5 Renters' Rights Act rules Nottinghamshire landlords keep getting wrong

Why this isn't just another compliance update

This applies to England only — Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run separate tenancy systems, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

The Renters' Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 27 October 2025, and its main measures took effect from 1 May 2026. If you own a rental property anywhere in Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire, that date is now behind you — which means you're either compliant or you're exposed. There isn't really a middle ground.

I've managed HMOs and standard lets across this patch long enough to know that most landlords don't get caught by the big, obvious changes. They get caught by the small procedural habits they never updated. Below are five of them. Correct as of 6 September 2026 — but this area moves fast, so treat anything with a number attached as something to double-check before you act on it.

Rule 1: Section 21 is gone — and 'no-fault' isn't coming back

From 1 May 2026, landlords in England lost the ability to serve a Section 21 'no-fault' eviction notice. That was the mechanism that let you end a tenancy without giving a reason, and it's been the default exit route for landlords for decades. It's gone.

What replaces it is Section 8 — but Section 8 has never worked like Section 21. You need a valid statutory ground: rent arrears, anti-social behaviour, wanting to sell, moving back in yourself, and so on. Each ground has its own evidence bar and its own notice period.

Here's my honest opinion: this is the single biggest mindset shift landlords need to make, and most haven't made it yet. I still hear landlords say 'I'll just serve notice' as if it's still 2024. If you're managing your own portfolio and you haven't sat down and worked out which Section 8 ground actually applies to your situation, you don't have an exit strategy — you have a hope. The trade-off is real: this protects tenants from arbitrary eviction, which is the point of the Act, but it means landlords carry a heavier evidential and administrative load than before. I don't think that trade-off is unreasonable, but I understand why it stings for landlords who relied on Section 21 as a safety net.

Rule 2: your fixed-term AST no longer exists — even the one you signed last year

This is the one I see landlords get wrong most often, because it's counter-intuitive. Every fixed-term assured shorthold tenancy became a rolling assured periodic tenancy under the Act — no end date, no automatic renewal clause to rely on, no 'the contract just ends' moment.

It doesn't matter if you signed a 12-month AST in March 2026 with an end date printed on the front page. That end date is no longer operative in the way it used to be. The tenancy simply rolls, period to period, until it's ended through a proper statutory route — which loops straight back to Rule 1.

A pattern I keep noticing: landlords who self-manage still send 'your tenancy is coming to an end, please confirm renewal' style messages, because that's the muscle memory from years of fixed terms. Under the current framework, that message doesn't mean what it used to. If you're still working from a tenancy agreement template written before May 2026, get it checked — not because the paperwork itself is illegal to hold, but because relying on clauses that no longer function is how landlords end up a step behind when a dispute starts.

Rule 3: the penalties aren't hypothetical, and they scale

This is where the fear is justified, and I'd rather landlords feel it now than find out the hard way. Industry commentary on the Act — including analysis from The Independent Landlord, written by letting agency consultant Suzanne Smith — has flagged that breaches from 1 May 2026 can trigger local council civil penalties running up into the thousands, with a higher tier available where a breach is treated as a criminal offence rather than a civil matter.

I'm deliberately not printing a single definitive number here for the upper tier, because civil penalty caps under housing legislation have a habit of being revised, and a number that's accurate in September 2026 can be stale within a year. What I will say plainly: the gap between the lower civil tier and the offence tier is large, and which side of that line you land on usually comes down to whether the breach looks like a one-off administrative slip or a pattern. Councils in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, like everywhere else, are actively enforcing this — it isn't a 'quiet corner of the law' anymore.

My opinion, for what it's worth after years of watching enforcement trends: the landlords who get hit hardest aren't the ones who make one mistake. They're the ones who stack three or four small ones — a slightly wrong notice, a missed compliance document, an unregistered change — and then a tenant complaint brings all of it into view at once.

Rule 4: there's a hard cut-off for pre-Act notices — and it's already passed

Here's a detail that catches out landlords who served notice before the changeover and assumed they had time to sort the court paperwork later. Trade body guidance for landlords has indicated that, from 1 August 2026, you can no longer apply to court using pre-Act Section 21 or Section 8 notices — the old notices simply stopped being a valid route into court proceedings after that date.

If you served a notice under the old rules and didn't get the court application in before that cut-off, that notice is no longer your route forward. You'd need to start again under the current framework, ground and all. I know that's an unwelcome thing to read if you're mid-process, but pretending otherwise isn't going to help you — better to know now and re-plan than to turn up to a hearing with paperwork that's no longer live.

This is a mechanism claim, not a settled number, and mechanism claims like this are exactly the kind that change as courts and the government issue further guidance. If you're anywhere near this situation, this is genuinely a moment to consider consulting a qualified solicitor rather than relying on a blog post — mine included.

Rule 5: there's more coming, and 'wait and see' isn't a strategy

The Act didn't land as one single event and then stop. A Private Rented Sector database and a new Ombudsman scheme for landlords are both due to follow later in 2026, on top of what's already live. I won't pretend to know the exact operational detail of either yet, because at the time of writing they haven't fully landed — and I'd rather tell you that honestly than invent specifics to sound authoritative.

What I will say is this: landlords who treat the 1 May 2026 changes as 'the one big update, now I can relax' are setting themselves up to be behind again within months. This has been described as the biggest shift in the private rented sector in roughly forty years, touching well over two million landlords and around eleven million renters across England, according to sector analysis from law firm Banner Jones. That scale means the guidance is still catching up in places. Staying current isn't optional admin anymore — it's the job.

Most landlords don't lose money because they're careless. They lose money because they're loyal to a process that worked fine for fifteen years and quietly stopped working in May. The Renters' Rights Act didn't just close one door — it rewired how eviction, tenancy structure and enforcement fit together, and the landlords who'll do fine from here are the ones treating that as a permanent shift, not a phase to wait out. I'd rather you feel slightly uncomfortable reading this than comfortable and wrong.

This is general information, not professional advice — for your specific tenancy or eviction situation, consider consulting a qualified solicitor before acting.

A free landlord compliance review looks at exactly the gaps this article describes — your notices, your tenancy paperwork, your process — against where the rules actually stand today, not where they stood in 2024.