Every tenancy is periodic now: what that changed in the file

The Renters' Rights Act did something to letting agency operations that gets less attention than the end of section 21, and affects far more files: it abolished the fixed term. Every assured tenancy in England is now a periodic tenancy, rolling weekly or monthly, with no end date.

An agency's year is usually built around renewals. That cycle no longer exists, and several processes that hung off it have to be rebuilt around a different trigger.

The renewal is gone, the obligations are not

A renewal used to be the moment everything got checked: the certificates, the right to rent follow-up, the deposit, the condition. Remove the renewal and none of those obligations go away — they simply lose the event that used to prompt them.

So the work is to re-hang each one on its own date rather than on an anniversary that no longer arrives. Gas safety on its own cycle, the EICR on its own, right to rent follow-ups on the expiry of the permission rather than the tenancy, inspections on a schedule of their own.

Agencies that had already moved to tracking certificate expiry across the portfolio rather than per tenancy found this change almost invisible. The ones still working from renewal dates lost their prompt and did not notice for months.

Rent increases run on one route

• –Once a year, and no more often.
• –On Form 4A, with at least two months' notice.
• –The tenant can challenge an increase above market rent at the tribunal.
• –The first twelve months of a new tenancy are protected from an increase.

What this removes is the rent review clause, the mid-term uplift and the increase agreed informally by email. There is one statutory route, it is dated, and a rise outside it is not an enforceable rise.

For an agency that is a diary problem with a legal consequence attached: every tenancy now has a rent-increase anniversary of its own, and the notice has to go out early enough that two months of it land before the intended date.

At the letting end: bidding, and advance rent

Two changes land on the people taking enquiries rather than on the ones managing tenancies, which is why they are the ones most often missed.

• –A property must be advertised at a stated rent, and offers above it cannot be accepted or encouraged. Rental bidding is over.
• –Once a tenancy agreement is signed, no more than one month's rent may be taken in advance.

The advance rent cap is the one that changes how an agency handles applicants who do not meet affordability criteria — six months up front is no longer available as an answer, and the conversation moves to guarantors instead. Check how your guarantor paperwork reads, because it is about to be used far more often.

The information sheet, and existing tenancies

Existing written agreements did not have to be reissued. What did have to happen is that tenants were given the government's information sheet, with a deadline of 31 May 2026 for tenancies already running.

If that was missed, it is worth establishing now rather than finding out during an enforcement visit. Local authorities have substantial civil penalty powers under the Act — the published figures run to £7,000 for some breaches, £21,000 for repeats, and higher again for others — so a missing document is not a trivial exposure.

What to put in place

• –Move every compliance prompt off the tenancy anniversary and onto the certificate's or permission's own expiry.
• –Give each tenancy a rent-increase date, and work back two months from it for the Form 4A.
• –Check every live tenancy has a record that the information sheet was served, and when.
• –Retire rent review clauses from your agreement templates; they cannot do anything now.
• –Brief lettings staff on the advertised-rent rule, because the breach happens at enquiry stage, long before a file exists.
• –Audit a sample of files against the new regime rather than assuming the migration happened cleanly.

None of this is difficult. It is just that it replaced a single annual event with half a dozen independent dates, and systems built around the event do not fail loudly when the event stops happening. They go quiet, which looks the same as working.