What happened to the material information rules?

Ask most agents what material information means and you will get a confident answer about Parts A, B and C. Price, tenure and council tax band in the first tier. Utilities, parking and broadband in the second. Flood risk, restrictions and known defects in the third. It became the shape of the job, and a great many listing templates, portal fields and staff checklists were built around it.

That guidance was withdrawn in May 2025. Not softened, not phased out. Withdrawn, with immediate effect and no replacement. Sixteen months later there is still no property-specific guidance to put in its place, and a surprising number of agents have not been told.

Why it went

Nothing was wrong with the guidance. What went was the law underneath it. The National Trading Standards guidance was written to help agents meet their duties under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, and those regulations were revoked on 6 April 2025, when Chapter 1 of Part 4 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force. The guidance was left explaining a statutory instrument that no longer existed, so it was taken down. The old regulations still govern anything that happened before that date, which matters if an old listing ever comes back to bite, but for everything you publish today the Act is the law.

The duty did not go anywhere. It is worth being blunt about that, because the withdrawal was widely read in the trade as a reprieve and it was the opposite.

What replaced it: two duties, not one

The first is the general one. Section 225 prohibits unfair commercial practices, and a practice is unfair if it involves a misleading omission, which section 227 defines to include omitting material information: the information the average consumer needs to take an informed transactional decision. Giving it unclearly, burying it, or giving it too late all count as omitting it. This duty bites only if the omission would likely have changed what the average consumer did.

The second is the one to pay attention to, because it works differently. Section 230 deals with an invitation to purchase, which the Act defines as a communication indicating the characteristics of a product and its price in a way that lets the consumer decide whether to buy. A priced property listing is squarely that. And for an invitation to purchase, omitting the listed information is unfair with no test at all about whether it would have changed anybody's mind. There is no "no harm done" argument available.

The short list that applies to every priced listing

Here is the part that gets lost. The Act does contain a list. It is not a property list, it is a generic one that applies to every trader in the country, and on a priced listing every item on it is required unless it is already apparent from the context:

• The main characteristics of the product, to the extent appropriate to the medium used and the nature of the product
• The total price, which includes anything the buyer will necessarily have to pay, and, where the whole or any part of it cannot reasonably be calculated in advance because of the nature of the product, enough about how that part will be worked out for the buyer to arrive at the total, set out as prominently as the price itself
• The identity of the trader, and of anyone the trader is acting on behalf of
• The trader's business address, service address if different, and business email address, and the same for anyone they act for, so far as that person has such addresses
• Any freight, delivery or postal charges, including taxes, that are not in the total price and that the buyer may choose to incur, or the fact that they may be payable if they cannot be worked out in advance
• Where the product carries a right of withdrawal or cancellation, the fact that it does
• Where actual practice on payment, delivery, performance or complaints differs from published practice, the practice actually operated
• Anything any other legislation requires as part of an invitation to purchase

The Act does allow for the limits of the medium you are using, so this is not quite a checklist to be applied without thought. It is a good deal closer to absolute than the general duty, though, and it leaves far less room for argument.

Read that list again with your own website open. Several items on it are not about the property at all. They are about you: who you are, where you are, how to email you, and whether what you say you do matches what you do. Those are the dullest possible things to get wrong, and they are visible to anyone who looks, including a regulator, without a single member of the public having to complain first.

One item has no settled answer yet in a property context. That third item asks for the identity of the person you are acting on behalf of, which on a listing is your seller or your landlord, and the item after it asks for their business address and email so far as they have them. A private vendor usually has neither, so in most listings there is nothing to give. Whether the identity limb means naming them at all is exactly the sort of question guidance ought to answer, and until it lands nobody should tell you they know.

Where the property detail went

Tenure, service charge, flood risk, construction type, parking, heating: none of them is named anywhere in the Act. They fall to be judged under the general duty, as information the average consumer needs to take an informed transactional decision, and, so far as a priced listing goes, within "the main characteristics of the product" to the extent the medium and the property make appropriate. Which route applies matters. Under the general duty a harm test still has to be met. Inside an invitation to purchase it does not. So on a priced listing this is not a lighter obligation than the old checklist, it is a vaguer one that is also harder to argue your way out of, and the burden of deciding what a buyer needs to know has moved from a published document onto the agent.

Which is why the sensible thing to do with the old Parts A, B and C is nothing. Do not strip those fields out of your listings. The categories were a reasonable working answer to what a buyer needs to know before they view, they are what the portals still ask for, and they remain the most defensible position available while the sector waits for something official. What has changed is that you can no longer point at them and say a third party told you that was enough.

Who enforces it now

Both of the answers you will hear are half right. Trading Standards have the statutory duty to enforce, and remain the people most likely to look at a listing complaint. The Competition and Markets Authority may also enforce, and since 6 April 2025 it can decide that a business has broken the law and fine it directly rather than taking it to court. Those penalties reach 10 per cent of global turnover or £300,000, whichever is greater.

As at 1 September 2026 the CMA had yet to open a direct consumer enforcement case against an estate or letting agent. It has fined estate agents before, though on competition grounds rather than consumer ones, most recently the Berkshire commission-fixing case in 2019. Its first year of direct enforcement went on drip pricing, fake reviews and online choice architecture, and its first financial penalty under the new powers, £4.2m reduced from £7m for early settlement, landed on the AA over its driving school brands. Property is not on its stated list of consumer priorities for the year ahead. That is worth knowing, and it is worth not over-reading: local Trading Standards prosecutions would never appear in CMA figures, and the Act keeps a criminal route open, including a specific offence of omitting material information from an invitation to purchase, carrying up to two years on indictment. There is a due diligence defence, which rewards agencies that can show a system rather than a habit.

Separately, and often forgotten: a redress complaint is still judged against The Property Ombudsman's Codes of Practice, whatever the statutory position. The lettings Code for England was reissued on 1 May 2026 and quietly dropped its reference to the old regulations. The sales Code still carries an effective date of 1 June 2019 and still names the Consumer Protection Regulations as the law you must comply with, which tells you something about how far the withdrawal has travelled.

The guidance we are still owed

The government consulted between 6 October and 29 December 2025 on what official guidance should say, and received 188 responses. It published its answer in June 2026, inside the home buying and selling reform roadmap. The commitments are specific: it will publish non-statutory guidance explaining what the Act requires, with a view to no further legislation on material information being needed; it will work on a standardised form for gathering the information; and it expects the information to be collected from source, with title information coming only from the Land Registry. That "no further legislation" is scoped to material information itself. The same roadmap commits to legislating for sales packs before listing when parliamentary time allows, so more law is coming, just not on this.

On timing, it said the guidance would be published later this year. It had not appeared when we checked on 1 September 2026, so if you are reading this later, check whether it has landed since. And there is a sting worth planning for: the government has not offered an implementation period. Its answer was that although there was support for one, the guidance clarifies existing legal obligations, so stakeholders "should have regard for the guidance as soon as it is published". There is no grace period to plan around.

The awkward bit about the portals

The portal fields have not changed, and their terms still require them. But if you go looking for the reasoning, the agent-facing help pages are in some cases years out of date. All of the following was true when we checked on 1 September 2026. Rightmove's hub page on material information has not been updated since the Act came into force and still tells agents the fields help them comply with the Consumer Protection Regulations, linking to a set of regulations that no longer exist and to guidance that has been taken down. Zoopla's support article still presents Parts A, B and C as the current requirement. Rightmove's more recent technical guidelines do name the Act, and then in the very next row still require compliance pursuant to the old regulations. The commercial requirement has outlived the legal scaffolding it was built on.

The practical effect is that filling in your portal fields is necessary and is no longer sufficient, because the Act's list includes things a portal never asks you for and applies to your own website just as much as to a portal listing.

What we would actually do this month

Start with the near-absolutes, because they are quick and they leave the least room for argument. Check that your trading name, your company identity, your business address and a business email address are stated plainly and are easy to find from any listing page, not buried behind a contact form. Check that the price you show is a total, in the sense that it covers anything the buyer will necessarily have to pay. Check that what your site claims about how you handle complaints matches what you actually do.

Then look at the structure. The agencies that will find the new guidance painless are the ones whose listing template has a permanent, always-present home for these facts, so the information is a field rather than a paragraph somebody remembers to write. That is a website decision more than an admin one, and it is the difference between updating a template once when the guidance lands and re-editing every live listing by hand.

Then write down what you decided and why. With no official checklist to point at, a short internal note recording the categories you disclose as standard is the nearest thing to a due diligence defence available, and it costs an afternoon.

The honest summary

The checklist went, the duty stayed, and the judgement moved onto you. Nothing about that requires panic, and anyone selling you urgency about it in the next few weeks is ahead of the evidence. What it does require is a listing template you can change quickly, an identity and contact trail that is stated rather than implied, and a note of your own reasoning. Get those three in place and the guidance, when it lands, is a morning's work rather than a rebuild. We build listing pages with a fixed home for this sort of information for exactly this reason, and if you would rather someone else looked first, a free site review will tell you whether any of them are missing from your site.