What your lettings website still says about the Renters' Rights Act

Legal pages do not fail loudly. They rot. A tenant guide written in April 2026 still reads fluently in September, still sounds authoritative, and is wrong in three places, because nothing about a stale sentence looks stale. The pages this happens to are the ones a worried tenant, or a landlord's accountant, reads most carefully. That is the wrong audience to be wrong in front of.

We audit these pages regularly, and the same four faults come up almost every time. None is exotic. All four are findable in about half an hour.

Fault one: dates that have passed, still written in the future

"From May 2026 you will need to" on a page being read in September. The fact underneath may be perfectly correct and it does not matter, because the tense tells the reader that nobody has looked at this since it was written. Once a date has passed, "will" becomes "did", and a key dates card can say "in force" instead of counting down to something that already happened.

This is the fault that survives longest, for a reason worth knowing. When these pages get corrected, they get corrected where people look: the hero, the date cards, the headings. The prose three screens down keeps its original wording. It is entirely normal to find a page with an accurate, corrected timetable at the top and, further down, a paragraph still promising that fixed terms "are being abolished". They were abolished on 1 May.

Fault two: two provisions, one date

This is the most common error we find, and the private rented sector database and the landlord Ombudsman are almost always the pair it happens to. They were announced together, they get written up together, and they are years apart.

As of 9 September 2026 the two are easier than ever to tell apart, because one of them now has a timetable and the other still does not. Registration for the database opens on 15 December 2026, starting in the West Midlands and moving region by region across England over the following twelve months. When your area is called forward, landlords get a three month window to sign up, and every landlord actively letting a property must be registered by 14 November 2027.

The Ombudsman is a different matter. The government still expects that service to be ready in 2028, and that remains an expectation rather than a date. So one of the pair is now a schedule you can plan around and the other is not, which means a page giving them a single shared date is wrong about both of them at once.

The consequence is not cosmetic. A tenant page offering the Ombudsman as a way to complain is directing somebody to a body that will not exist for around two years. The routes that exist today are the local authority for disrepair, the First-tier Tribunal for a rent increase, and the agent's own redress scheme for a complaint about the agent. If your site names a destination, it should be one that answers the phone.

Fault three: a confident summary built from commentary

Law firm updates and industry blogs are useful for noticing that something has changed. They are not reliable for the exact conditions, and the exact conditions are what end up on your page as a number. Notice periods, penalty ceilings, deposit caps, commencement dates: every one of those needs a source somebody has actually read.

The tell is a page stating a maximum fine with nothing behind it. Somebody read that figure somewhere. If you cannot find where, take it off rather than leave it up.

Fault four: silence on the thing this reader came for

A page can be entirely accurate and still fail. A student lettings site that never mentions the ground under which a student house is recovered and re-let each year has answered every question except the one that governs its readers' tenancies. A landlord page that covers the database and skips the one month cap on rent in advance has missed the item a landlord is actually going to be asked about.

Accuracy is the floor. Being complete for your particular audience is what makes the page worth having.

The timetable, with each item on its own line

In force since 1 May 2026. Section 21 abolished, so possession requires a Section 8 ground. Assured shorthold tenancies converted to assured periodic tenancies, and fixed terms went with them. Tenants give two months' notice to leave. Rent rises once a year, on the correct form, with at least two months' written notice, challengeable at the First-tier Tribunal, which cannot set a rent above the figure the landlord proposed. No more than one month's rent in advance before a tenancy starts. Rental bidding banned, so the advertised rent is the ceiling. Blanket bans on benefits claimants and on children unlawful, with reasonable individual affordability checks still permitted. Tenants may request a pet, and consent cannot be unreasonably refused.

Dated, and close. The private rented sector database opens for registration on 15 December 2026 in the West Midlands, then region by region over twelve months, with a three month window once your area is called and a final deadline of 14 November 2027 for every landlord actively letting. Announced on 9 September 2026. A registration fee per property and civil penalties for not registering were both reported alongside the announcement; we have left the figures off this page until they are confirmed in more than one place, which is the rule the section above asks of you.

Expected, not yet in force. The landlord Ombudsman, expected to be ready in 2028, and still an expectation rather than a date. An extension of Awaab's Law to the private rented sector, still under consultation with no date attached, which makes it safe to describe as coming and not safe to date.

Further out. Properties to meet the Decent Homes Standard by 2035, and an energy performance rating of EPC C, or a valid exemption, by 1 October 2030. Any page putting Decent Homes in the late 2020s is wrong.

And one that has not moved, which is why nobody checks it. The Renters' Rights Act did not change the Tenant Fees Act caps, so a site stating a five week deposit is still right. Worth confirming rather than assuming, because a figure like that can be amended by a separate instrument without any fanfare at all.

The one that lands on your website

Most of the database story is a landlord duty and none of your affair. One part of it is not. Once the public side of the register is running, landlords and letting agents will need to show registration numbers on adverts, which makes it a property listing field, a template change and a feed question rather than a compliance page.

That is worth raising with whoever builds your site now rather than in the week it starts, because "add a field to every listing and pull it through from the CRM" is a small job with notice and an awkward one without. Ask where the number would live on your property template, and whether your feed can carry it.

The two searches that find it

If you can search your own site's source, or your developer can, two sweeps do most of the work, and they find different things.

The first collects the claims. Search for Section 21, Section 8, periodic tenanc, assured shorthold, Ombudsman, redress, database, Awaab, Decent Homes, EPC, deposit, holding deposit, Right to Rent, and any run of "weeks notice" or "months notice". Write down every hit with the page it sits on.

The second is the one people skip, and it is the one that catches fault one. Search for the future tense: "will be", "will become", "will need to", "is being", "are being", "from January 20", "coming soon", "not yet". Those are sentences that were true the day they were written and are now describing the past as though it had not happened yet.

Search the source rather than clicking through the site, because the sentences that survive longest live inside accordions, tabs and anything behind a "read more". Nobody reviewing a page opens all of them. That is precisely why the stale text is still in there.

What is yours to correct, and what is not

A statement about the law is yours to fix. "Section 21 was abolished on 1 May 2026" either is accurate or it is not, and you need nobody's permission to make it accurate.

A statement about the agency is not. Which deposit scheme you use, what your holding deposit is, whether you require a guarantor, how quickly maintenance gets answered: those are claims about your own practice. If one looks wrong, that is a question for the office, not an edit.

And compliance text that a scheme or a statute requires in a particular form, a complaints procedure most obviously, is verbatim. Restyle the presentation as much as you like. Leave the words alone.

Then move the date, and mean it

Correcting a page and leaving April on it is worse than the original error, because the page is now accurate and still signals neglect. Update the date. And if the page carries a line that counts things, "the ten changes", check the count still matches after you have added or removed an item, because those counts get written once and never revisited.

None of this needs a solicitor on retainer. It needs somebody to look twice a year with the two searches above, and a site built so that changing a sentence does not require a developer. We have written separately about keeping compliance pages current, and about the advertised rent rule, which is the single change most likely to still be wrong somewhere in your listings copy.