The Renters' Rights Act came into force on 1 May 2026, and for most letting agents the biggest day-to-day change is not a single new form or fee. It is structural. The fixed-term assured shorthold tenancy is gone, and with it a whole scaffold of processes your agency has relied on for years. Every tenancy is now a periodic assured tenancy that rolls on a period-by-period basis, usually month to month, and existing tenancies converted automatically on the day the Act took effect.
If you have already read the legal overview in our Renters' Rights Act guide for letting agents, this is the operational companion. Here we focus on the unglamorous but critical question: what actually changes in your team's calendar, your CRM and your standard operating procedures. This is general information rather than legal advice, and where a point is still bedding in we say so, but the direction of travel is clear and worth preparing for now.
Renewals Are Over, Notice Tracking Begins
For most agencies, chasing renewals has been a core seasonal rhythm. You track fixed-term end dates, you contact the landlord a few months out, you negotiate terms, you issue a renewal agreement, and you re-protect or re-confirm the deposit. Under periodic tenancies, that entire workflow largely disappears. There is no fixed term to expire, so there is nothing to renew.
What replaces it is quieter but no less important: ongoing periodic-tenancy management and notice tracking. Tenants can now end a tenancy at any time by giving two months' notice, with nothing locking them in for a minimum term. That means your pipeline of upcoming vacancies is no longer predictable from a spreadsheet of end dates. Instead, a tenant's notice can arrive in any month, and your systems need to capture it, timestamp it, calculate the correct end date and trigger check-out, marketing and re-let workflows immediately.
The practical adjustment is to retire renewal reminders as a concept and rebuild that part of your process around rolling notice periods. Your team should have a single, reliable place to log the date a notice was received, from which party, and the resulting move-out date, so that nothing is missed and every downstream task fires on time.
Rent Reviews Become an Annual Section 13 Cycle
With fixed terms gone, the old habit of reviewing rent at renewal no longer works, because there is no renewal. Rent can now be increased only once every twelve months, and only by serving a Section 13 notice giving the tenant at least the required notice period. The tenant then has the right to challenge the proposed figure at the First-tier Tribunal, which can determine the market rent.
This turns rent reviews from an ad hoc, deal-by-deal activity into a systematic annual cycle that you must run per tenancy. Every managed property needs its own rent-review anniversary, a reminder that fires with enough lead time to prepare and serve the notice correctly, and a record of when the last increase took effect so you never breach the once-a-year rule. Miss the timing or the notice requirements and the increase can simply fail.
Because a tenant can escalate to the tribunal, you also need to be able to evidence that the proposed rent reflects the local market. In practice that means keeping comparable-evidence to hand at the point you serve the notice, not scrambling for it weeks later if a challenge lands. One further detail worth building into your process: where a tenancy has a guarantor, good practice is to notify the guarantor of the increase as well, so their liability is clearly documented.
Tenant Retention Is Now a Commercial Priority
Under the old regime, a fixed term gave landlords a degree of certainty: a tenant was committed until the end of the term, whatever the standard of service. That safety net is gone. With every tenancy periodic and tenants free to leave on two months' notice, the quality of your management becomes the main thing keeping good tenants in place.
This reframes retention as a commercial priority rather than a nicety. Voids are expensive, re-letting costs time and money, and each turnover is a fresh compliance cycle of referencing, Right to Rent checks and deposit protection. The agencies that will thrive are those that make it easy for a settled tenant to stay: responsive communication, fast and transparent maintenance, and a professional experience at every touchpoint.
Maintenance is the clearest lever here. A tenant whose repair is acknowledged quickly, tracked visibly and resolved promptly has little reason to look elsewhere. Getting your maintenance workflow right is now a retention strategy, not just an operational one, and it is worth revisiting how quickly your team turns reported issues into completed jobs.
Arrears and Possession Move to Specific Section 8 Grounds
The abolition of Section 21 removes the no-fault route to possession entirely. To seek possession now, a landlord must serve a Section 8 notice citing a specific legal ground, and different grounds carry different notice periods and evidence requirements. The rent-arrears grounds, grounds to sell, and grounds to move in a family member each work differently, and using the wrong one, or serving it incorrectly, can derail a case.
For your agency, this raises the stakes on how carefully you track arrears. To rely on the mandatory arrears ground, the arrears must reach the required threshold, so you need accurate, up-to-date rent ledgers and a clear view of exactly how much is owed and for how long at any moment. Vague or lagging arrears data is no longer good enough when it may need to support a possession claim.
Just as important is the audit trail. Every rent demand, every arrears communication, every notice served and every landlord instruction should be captured with a timestamp, so that if a matter reaches court you can demonstrate a clean, consistent history. Serving the correct notice on the correct ground, backed by solid records, is now central to protecting your landlord clients.
Your CRM and Tenancy Records Must Change
Most letting-agent systems were designed around the fixed-term AST. They assume a start date and an end date, they drive renewal reminders from that end date, and they treat the tenancy as a series of discrete terms. Under the new regime, that data model is actively misleading, because there is no fixed-term end date to build logic on.
Your tenancy records need to shift from fixed-term logic to periodic plus rolling-notice logic. Concretely, that means replacing the end-date field and its renewal triggers with the period on which the tenancy rolls, a place to record notices and their calculated end dates, Section 13 rent-review scheduling on an annual anniversary, and Section 8 ground tracking for any possession action. Alongside this, you need clean, timestamped audit trails across the whole tenancy lifecycle.
This is not a cosmetic relabelling exercise. Councils can impose civil penalties of up to £40,000 for breaches under the new framework, so records that quietly assume the old model create real risk. If your current system cannot represent a periodic tenancy natively, that gap will surface at exactly the wrong moment, when you are trying to serve a valid notice or evidence a compliant rent increase.
Check the Information Sheet Went Out
One transitional obligation is easy to overlook because it was a one-off. Landlords with tenancies that were ASTs on 1 May 2026 were required to serve tenants the government Information Sheet by 31 May 2026. Failure to do so carries a civil penalty of up to £7,000, which makes this a checkbox worth confirming rather than assuming.
If your agency manages tenancies on behalf of landlords, the practical question is simple: can you confirm, for every affected tenancy, that the Information Sheet was served within the window, and can you evidence it? For most agencies this is now historic, but it belongs on your compliance record for each tenancy, and if any were missed you should take advice on how to remedy the position.
Going forward, the discipline this illustrates is the one that matters most under the Act: serving the right document, to the right party, within the right timeframe, and keeping proof that you did. Baking that into your standard process removes the reliance on individual memory that so often causes compliance slips.
How LettingGuru Takes the Manual Risk Out
The common thread across all of these changes is that they replace predictable, term-based admin with continuous, per-tenancy obligations that are easy to miss if you are tracking them by hand. Rolling notice periods, annual Section 13 anniversaries, arrears thresholds, Section 8 grounds and timestamped audit trails are exactly the kind of work that suits software rather than spreadsheets.
LettingGuru is built to model periodic tenancies natively rather than bolting a workaround onto a fixed-term data model. It schedules annual Section 13 rent reviews per tenancy, tracks notices and possession grounds, and maintains the clean audit trail you will want if a rent increase is challenged or a possession case reaches court. That takes the manual risk out of the transition and lets your team focus on service and retention rather than diary management. You can see how the pieces fit together on our features page, and review what it costs on our pricing page.
The wider market context matters too, and our UK rental market outlook for 2026 sets out the demand and supply pressures shaping the year ahead. Adapting your workflow to periodic tenancies is not only a compliance exercise; done well, it is a genuine competitive advantage in a market where retaining good tenants is now harder and more valuable than ever. If you would like to see how a periodic-first system works in practice, you can start a free trial and set up your first tenancy the new way.