The landlord register has nine deadlines, not one

Most coverage of the rental property register gives one date. There are nine.

The register opens region by region, one region a month, with a three month window to register in each and enforcement starting the day after that window closes. Which means that from the middle of March 2027 until the middle of November 2027, whether a given property has to be registered depends on where it is.

The nine dates

Registration opens on the 15th of the month, the window runs for three months, and enforcement begins the day after it shuts.

• West Midlands: opens 15 December 2026, enforcement from 15 March 2027
• East of England: opens 15 January 2027, enforcement from 15 April 2027
• East Midlands: opens 15 February 2027, enforcement from 15 May 2027
• South East: opens 15 March 2027, enforcement from 15 June 2027
• Yorkshire and the Humber: opens 15 April 2027, enforcement from 15 July 2027
• North West: opens 15 May 2027, enforcement from 15 August 2027
• North East: opens 15 June 2027, enforcement from 15 September 2027
• London: opens 15 July 2027, enforcement from 15 October 2027
• South West: opens 15 August 2027, enforcement from 15 November 2027

The fee is £65 per property per year, renewed annually. It applies to landlords letting on assured and regulated tenancies, with exempt accommodation outside it, and landlords who do not register risk a financial penalty.

The sentence that makes it your problem

In a later phase, landlords will need to include the property's unique landlord and property identifiers in advertising.

That is the line that turns this from a landlord's admin job into a listings job, and it is worth being precise about its status. The requirement is stated. The date is not. It is a future phase with no commencement date attached to it at the time of writing.

So here is the position a lettings agency is actually in. There will be a number that has to appear on adverts, nobody knows when, and for eight months of 2027 a good share of your landlords will have one while the rest will not, depending entirely on which region their property happens to sit in.

Three ways this goes wrong on a website

This is the part we can be genuinely useful about rather than just restating a timetable, because it is the part we will end up fixing.

A field that looks broken when it is empty. The obvious build is to add a registration number to the property template. Do that naively and every unregistered property displays a label with nothing after it, or worse, the word "null", for months on end. A field that will be legitimately empty for most of a year needs to be designed to be absent, not designed to be filled.

One national deadline hard-coded somewhere. Any banner, any landlord-facing prompt, any "register by" message that names a single date will be wrong for eight of the nine regions on the day it goes live. Anything you put in front of landlords either knows which region the property is in, or says nothing about dates at all.

The feed. If your listings flow out to portals, a new required field is not just a template change. It has to exist in the CRM, survive the feed, and arrive somewhere the portal is willing to display it. That is three systems, and historically it is the slow part of every listing-data change anybody has ever made. The time to find out whether your feed can carry an extra field is while carrying it is still optional.

What is worth doing now, which is not much

Nothing needs building yet, and anybody quoting you for register compliance work today is pricing a specification that has not been written.

What is worth doing is cheap. Find out whether your property records can hold a per-property reference that is neither the address nor your own internal ID, because that is the shape of what is coming. Find out whether your listing template can show a field conditionally, so that an empty one disappears instead of leaving an orphaned label. And ask whoever runs your website whether adding a displayed property field is a configuration change or a development job, because that answer decides whether this is an afternoon or a quarter.

It is the same question the sales side of the business is about to face, for the same reason, which we have written up in the home buying reforms as a data project. The register numbers themselves, and what they mean for listings more broadly, are in our piece on the registers and listing numbers.

One thing worth telling landlords

Not advice, just the useful fact: their deadline is not the one in the headlines. A landlord with a property in the West Midlands has until 14 March 2027. A landlord with one in the South West has until 14 November 2027. A landlord with both has two different deadlines for the same portfolio, and will almost certainly assume there is only one.

If you manage stock across more than one region, that is a conversation worth having early, and a mailing worth segmenting by region rather than sending to everybody at once. It is also the sort of thing that makes an agent look like they are paying attention, which is not nothing.

A note on sources. The region-by-region timetable, the three month registration windows, the £65 annual fee and the future advertising requirement come from Propertymark's published summary of the rollout. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice; landlords should take their own.