Landlord compliance: the duties, the renewal cycle, the cost and the tax treatment
Six recurring duties sit on a residential letting in England: gas, electrical, energy, fire, alarms and, in a growing number of council areas, a licence. Each has its own statutory clock, its own enforcement body and its own penalty. Here is the whole cycle in one place, with what it costs, what it costs to get wrong, and which parts of the bill you can actually deduct.
Six duties
What landlord compliance actually covers
Jurisdiction, before anything else
This page describes the position for a residential property let in England. The regimes do not share a footprint. The gas safety regulations apply across Great Britain. The electrical safety regulations are an England-only statutory instrument, although Scotland has required electrical inspections since 2015 under separate rules. The EPC and minimum energy efficiency regulations, and the fire safety order, cover England and Wales. Licensing under the Housing Act 2004 is described here in its England form; Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland run parallel but distinct schemes, including Rent Smart Wales. Check the regime for the country your property is in before relying on any figure below.
Landlord compliance is not one obligation. It is a set of separate statutory duties, created at different times by different departments, enforced by different bodies, and carrying penalties that range from a fixed £200 notice to a £40,000 civil penalty and, for gas, a criminal prosecution. They have almost nothing in common except that they all land on the same person and all get budgeted for out of the same rent.
Gas
Annualcriminal enforcement
An annual safety check of every gas appliance and flue by a Gas Safe registered engineer, with the record supplied to tenants and retained.
Electrical
5 years28 days to remedy
Inspection and testing of the fixed installation by a qualified person at least every five years, producing the EICR, with any remedial work completed within 28 days.
Energy
Band EEPC valid 10 years
A valid EPC before the property is marketed or let, and a rating of at least band E unless a valid exemption is registered.
Fire
HMOs and common parts
A suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment, where the property is an HMO or the building has common parts, plus smoke and carbon monoxide alarms in every let.
Licensing
Council termup to 5 years
A licence where the property is a larger HMO anywhere in England, or sits inside a council designation for additional or selective licensing.
One thing worth naming early, because it is the most common misreading: the EICR is the report. There is no separate document called an electrical safety certificate in law. When an agent or a council asks for the certificate, the satisfactory EICR is the thing they mean.
Renewal cycles
The landlord compliance calendar
The cycles are not aligned, which is why compliance drifts. A gas check falls due every year, an EICR every five, an EPC every ten, and a licence on a term the council sets. Most landlords who get caught out were not ignoring the rules, they lost track of one date.
Every
1
year
Gas safety record
Every
5
years
EICR
Every
10
years
EPC
Every
?
council term
Licence
The other clock: deadlines that run from the inspection
- Before occupationGas record and EICR to any new tenant, before they move in.
- 28 daysGas record to existing tenants after the check. EICR to existing tenants after the inspection. Remedial work from an unsatisfactory EICR.
- 7 daysEICR to the local housing authority, from a written request.
Note: Example figures displayed
| Duty | How often | Legal basis | Applies in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gas safety record (CP12) | Every 12 months | GSIUR 1998 reg 36(3)(a) | Great Britain |
| Electrical installation condition report (EICR) | At least every 5 years, sooner if the report says so | SI 2020/312 reg 3 | England |
| Energy performance certificate (EPC) | Valid for 10 years from the date it is entered on the register | SI 2012/3118 reg 9(2) | England and Wales |
| Minimum energy efficiency standard (band E floor) | Continuous, checked whenever the EPC or the letting changes | SI 2015/962 | England and Wales |
| Fire risk assessment (HMOs and common parts) | No statutory interval, reviewed regularly and on any significant change | RRFSO 2005 art 9 | England and Wales |
| Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms | Checked in working order on the day the tenancy begins | SI 2015/1693 reg 4 | England |
| Property licence (mandatory HMO, additional or selective) | Term of up to 5 years, renewed before expiry | Housing Act 2004 Parts 2 and 3 | England |
Note: Example figures displayed
The dates that matter are not only the renewal dates. Each regime carries service and action deadlines that run from the inspection, and those are where councils find breaches:
- Gas: a copy of the record to each existing tenant within 28 days of the check, and to any new tenant before occupation. The record is kept until there have been two further checks of that appliance or flue, and for two years from the last check where an appliance is removed. A check carried out in the two months before the deadline date is treated as made on the deadline date, so booking early does not shorten the next cycle.
- Electrical: the report to each existing tenant within 28 days of the inspection, to a new tenant before occupation, and to the local housing authority within 7 days of a written request. Further investigative or remedial work flagged by an unsatisfactory report must be completed within 28 days, or any shorter period the report specifies.
- Energy: a valid EPC must exist before the property is marketed, and be made available free of charge to any prospective tenant at the earliest opportunity. A re-let does not need a fresh certificate while a valid one is on the register, which is why the register check comes before the booking.
- Fire: article 9 sets no fixed interval. It requires the assessment to be kept up to date and reviewed immediately where there is reason to suspect it is no longer valid or the building has significantly changed. In practice assessors and enforcing authorities work to an annual review with a full reassessment every three to five years.
The budget
What landlord compliance costs in 2026
These are the market ranges our cost pages verify for 2026. Quotes move with the size and age of the property, the region, how many appliances or circuits there are, and whether you book direct or through an agent. Treat the ranges as a budgeting floor and ceiling, not a quote.
| Item | Typical 2026 price | Cycle | Spread over the cycle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gas safety record (CP12), single boiler | £60 to £120 | Annual | £60 to £120 a year |
| CP12 bundled with a boiler service | £110 to £160 | Annual | £110 to £160 a year |
| EICR, typical rental property | £120 to £350 | 5-yearly | £24 to £70 a year |
| EICR remedial work, small C2 fixes | £100 to £500 | As triggered by the report | Budget a contingency, not a fixed figure |
| Domestic EPC, direct to an accredited assessor | £45 to £90 (£35 to £120 across the whole market) | 10-yearly | £5 to £9 a year |
| Fire risk assessment, small HMO | £150 to £300 | First assessment, reviews cost less | Varies with the review cadence you adopt |
| Fire risk assessment, small converted block | £250 to £600 | First assessment, reviews cost less | Usually a service charge cost, not a landlord cost |
| Fire risk assessment, high-rise building | £800 to £1,500 or more | First assessment, reviews cost less | Usually a service charge cost, not a landlord cost |
| Mandatory HMO licence | Around £600 to £1,900 (Camden charges £1,531) | Up to 5 years | £120 to £380 a year across the term |
| Selective licence | Around £500 to £1,000 (Liverpool charges £704) | Up to 5 years | £100 to £200 a year across the term |
| MEES improvement works, domestic | Capped at £3,500 including VAT | Only where the property is below band E | One-off, and usually capital rather than revenue |
Note: Example figures displayed
Certificates on a gas-heated single let, no licensing
£90 to £200
a year, once the 5 and 10-year items are spread
That is not the number that hurts. The number that hurts is remedial work: an unsatisfactory EICR can trigger anything from a £100 socket repair to a four-figure rewire, and a fire risk assessment action plan is open-ended by design.
Bundle the visit
£110 to £160CP12 with a boiler service, against £60 to £120 alone
Assessors who carry out more than one inspection in a single visit usually price the second one lower.
Book direct, not through an agent
The agent markup is often the largest single component of the quote.
Note: Example figures displayed
Getting it wrong
Penalties at a glance
Two things are worth understanding before you read the table. First, the caps moved recently and much of the guidance online is stale: the electrical penalty rose from £30,000 to £40,000 on 1 November 2025, and the licensing civil penalty rose from £30,000 to £40,000 on 1 May 2026. Second, these are separate regimes with separate enforcement, so an unlicensed and uncertified property can attract both.
£200
EPC, dwelling
£5,000
Alarms
£40,000
EICR breach
£40,000
Licensing
Criminal
Gas
These are separate regimes with separate enforcement, so an unlicensed and uncertified property can attract more than one at the same time.
No gas safety check or record
Criminal enforcement by the HSE. A substantial fine, unlimited on indictment, and a custodial sentence are both on the table. There is no fixed civil penalty figure to plan against.
GSIUR 1998 reg 36, enforced under the HSWA 1974
No EICR, or remedial work not done
A financial penalty of up to £40,000 per breach imposed by the local housing authority. The cap was £30,000 until SI 2025/1043 raised it with effect from 1 November 2025, so older guidance understates it. Breaches stack, so several duties missed on one property means several penalties.
SI 2020/312 reg 11
Marketing or letting a dwelling without a valid EPC
A fixed £200 penalty charge notice per breach for a dwelling, issued by trading standards. For a non-dwelling the amount is 12.5% of the rateable value, subject to a £500 minimum and a £5,000 maximum, with a £750 default where no rateable value can be determined.
SI 2012/3118 reg 38
Letting a sub-standard property below EPC band E
A ladder of penalties: up to £2,000 for a breach under three months, up to £4,000 at three months or more, up to £1,000 for false or misleading register information and up to £2,000 for ignoring a compliance notice, all subject to an aggregate cap of £5,000 per property. Publication of the breach on the public register runs alongside it.
SI 2015/962 reg 40
No suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment
Offences under article 32, enforced by the fire and rescue authority through enforcement and prohibition notices and, in serious cases, prosecution. The practical exposure is usually the works the enforcement notice demands rather than the fine.
RRFSO 2005 arts 26 and 32
Letting without a required property licence
A civil penalty of up to £40,000 per offence, raised from £30,000 by SI 2026/319 with effect from 1 May 2026, or criminal prosecution with an unlimited fine on summary conviction. On top of either, a rent repayment order can claw back up to two years of rent, and repeat offenders face banning orders.
Housing Act 2004 ss.72, 95 and 249A
Financial penalties are not the whole exposure. A rent repayment order lets a tenant or the council recover up to two years of rent from an unlicensed letting. Repeat offenders face banning orders, which end the rental business altogether and bring their own capital gains tax consequences on cessation. And a missing gas record or deposit failure can block a possession claim, which turns a compliance slip into months of lost rent.
Three buckets
What is deductible, what is capital, and what gets no relief at all
This is the part most compliance guidance skips, and it is where the money is. Every compliance pound falls into one of three buckets, and they are treated completely differently.
Revenue
Full relief in the year incurred
Examples
CP12 fee, EICR fee, EPC fee, fire risk assessment fee, licence fee, alarm servicing, like-for-like repairs the inspection flags
Deducted against rental profit in the year incurred, under ITTOIA 2005 s.272
Capital
Deferred relieved on sale
Examples
A first-time full rewire that materially upgrades the installation, a new alarm or compartmentation system, insulation and glazing that lift the EPC band
Added to the base cost and relieved against capital gains tax on sale, under TCGA 1992 s.38(1)(b)
No relief
Nothing not wholly and exclusively
Examples
Civil penalties, penalty charge notices, criminal fines, rent repayment orders
Not incurred wholly and exclusively for the business, so nothing is deductible. HMRC sets this out at BIM38500 onwards
The line between the first two buckets is repair against improvement, and it is the single most common source of amended returns in this area. Restoring the installation to the condition it was in is a repair. Making it materially better than it was is capital. A consumer unit swapped like for like after a C2 code is a repair; a first-time rewire of a 1960s installation that brings it up to a modern standard is not. Replacing a failed boiler with a modern equivalent is normally a repair; the same replacement as part of a wider upgrade to the property is not.
Three practical points follow. First, none of these costs are finance costs, so the Section 24 restriction does not apply to any of them: they come off rental income at your full marginal rate, unlike mortgage interest. Second, compliance spend before the first tenant moves in is not lost, because pre-letting expenditure of a revenue nature is relieved under the pre-trading rules. Third, grants matter: energy efficiency grant receipts reduce the expenditure they fund, which reduces the base cost you can claim on sale, so the grant and the works have to be tracked together rather than separately.
A licence fee is deductible in full in the year it is incurred even though the licence covers a term of up to five years. Landlords sometimes spread it across the term in their own accounts, which understates the deduction in year one and creates a reconciliation problem later.
Not sure which bucket your last invoice falls in? That line is worth getting right once.
Book a consultationEvery 12 months
Gas safety
Regulation 36 of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 requires an annual check of every gas appliance and flue by a Gas Safe registered engineer, the record supplied to tenants within fixed deadlines, and the record retained. Enforcement runs through the HSE on a criminal track, not through a civil penalty regime, which is why no fixed fine figure exists to plan against and why the figures circulating in agent guidance should be treated with suspicion.
Regulation 36A: the two-month window that does not shorten the cycle
A check carried out in the two months before the deadline date is treated as made on the deadline date. Book inside that window and the next deadline stays where it was, which is why the annual check is often described as a ten to twelve month job rather than a strict twelve.
Five-yearly
Electrical safety and the EICR
The Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020 require the fixed installation to be inspected and tested by a qualified person at intervals of no more than five years, or sooner where the report specifies. The report itself is the EICR, and the codes it carries drive everything that follows: C1 means danger present, C2 means potentially dangerous, and FI means further investigation required. Any of the three makes the report unsatisfactory and starts the 28-day remedial clock.
C1
Danger present
C2
Potentially dangerous
FI
Further investigation required
A narrow set of tenancies is excluded from the regime by Schedule 1, including long leases of seven years or more, lodger arrangements where the occupier shares amenities with the landlord, student halls of residence, hostels and refuges, care homes, hospitals and hospices. Since 1 November 2025 the regime also reaches registered providers of social housing, whose earlier exclusion was removed.
The band E floor
EPCs and the minimum energy efficiency standard
Two separate statutes are involved here, and merging them causes real errors. They answer different questions.
EPB Regulations 2012
Must a certificate exist?
An EPC before marketing, made available free of charge to a prospective tenant, valid for ten years from the date it went on the register.
10 yearsand it survives a sale and a re-let
EE (PRP) Regulations 2015
Is the band good enough to let?
Letting a domestic property rated F or G has been prohibited for new tenancies since 1 April 2018 and for all continuing lets since 1 April 2020, unless a valid exemption is registered.
Band Ethe floor
£3,500cost cap, including VAT
Most exemption classes run for five years; the temporary exemption for someone who has recently become a landlord runs for six months.
Before booking anything, search the national register. An EPC lasts ten years and survives both a sale and a re-let, so a valid certificate may already exist for the property. A surprising share of the EPC market is landlords paying for a certificate they already have.
HMOs and common parts
Fire safety and alarms
The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 does not reach every rental, and any guide telling you it does is wrong. Where it does apply, the responsible person must make a suitable and sufficient assessment and, since October 2023, record it in full rather than recording significant findings only.
The fire safety order applies
- HMOs
- Common parts of buildings containing two or more sets of domestic premises
It does not apply
- Inside a single self-contained house let to one household
Alarms, in every let, with no exceptions
£5,000maximum penalty, regulation 8(2)
A smoke alarm on each storey with living accommodation, carbon monoxide alarms in rooms with a qualifying combustion appliance, and a working-order check on the day the tenancy begins.
Who pays depends on the building. An HMO landlord bears their own assessment cost and deducts it as a revenue expense. In a block, the freeholder or managing agent procures the assessment and recovers it through the service charge as a management cost, subject to the statutory reasonableness test. A right to manage company that has taken over management procures and recharges it in the same way.
Check the current wording of regulation 4 before assuming the carbon monoxide scope, because it has been amended.
Council schemes
Licensing: mandatory, additional and selective
England runs three licensing regimes under the Housing Act 2004.
Mandatory HMO
Nationwideno designation needed
Applies to any HMO occupied by five or more people forming two or more households, regardless of what the council has designated.
Additional HMO
Designated areassmaller shared houses
Catches smaller shared houses, but only inside an area the council has designated.
Selective
Designated areasevery private rental
Catches every private rental inside a designated area, including an ordinary single-family let with no sharing at all.
Read the fee per year of term
£704selective licence over a five-year term£141a year, which is the figure to compare
Note: Example figures displayed
Which one applies turns on four facts you can check quickly: how many people live there, how many households they form, which council area the property sits in, and whether that council has a live designation. Designations run for up to five years and then lapse or are re-made, so a scheme that ended last year does not bind you and one that started last month does.
Fees vary widely and are set locally. Mandatory HMO licences commonly run from around £600 to £1,900, and selective licences from around £500 to £1,000, usually split between a payment on application and a second payment on grant.
Non-domestic
Commercial property is a different regime
If you let non-domestic property, do not import the figures above. Four things behave differently, and each of them is a mistake someone makes every year.
Energy improvement filter
Domestic: £3,500 cost cap, including VAT
Commercial: Seven-year simple payback test
EPC penalty
Domestic: £200 fixed notice
Commercial: A percentage of rateable value
MEES penalty
Domestic: Fixed caps
Commercial: Linked to rateable value, split under and over three months
Capital allowances
Domestic: Blocked by the dwelling-house restriction
Commercial: Plant within an energy upgrade can often be claimed
On the commercial side the payback filter works like this: improvements that do not pay for themselves in energy savings within seven years are not relevant improvements, and an exemption can be registered where all relevant improvements have been made or none can be.
On the horizon
The wider regime, and what is coming
None of the following is in force. The operative question for any given duty is which provisions have actually been brought into force, rather than what an Act says on its face.
Not yet in force
Renters' Rights Act 2025
Adds a redress scheme obligation and a private rented sector database, and extends the rent repayment order window. Commencement is being phased, so the operative question for any given duty is which provisions have actually been brought into force rather than what the Act says on its face.
Not yet in force
The Decent Homes Standard for the PRS
Preliminary provisions only, with the substantive standard awaiting a further statutory instrument.
Not yet in force
EPC C by 2030, and EPC C or B for commercial
Consultation and policy positions. Neither has been laid as a statutory instrument. Treat them as a direction of travel that should shape what you do at the next refurbishment or the next purchase, and treat band E as the line that is actually enforceable today.
For how the compliance bill fits into the wider tax position on a portfolio, see our landlord tax guide, model your rental profit with the rental income tax calculator, or read what our landlord accounting service covers on the ongoing compliance side.
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