For letting agents: what your landlords will ask you this year

The tenancy reforms in the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 came into force on 1 May 2026. They reach private assured tenancies. Social-housing assured tenancies were carved out of that wave, so a landlord letting through a housing association is asking you a different question.

Three changes cover most of what lands on your desk. Section 21 is gone, and possession now runs on the Section 8 grounds. Every assured tenancy is periodic. A rent rise goes through a Section 13 notice rather than whatever the tenancy agreement used to say.

It helps to know that the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 rewrote the Housing Act 1988 rather than replacing it. The tenancy you manage is still an assured tenancy, which is why so much of the paperwork looks familiar.

You do not need the commencement detail at the counter. You will want it the first time a landlord asks what became of Section 21, or why a Section 8 notice looks different now. The explainer carries it in full.

Two of the things your landlords have read about are in the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 and are not running. One is the landlord database. The other is the landlord redress scheme.

Neither duty has been switched on, so neither puts anything on your landlord today. The database has no commencement date at all, and on the redress side the only part in force is a boundary provision about which ombudsman handles which complaint. The power to write the rules is live. The rules are not written.

When the database opens, your landlord will need an entry before a property can be marketed. When the redress regime starts, it will be a regime of approved schemes rather than one named ombudsman, which is a distinction worth holding on to.

No registration fee exists in law, so a figure quoted at you by a landlord has come from somewhere that made it up. Your own agency redress membership is a separate and much older duty, and the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 did not touch it.

Every private assured tenancy is periodic now, and two questions follow from that. The first is what notice the tenant has to give. The second is what happened to a fixed term that was still running on 30 April 2026.

Neither of them is the rent question. Putting the rent up runs on the Section 13 route instead, and that is a once-a-year decision rather than a consequence of the switch.

Both pages below were written for the landlord rather than for you, which is what makes them worth forwarding. You should not have to explain the conversion yourself twice a week.

A landlord will tell you the property has to reach EPC C by 2030. That is government policy. It is not enacted, and no regulations have been laid to make it law.

The standard in force is EPC E. Once a landlord has spent £3,500 including VAT on getting there, they can register an exemption instead of spending more. Give the enacted position first and the policy second, and you have given your landlord a straighter answer than the article that sent them to you.

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is the landlord’s obligation and not yours. You do not file for them and you are not part of the submission. What your statement does is feed their categories: the gross rent you collected, your commission, the management fee and anything else you deducted.

One trap is worth knowing, because it costs a landlord money rather than time. If they treat the net figure you paid them as their income, both their income and their costs come out understated. The test that decides whether they are in the regime at all runs on the gross figure.

Deposits raise a tax question, and it is not the one landlords expect. It is not about holding the money. It is about the end of the tenancy, when a deduction is made and the landlord keeps part of what was paid.

That is the point where a landlord asks you what to tell their accountant, and the page below is the answer to send. Your agency’s own client-money obligations are a separate regime and are not covered here.

Send one instead of doing the sum on the back of a viewing sheet.

• Stamp duty calculator What a landlord pays on the next purchase, with the buy-to-let surcharge built in.
• Rental yield calculator Whether the yield on a property is the one the landlord thinks it is.
• Section 24 calculator What the mortgage interest restriction costs a landlord at their own tax band.
• Rental income tax calculator The tax on a year of rent, once the allowable running costs come out.
• Making Tax Digital checker Whether a landlord is caught by Making Tax Digital, and from which April.

Every calculator here can sit on your own website. It is one line of HTML, it costs nothing, and we keep the rates current so that you never have to think about it again.

The only condition is that the small “Powered by Property Tax Partners” line stays where it is. The gallery has the code for each calculator.

Every page linked from here is written to be sent. They answer the landlord’s question rather than describing the law at them, and they sit on open URLs, so you can paste one into a reply and move on.