If you manage property in England, the tenancy agreement changes 2026 brought in are not a formatting exercise. The Renters' Rights Act did far more than scrap Section 21. It removed the fixed term, rewrote how rent goes up, narrowed the grounds you can rely on, and made several standard clauses unenforceable more or less overnight. An agreement you were happily issuing in 2025 now contains terms that either do nothing at all or actively expose your landlord client. What follows is a clause-by-clause view of what comes out, what goes in, and how to re-paper a managed portfolio without grinding your lettings pipeline to a halt.
First, get the scope right
The Act applies to England. Wales runs on the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016 with occupation contracts and its own written statement rules, and Scotland has used private residential tenancies for years. If you manage across borders, keep three separate template sets and never let an English clause bank leak into a Welsh contract. It happens more often than anyone admits, usually when a branch copies a clause out of an old file.
The second point matters more: there is no grandfathering. Existing assured shorthold tenancies converted to the new periodic assured tenancy on commencement, whether or not anyone opened the file. Your back catalogue changed while you slept. That is exactly why the tenancy agreement changes 2026 introduced are a portfolio job rather than a new-lets job.
Tenancy agreement changes 2026: the clauses that must come out
Work through your template with a red pen. These are the usual casualties:
- Fixed terms and everything hanging off them. Twelve-month terms, six-month minimums, break clauses, renewal fees, and any wording that says the term shall continue for a set period. All assured tenancies are now periodic, and a tenant can serve notice to quit at any point. A clause promising your landlord a year of guaranteed income is not a promise anyone can enforce.
- Rent review clauses. Rent can now only be increased through the statutory notice route, once a year, with the tenant free to challenge the figure at the First-tier Tribunal. Contractual escalators, index-linked uplifts and anniversary increases are ineffective, and leaving them in invites an argument you will lose.
- Blanket bans. No DSS, no benefits, no children, and anything that functions the same way in practice. This applies to the advert and the referencing criteria as much as the agreement. An income multiple pitched so high that only a working household could ever meet it will be read for what it is.
- Automatic pet refusals. Tenants can request to keep a pet and consent cannot be unreasonably refused. Note also that the pet damage insurance mechanism which appeared in earlier drafts of the Bill did not survive into the final Act, so do not build a compulsory tenant insurance clause on top of it.
- Anything drafted around Section 21. Notice-to-quit wording that assumed a no-fault route, and prescribed information clauses that existed purely to keep a Section 21 alive.
The trap hiding in student and superior-landlord clauses
Several possession grounds only work if the tenant was told in writing before the tenancy began. Ground 4A, the student HMO ground, is the one letting agents miss most often, because student stock is re-let on an annual cycle and the prior notice has to be in place at the start of every single tenancy. The same discipline applies to grounds resting on a mortgage or a superior lease. If the prior notice is not in the agreement, the ground simply is not available to you eighteen months later when you need it.
What has to go in
A written statement of terms, served before the tenancy starts
This is not a nice-to-have. Build it into the pre-tenancy pack alongside the gas safety record, EPC, EICR and deposit prescribed information, and log the date it went out and who it went to. If your system cannot evidence that, fix the system before you fix the templates.
Rent as a single stated figure
Publish an asking rent and let at or below it, because accepting bids above the advertised figure is out. Your agreement should state one rent, one payment date, one payment method. Large upfront rent payments have also been restricted, so if you have been using six months in advance to get a thin applicant over the line, replace that habit with a properly drafted guarantor deed.
Ombudsman, database and complaints wording
Landlords must join the ombudsman scheme and appear on the private rented sector database. Tenants need to know how to complain, how long you will take, and where the complaint goes if you do not resolve it. Put the internal complaints route and your genuine response timescale in the agreement itself, not in a leaflet nobody keeps.
Repairs clauses now carry the weight Section 21 used to
Be honest about what Section 21 did in practice: it was the release valve for a tenancy that had gone sour, including tenancies that went sour because repairs were slow. That valve is gone. A tenant who reports damp in month two is with you until a ground applies, and the sector is moving towards defined hazard response timescales for private rented homes in the same spirit as the rules already binding social landlords. Deposit caps under the Tenant Fees Act are unchanged, but deposit compliance is now unforgiving, because there is no no-fault route to paper over a protection failure.
So the repairs clause is doing real work. It should set out:
- How a tenant reports a repair, through one named channel rather than call the office, email, or tell the contractor.
- What happens for genuine emergencies out of hours, and what does not count as one.
- Your access provision, which still requires at least 24 hours' written notice at a reasonable time and does not entitle you to enter over an objection.
- What the tenant must report promptly, so that betterment and tenant damage arguments rest on a documented duty rather than an improvised one.
The operational consequence is capacity. Tighter response expectations plus no eviction backstop means you need contractors who actually turn up, and pricing you can defend to a landlord now paying for work they previously deferred. Platforms like PlanaJob let property managers put a job out and compare quotes from vetted contractors instead of ringing the same three numbers and hoping. On the trade side the same pressure is reshaping how firms price reactive work, and the discussions at Contractor Club are a useful read if you want to understand why your usual electrician suddenly has a three-week waiting list.
A re-papering plan that does not stall lettings
- Audit the templates you actually use, including the ones branches keep on desktops. Most agencies find four or five variants in the wild.
- Rank by exposure. Student HMOs and any stock the landlord may want to sell or move into go first, because those depend on prior notice.
- Rebuild the new-let template, then stop issuing anything else from that day.
- Handle converted tenancies with a plain-English side letter explaining that the tenancy is now periodic, how rent increases work, and how to report repairs. You are not reissuing the tenancy, you are removing confusion.
- Update adverts and referencing criteria the same day as the template. Discriminatory wording usually lives in the advert, not the contract.
- Brief the front line. Negotiators repeat the fixed-term script from memory for months unless someone stops them.
- Diarise rent increases on the statutory route, one per tenancy per year, with the notice period built into the reminder.
Your repairs desk is now a compliance function
Where the tenancy agreement changes 2026 bite hardest is not the drafting. It is the day after. Every reported defect is now a dated event that either was actioned or was not, and the record is the difference between a defensible file and an ombudsman finding. PlanaJob works as a repairs desk CRM: jobs raised against the property, quotes compared side by side, contractor credentials checked, and a timestamped trail from first report to sign-off. You can create an account in a few minutes, see how it fits a managed portfolio on our page for UK property managers, or read more compliance breakdowns on the PlanaJob blog.
One caveat worth stating plainly: this is a practical guide, not legal advice, and implementation detail continues to arrive through regulations. Check current government guidance before you sign off a template, and have a housing solicitor review the final version.
FAQ
Do I have to reissue agreements to tenants already in situ?
No. Existing tenancies converted automatically, so there is no requirement to sign a fresh document. What you should do is write to those tenants explaining the new position, and update your internal record so nobody quotes an expired fixed term back at them. Reissuing wholesale creates more risk than it removes.
Can we still ask for rent in advance where a tenant has no UK guarantor?
Large upfront rent payments have been restricted, so the old workaround of taking many months in advance is no longer a safe route. The better answer is a properly executed guarantor deed, a rent guarantee insurance policy where the landlord wants the cover, or a referencing decision made honestly. Check the current rules on permitted upfront payments before you write the clause.
If there is no fixed term, how much notice does anyone have to give?
Tenants must still serve notice to quit rather than simply leaving, and the standard notice runs to two months. On the landlord side, possession requires a ground, several grounds carry longer notice periods than the old regime, and the grounds covering sale or a landlord moving in cannot be used during a protected period at the start of the tenancy. Serve on the correct current prescribed form, because an outdated form is the easiest way to lose a claim on a technicality.