that set it.
England only
The Renters' Rights Act applies to England. Wales has run its own regime under the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016 since 2022, Scotland has private residential tenancies, and Northern Ireland has separate rules again. None of the dates above apply outside England.
Get the right document
Our UK tenancy template is built for the post-commencement regime — assured periodic by default, no fixed term, no section 21 clause, with the statutory rent-increase procedure and pet-request wording in place.
→ Assured Tenancy Agreement (Periodic) · Section 8 Notice (Seeking Possession)
Related: assured shorthold tenancies are gone — what replaced them · section 21 is gone — how possession works now · section 8 grounds and notice periods.