Section 21 has gone: the possession route agents use now

Since 1 May 2026 there is no such thing as a section 21 notice. The Renters' Rights Act 2025 abolished no-fault possession, and every assured tenancy in England — new and existing — moved onto the new system on the same day.

What replaced it is not a harder version of the same thing. It is a different thing: possession now requires a ground, and the ground decides the notice period, the evidence and whether a court will grant it at all.

The mechanical change

• –Section 21 is gone. There is no no-fault route and no replacement for one.
• –Possession runs on section 8 grounds, served on Form 3A or a form substantially to the same effect.
• –The ground you rely on sets the notice period. There is no single number to remember any more.
• –A section 8 notice served before 1 May 2026 continues under the grounds and notice periods that applied when it was served.

That last point is the one that catches agents managing a backlog. A notice is governed by the rules in force when it was served, not when it reaches court, so a file can contain two notices on two different regimes and both can be valid.

Grounds are a filing problem before they are a legal one

The reformed grounds include selling the property, the landlord or a family member moving in, and the fault grounds that already existed for rent arrears and breach. Each carries its own notice period and its own evidential expectation.

Which means the question an agent gets asked — can we get the property back — now has a different shape. It is not how much notice. It is which ground is available, what the file has to show to support it, and whether that evidence was being collected before anybody needed it.

• –Selling, and moving in, are grounds with conditions attached and consequences for misuse. The intention has to be real and the file should show when it was formed.
• –Arrears grounds need a rent account that is complete, contemporaneous and reconciled — not a figure typed into a letter.
• –Breach grounds need the breach recorded when it happened, with what was said to the tenant about it.
• –Anti-social behaviour grounds need incident records, which almost nobody keeps until the week they are needed.

None of that is new law. It is the ordinary evidential burden that section 21 let everybody avoid, and it lands on the tenancy file rather than on the notice.

Retaliatory eviction stops being a side issue

Under the old regime a landlord facing a disrepair complaint could, in many cases, simply not renew. That route has closed, and a possession claim that follows a complaint about condition now has to stand on its ground in front of a judge who can see the sequence.

The practical consequence is that repair response times are now part of the possession picture. A property with an open damp and mould report and a possession notice served three weeks later is a file that invites a question, and the answer has to be in the records rather than in somebody's memory.

What to change in the way files are kept

• –Record the date a landlord forms an intention to sell or to occupy, and what prompted it. That date is the beginning of the evidence for the ground.
• –Reconcile rent accounts monthly rather than when arrears are chased, so the figure in a notice can be stood behind.
• –Log every repair report and every response, with dates. The gap between the two is now relevant to more than the repair.
• –Keep the correspondence that shows a breach was raised with the tenant before it was relied on.
• –Diary the notice regime a pre-May notice was served under, because it does not change as the case ages.
• –Record which form was used and when it was served, with how. A ground is only as good as proof of service.

This is the real cost of the change for an agency, and it is administrative rather than legal: a possession route that depends on evidence depends on the evidence having been collected routinely, by people who did not know it would be needed.

Check the current grounds, notice periods and forms on gov.uk before serving anything. They are listed below, they are the authoritative version, and this is an area where guidance has moved more than once already.