100 Days of the Renters’ Rights Act: What’s Actually Changed for Manchester Landlords
The Renters’ Rights Act received Royal Assent on 27 October 2025. Its main provisions arrived with a “big bang” commencement on Friday 1 May 2026 — one hundred days ago this weekend.
The predictions before it landed ranged from nothing much will change to landlords will leave the sector in droves. The reality, at least in the North West, has been considerably duller than either. A joint report from three of the region’s larger agencies found in the second quarter that the Act had not significantly changed tenant behaviour, with renters still focused on the same things they always were: condition, quality and location.
That’s the good news. The less comfortable news is that a lot of landlords are still operating on pre-May habits — particularly around rent increases — and the parts of the Act with real teeth haven’t arrived yet.
Here’s an honest stocktake.
What changed on 1 May, and applies to you now
Section 21 is gone. No-fault eviction has been abolished. To end a tenancy, you now need a Section 8 notice citing a valid statutory ground, and you need evidence for it.
Every assured shorthold tenancy became an assured periodic tenancy. This is the part landlords most often misunderstand. It wasn’t just new tenancies — existing ASTs converted automatically on 1 May, including ones signed before that date where the tenants hadn’t yet moved in. Fixed terms have ended. There is no longer a natural “end of contract” moment. Tenants can end the tenancy with two months’ notice.
Rent increases now run through one route only. A Section 13 notice, on the prescribed Form 4A, once every twelve months, with two months’ notice — double the old period. Rent review clauses are void, including ones already written into existing agreements. Informal increases agreed with a tenant outside the Section 13 process aren’t enforceable.
Tenants can challenge an increase at the First-tier Tribunal, and the tribunal can’t set the rent any higher than the figure you proposed. That asymmetry is deliberate. It means a speculative over-ask carries downside and no upside, and it makes tribunal challenges materially more attractive to tenants than they used to be. If you serve a Section 13, you should be able to evidence the figure with genuine local comparables at the point you serve it, not scrambled together six months later.
Rent in advance is restricted. You can’t require or accept any rent before the agreement is signed, and after signing you can require a maximum of one month’s rent in advance (28 days for shorter rental periods). Clauses demanding quarterly or annual payment upfront are unenforceable. A tenant can still choose to pay ahead voluntarily — you just can’t make it a condition. This one bites hardest on student and overseas lets, where advance payment was often the fallback for a thin UK guarantor position.
Blanket bans are illegal. Discriminating against tenants because they have children or receive benefits is now unlawful. Pets can’t be unreasonably refused.
A written statement of terms must be given before an assured periodic tenancy begins. Landlords with existing verbal tenancies had until 31 May 2026 to provide a written summary of the main terms.
Penalties went up. Rent repayment orders have been extended to superior landlords, the maximum penalty has doubled, and repeat offenders pay double again. Local authority investigatory powers were strengthened back in December 2025, including powers to access properties to investigate suspected breaches.
Selling a tenanted property: the timing trap
Worth flagging separately, because it catches people out.
If you want possession in order to sell, you use Ground 1A. It requires four months’ notice, and — critically — the date named in the notice cannot fall within the first twelve months of the tenancy. Serve a notice naming a date inside that first year and it’s defective regardless of when you served it. In practice the fastest possible timetable is a notice served around eight months in, expiring on the tenancy’s first anniversary.
You also have to prove a genuine intention to sell at the hearing. An estate agent’s instruction or a valuation is the kind of evidence that does that. A vague plan is not.
If selling is anywhere on your two-year horizon, that changes when you’d want to start a new tenancy, and it’s worth thinking about before you sign one rather than after.
What hasn’t landed yet — and matters more
The PRS database, late 2026. Registration will be mandatory for all landlords, with an annual fee, rolling out region by region before the database opens to public access. It will hold your contact details, property details, and safety information — gas, electrical and EPC certificates.
This is the change we’d tell landlords to prepare for now. Not because registering is difficult, but because it makes compliance visible. A missing certificate stops being a private problem you’d fix if anyone ever asked, and becomes a gap on a public record.
The PRS Ombudsman. The body is being appointed and given time to set up. Mandatory landlord membership is expected in 2028.
A Decent Homes Standard for the private rented sector. This is the final phase, with implementation dates still to be confirmed. Combined with a Prime Minister who built his reputation on housing and homelessness, and a Greater Manchester mayor in Bev Craig who has made affordable housing a priority, the direction for this region looks like more scrutiny of property condition, not less. Greater Manchester already runs the UK’s first Good Landlord Charter.
What we’d do in the next hundred days
- Check your Section 13 process. If you’ve raised rent since May by agreement, letter or a review clause rather than a Form 4A notice, that increase may not be enforceable. Worth reviewing before it compounds.
- Get certificates current and filed. Gas, electrical, EPC. Not for a hypothetical inspection — for the database registration that’s coming this year.
- Sort out your paperwork trail. Written statements of terms, inventories, check-in reports, correspondence. Under a possession regime that requires proving grounds, the file is the case.
- Think about sale timing before you re-let, not after.