The Renters' Rights Act came into force on 1 May 2026. Section 21 "no-fault" evictions are abolished. All tenancies are now periodic. Rent bidding is banned. Letting agents must give an official Information Sheet to every current tenant and guarantor. The date is 31 May 2026. Fines start at £4,000. This guide covers four things. What changed. What your software must now do. How the main platforms are changing. Where lettings systems still fall short.
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The Renters' Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent in September 2025. Phase 1 came into force on 1 May 2026. The changes are immediate and apply to both new and existing tenancies. For letting agents, the operational impact is significant across several areas. For a broader comparison of how the main lettings platforms handle the Act, see our lettings software comparison. This article focuses on what your system needs to do right now.
No-fault evictions are gone. Landlords can no longer end a tenancy without giving a valid reason. All possession proceedings now require a Section 8 ground: rent arrears, antisocial behaviour, landlord sale, landlord occupation, or redevelopment. Your system must record which Section 8 grounds apply to each tenancy. It must also handle the notice period for each ground. Those run from two weeks to four months, by reason.
Assured Periodic Tenancies (APTs) replace Assured Shorthold Tenancies (ASTs) as the default. Fixed-term tenancies are abolished. Every existing fixed-term AST converted automatically to a periodic tenancy on 1 May 2026. The maximum rent period is one month.
This is the change with the largest software impact. Some systems follow a tenancy by its fixed end date. They start renewal work 60 or 90 days before it. They work out renewal fees from those cycles. All of that must be rebuilt. There are no fixed terms to renew. There are no renewal fees to charge. The tenancy runs indefinitely until the tenant gives two months' notice or the landlord obtains possession through a valid Section 8 ground.
Letting agents must advertise a specific rent figure for each property. They cannot invite, encourage, or accept offers above the advertised price. This applies to the agent's own advertising and to any third-party platforms where the property is listed. If your system generates offer forms that allow prospective tenants to propose a different rent figure, that functionality needs to be removed or modified.
Landlords and agents can no longer require more than one month's rent in advance. Any clause in a tenancy agreement that requires rent in advance beyond the relevant rental period is unenforceable. Some agencies took two, three or six months of rent in advance. They did it most often for tenants with no UK credit history. This changes how they take on a tenant, and how they carry the risk.
The government published an official Information Sheet. You must give it to every tenant and guarantor on an assured or assured shorthold tenancy. That means a tenancy that started before 1 May 2026. The deadline is 31 May 2026.
If a landlord uses a letting agent to manage the property, the agent must serve the Information Sheet to the tenant. This obligation applies even if the landlord has already served a copy separately. Both the landlord and the managing agent have independent obligations.
The Information Sheet can be served digitally or on paper. However, the government has explicitly stated that emailing or texting a link to the PDF does not count as valid service. You must send the actual document (as an attachment or a physical copy), not a link to the government's website. Your system needs to generate or attach the document and deliver it directly, with a record of delivery.
The civil penalty for failing to serve the Information Sheet starts at £4,000 for a first breach and can reach £7,000. Each failure counts separately, so an agency managing 200 tenancies that misses the deadline faces potential aggregate exposure of £800,000 to £1.4 million. The penalty applies per tenancy, not per agency.
Goodlord says it will send the Information Sheet to every live tenancy on its platform by itself. The tenancy must have been added before the last week of April 2026. Your tenancies may not be in Goodlord. Your system may not do this for you. You then need a way to do it now, by hand or part by hand.
The move from fixed-term to periodic tenancies is not just a legal change. It restructures how a letting agency operates day to day. Every workflow that was built around the fixed-term cycle (renewals, rent reviews, fee invoicing, landlord reporting) needs to be reconsidered.
The ban on rent bidding affects the listing and offer process. Your system may let a tenant put forward a rent figure. That could be an "offer" field, a bidding screen, or a "proposed rent" box that differs from the advertised rent. You must switch it off or take it out. The advertised rent is the rent. Any deviation upward is a breach.
For agencies that feed listings to Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket, the advertised rent on the portal must match the rent in your system. If your system allows manual overrides at the offer stage, check that the override cannot exceed the advertised figure. For more on how portal feeds work, see our Rightmove and Zoopla integration guide.
Your onboarding and tenancy creation workflows need to enforce the one-month advance rent cap. If your system calculates a "move-in cost" that includes more than one month's rent, the calculation needs updating. Deposits (capped at five weeks' rent under the Tenant Fees Act 2019) remain separate and are not affected by the advance rent cap.
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Phase 2 of the Renters' Rights Act introduces the Private Rented Sector (PRS) Database, expected to launch in late 2026. Every private landlord in England must register themselves and their rental properties. The database will record property details, EPC ratings, gas safety certificates, EICR status, and enforcement history.
Letting agents will be prohibited from advertising or managing a property on behalf of an unregistered landlord. This is not optional. If you market or manage a property for a landlord who has not registered, you face the same penalties as the landlord.
An unregistered landlord cannot serve a valid Section 8 possession notice. Since Section 21 is already abolished, this means an unregistered landlord has no legal mechanism to regain possession of their property at all. Any agent managing that property is exposed to complaints, enforcement action, and reputational damage.
Non-compliance penalties start at £7,000 for a first offence and rise to £40,000 for repeated breaches. Providing false information carries penalties of up to £30,000. Rent repayment orders of up to 24 months' rent can be imposed on non-compliant landlords.
When the PRS Database goes live, your system needs to verify landlord registration status before listing or managing a property. You then have two choices. Check by hand, with flags and an audit trail. Or connect to the government database, so it confirms the registration when you take on a property. No major CRM has announced this integration yet, because the database's technical specifications have not been published. But agencies should be planning for it now.
The major lettings platforms have announced updates, but the depth and completeness of those updates varies. Here is what we know as of May 2026.
| Platform | Info Sheet | Periodic Tenancy | Rent Bidding | PRS Database |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Goodlord | Auto-issued to live tenancies | Updated workflows | Not confirmed | Not yet |
| MRI (Sales & Lettings) | Not confirmed | Bulk conversion tool for existing tenancies; new tenancies auto-periodic | Not confirmed | Not yet |
| Alto | Via Goodlord integration | Updates announced | Not confirmed | Not yet |
| Reapit | Via Goodlord AppMarket | Updates announced | Not confirmed | Not yet |
| Street.co.uk | Via Goodlord integration | Updates announced | Not confirmed | Not yet |
The pattern is clear: most platforms are relying on Goodlord for the Information Sheet compliance, and several have announced periodic tenancy updates. No platform has said how it stops rent bidding at the offer stage. No platform connects to the PRS Database, because that database does not exist yet.
Whether you use an off-the-shelf platform or a bespoke system, your lettings software needs to handle the following as of 1 May 2026:
| Requirement | Deadline | What Your Software Must Do |
|---|---|---|
| Information Sheet | 31 May 2026 | Identify pre-1 May tenancies, generate/attach the official document, deliver to all tenants and guarantors, record proof of service |
| Periodic tenancy management | Already live | Convert existing fixed-term records to periodic, remove renewal workflows, track Section 13 rent review dates, manage tenant notice periods |
| Section 8 ground tracking | Already live | Record applicable possession grounds per tenancy, manage varied notice periods per ground, generate Section 8 notices |
| Rent bidding prohibition | Already live | Stop offers above the advertised rent, ensure portal feed figures match system figures |
| Advance rent cap | Already live | Enforce one-month maximum on move-in rent calculations |
| PRS Database verification | Late 2026 | Verify landlord registration before listing or managing; flag unregistered landlords; block non-compliant properties |
The Renters' Rights Act is one Act. Every letting agent in England must follow it in the same way.
Every vendor is now building the same change, and building it alone. The rolling tenancy. The Section 8 grounds and their notice periods. The Information Sheet. The rent bidding block. The PRS Database, when it opens. The sector pays for that work once for each product, and each agency waits for its own vendor.
We build the other way. The tenancy, the notice, the deposit and the certificate are declared once, in a foundation that every agency system uses. A change in the law is made once. Every agency still owns its own system, and every one has the change at the same time.
We explain how a whole sector shares one foundation in bespoke software for a whole sector. We explain why that changes the market itself in what does an interoperable software market look like.
Most agencies with a modern CRM (Alto, Reapit, Street) and a Goodlord integration will meet the basic compliance requirements through platform updates. For single-branch agencies with straightforward lettings portfolios, off-the-shelf systems handle this well.
Bespoke software becomes the better option in specific scenarios:
The Renters' Rights Act does not just change what lettings software needs to do. It changes the economics of running a lettings agency. The agencies that adapt fastest will be the ones whose systems match their new reality, not the old one.
You can see this in a working system. The ESRE live estate agent demo opens with no login, and it shows the Renters' Rights work in this guide. Sign in as lettings and generate the Renters' Rights compliant pack, or as tenant and see the rights summary. It is a working system, not a screenshot.