RRA: Why Students Can Leave When They Like — and How to Make Sure They Don't

There is a risk sitting inside the new periodic tenancy model that does not get nearly enough attention in the commentary on the Renters' Rights Act, and it is not the one that most landlords are worried about.

The one most landlords are worried about is students staying too long, refusing to leave at the end of the year, triggering Ground 4A proceedings, and disrupting the summer changeover. That risk is real, and we have spent the previous posts in this series explaining how to protect against it.

The one that gets less attention is students leaving too early. And in some ways, it is the more immediate concern.

From 1 May 2026, any student on a periodic tenancy can serve two months' written notice at any point during the year and leave lawfully. There is no minimum period they must wait before serving that notice. There is no financial penalty for leaving. There is no break clause to negotiate. They could serve notice on the first day of the tenancy if they chose to, and they would be legally entitled to vacate two months later with no further obligation to the landlord. Under the old fixed-term model, that was a breach of contract. Under the new periodic model, it is an exercise of a statutory right.

This post is about what that means in practice, what drives students to leave early, and what landlords can do about it. Because while the legal framework has changed, the underlying reasons students walk away from properties mid-year have not, and they are almost entirely within a landlord's control.

The Rule

The mechanics are straightforward. Under the assured periodic tenancy regime, a tenant wishing to leave must serve written notice of at least two months. That notice must expire at the end of a rent period, which in most cases means the end of a calendar month. The notice can be served at any time, for any reason, without the landlord's agreement and without any requirement to explain the decision.

There is one important nuance for joint tenancies, which we cover in detail in the next post in this series. Where a property is held by multiple tenants on a joint tenancy, notice served by one tenant can bring the entire tenancy to an end, not just that tenant's share of it. The implications of that rule for student HMOs are significant and deserve their own dedicated discussion. For this post, we will focus on the mid-year departure risk as it applies to the tenancy as a whole.

What does that risk look like in calendar terms? A group of students on a June start tenancy who serve notice in October are gone by Christmas. A group who serve notice in January leave by March, in the middle of the second semester, at the coldest and quietest point in the letting calendar. A landlord in that position faces a property that needs to be re-let during the period of lowest demand in the student market, with no fixed-term backstop and no immediate pool of motivated prospective tenants to draw from.

The financial exposure is real. Two months of rent while the notice runs, then whatever gap follows before a new group can be found and moved in. In a university city with strong demand and a well-managed property, that gap might be weeks. In a slower market, or with a property that has underlying issues, it could be months. And unlike the summer storage period we discussed in Post 5, a mid-year departure leaves the property genuinely unoccupied at a point when replacement tenants are hard to find.

The New Norm

Here is the question that matters most for landlords thinking about this risk: who actually leaves mid-year, and why?

The answer, in our experience across eleven years of managing student properties in Lincoln and Nottingham, is that students who leave mid-tenancy almost always do so for one of a small number of reasons. They drop out of their course. They experience a relationship breakdown within the house group. They move in with a partner. Or, most commonly and most relevantly for landlords, they are unhappy with the property and feel unable to resolve the problems they are living with.

The first three reasons, personal and circumstantial, are largely beyond a landlord's influence. Course withdrawals happen. House groups fall apart. Students form relationships and want to move. These are facts of the student rental market that have always created occasional mid-tenancy disruption, even under the old fixed-term model where leaving early had financial consequences. They will continue to create disruption under the new model, and the difference now is that the departing student faces no financial penalty for going.

But the fourth reason, dissatisfaction with the property and the management, is different. That one is within the landlord's control. And it is, in our view, by far the most common driver of early departures in the student sector.

Think about what actually makes a student decide to leave a property they have already committed to. They report a problem, and nothing happens. They report it again, and still nothing happens. The boiler breaks and it takes a week to get anyone out to look at it. The damp on the bedroom wall that was there when they moved in gets worse through the winter and nobody seems to care. The washing machine floods and sits broken for a fortnight. The front door lock is stiff and the landlord tells them to put oil on it. These are not dramatic grievances. They are the slow accumulation of small failures that, under the fixed-term model, students absorbed because they had no practical alternative. Under the periodic model, those same students can be gone in two months.

The Renters' Rights Act has not changed the experience of living in a poorly maintained property. It has changed the consequence of having to live in one. The legal scaffolding that kept dissatisfied students in place until the end of a fixed term is gone. What it has revealed, quite clearly, is that the protection those fixed terms offered was in many cases protecting landlords from the consequences of substandard management rather than from any genuine risk of tenants behaving unreasonably.

That is a harder truth than most landlord-facing commentary wants to say out loud. We think it is worth saying, because understanding it is the starting point for responding to it properly.

How We're Handling It

At Student Housing, our response to the early-departure risk is not primarily a legal one. It is an operational one. The best protection against a student leaving mid-tenancy is a property that students want to stay in, managed by an agent that deals with problems quickly and professionally. That has always been our position, and the new legislative framework has made it not just a quality standard but a commercial necessity.

There are several things we are doing specifically in response to the new regime.

On maintenance response times, we are tightening our standards and being more explicit with landlords about what timely response means in practice. A heating failure in November is not a job that can wait until next week. A water leak in a bathroom is not something that can be assessed in a few days and then scheduled for the following month. Under the new model, a landlord whose contractor is slow, whose authorisation process is cumbersome, or whose approach to maintenance is reactive rather than responsive is a landlord whose tenants have both a reason and a legal right to leave. We are communicating that directly, because it is true and because we think landlords deserve to understand the stakes.

On property condition at the point of letting, we are raising our standards for what we will market and manage. A property that goes to market with known outstanding maintenance issues, aging appliances approaching end of life, or damp and condensation problems that have not been properly investigated is a property that is carrying mid-tenancy departure risk from the moment students move in. We are doing more thorough pre-tenancy inspections and being clearer with landlords about what needs to be addressed before a property goes live. Some of those conversations are uncomfortable. They are also necessary.

On ongoing compliance, we are paying close attention to the extension of Awaab's Law to the private rented sector, which requires landlords to investigate and address hazards such as damp and mould within defined timeframes. The precise implementation date for the private sector has not yet been confirmed, but the direction of travel is clear. Landlords who are not already treating damp and condensation as a priority rather than a nuisance complaint are going to find themselves exposed, both legally and commercially, as the regulatory framework tightens.

On communication with tenants, we are investing in making it easier and less adversarial for students to tell us when something is wrong. Students who feel heard when they report a problem are students who wait for it to be resolved. Students who feel ignored are students who start looking at their options. A simple, responsive maintenance process is one of the most effective retention tools available to a student landlord, and it costs far less than the disruption of a mid-year void.

We want to be honest about something else, too. The landlords who are most exposed to the mid-year departure risk are those who have used the fixed-term model, consciously or otherwise, as a substitute for the quality and management that should have been there all along. The Act has removed that substitute. What replaces it is not a new legal mechanism. It is a simple, direct relationship between the standard of the property and the likelihood of the tenant choosing to stay. That relationship has always existed. It is just that, from 1 May 2026, the consequences of getting it wrong arrive much faster than they used to.

If you are a landlord who wants to talk through the condition of your properties and what the standard needs to look like under the new regime, your local Student Housing branch in Lincoln, Nottingham, or Hull is the right starting point. We would rather have that conversation now than explain it to you in the middle of an unexpected mid-year departure.

Student Housing | Renters' Rights Act Series — Post 6 of 8

Next in the series: Post 7 — Joint Tenancies Under the New Rules: One Tenant Leaves, the Whole Tenancy Ends

Student Housing manages student properties across Lincoln, Nottingham, and Hull. This post is part of our ongoing series on the Renters' Rights Act 2025 and is written for general informational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice. Landlords with specific questions about their circumstances should seek independent legal guidance.