Book a Demo

By the end of 2026, the Renters’ Rights Act won’t be something people argue about on panels or in comment threads. It’ll simply be the environment the private rented sector operates in. And that’s the point most commentary still misses. This isn’t a headline reform; it’s a systems change.

The direction of travel is already fixed. Section 21 goes. Periodic tenancies become the default. The Decent Homes Standard applies to the PRS. A landlord portal links compliance to the ability to operate and, critically, to access certain possession grounds. This isn’t conjecture; it’s stated policy intent.

What matters now is not whether the sector agrees with that direction, but whether it can actually function inside it.

Because when you place those reforms next to the reality of housing stock, the scale of the shift becomes obvious. The English Housing Survey shows the private rented sector remains the most likely tenure to be non-decent (around 21%) with roughly one million PRS homes failing the standard, often due to Category 1 hazards. That means the Decent Homes move isn’t a technical tweak. It’s a material operational uplift across a large, unevenly managed stock base.

Layer behaviour on top of that. Since the abolition of Section 21 was first promised back in 2019, more than 108,000 households have still been served a Section 21 notice while reform dragged on. That figure isn’t about blame – t’s about incentives. When rules are in limbo, people protect optionality. When the rules finally land, behaviour shifts again. Fast. And not always gracefully.

So here’s the prediction for this year, stripped of drama:

The Renters’ Rights Act creates a hard divide between those who can evidence compliance continuously and those who can’t.

Not between “good” landlords and “bad” ones. Not between those who care and those who don’t. Between operators who can prove what happened, when it happened, and what they did about it, and those who rely on memory, intent, and scattered paperwork.

The quiet complication is enforcement. Between 2022 and 2024, two-thirds of councils didn’t prosecute a single landlord despite significant complaint volumes. That tells you something important about how 2026 is likely to feel on the ground: higher standards on paper, uneven enforcement in practice. And in that sort of environment, the most exposed players are not the worst actors, they’re the largest, most visible, and most professionally run ones. Which is why those operators over-invest in defensible process. They know scrutiny eventually arrives, and when it does, it’s rarely forgiving.

This is where the real power shift sits. Not with whoever shouts loudest about reform, but with whoever makes compliance routine. Boring. Auditable. Repeatable. The systems that turn regulation into everyday workflow: inspections with consistency, condition deltas over time, logged actions, repair evidence that closes the loop. Once Section 21 is gone and expectations rise, credibility stops being a confident explanation and becomes a record you can put in front of someone without flinching.

I’m not predicting chaos or mass landlord flight. That’s lazy analysis. I’m predicting sorting.

In 2026, the private rented sector will be run less on goodwill and institutional memory, and more on evidence. The Renters’ Rights Act is the lever. Operational proof is the difference between coping quietly and firefighting endlessly.