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Harry Conti
Founder & Director
There is a version of this blog post that reads like a government press release. It would tell you that the Renters' Rights Act 2025 is a landmark piece of legislation, that it received Royal Assent on 27 October 2025, and that it comes into full effect on 1 May 2026. It would list the changes in a neat table, wish you luck, and leave you none the wiser about what it means for your property, your lettings cycle, or your income.
This is not that version.
We have been managing student properties across Lincoln, Nottingham, and Hull for over a decade. Our team are former students themselves. We have let hundreds of HMOs, navigated two government consultations, survived a pandemic, and dealt with just about every curveball the private rented sector can throw. So when legislation of this scale arrives, we think you deserve a frank, honest assessment of what it actually means in practice, not just what the Act says on paper.
Our view, in short, is that the picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Yes, there are genuine challenges. But there are also opportunities that have not been widely discussed. And there are things we are already doing at Student Housing to make sure our landlords are protected, prepared, and positioned well for the years ahead. If you want the short version first, we have put together a plain-English Q&A covering the questions we hear most often. For everything else, read on.
The central pillar of the Renters' Rights Act is the abolition of fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies. From 1 May 2026, all existing ASTs will convert automatically into assured periodic tenancies. New tenancies created after that date must be periodic from the outset. The fixed term, which has long been the backbone of student letting, is gone.
This matters for student landlords in a very specific way. The fixed term has historically been the mechanism that allowed both sides of the transaction to plan around the academic year. Students signed in November for a July start, moved in, paid their rent, and left when the term ended, at which point the landlord could prepare the property and let it again. That clean, predictable cycle has defined student accommodation for a generation. We have written in detail about what the shift to periodic tenancies means in practice, including the new documentation obligations that come with conversion and the deadlines that apply from 1 May.
Under the new regime, tenants can give two months' notice at any point. They are no longer bound by a fixed-term end date. A group of students could, in theory, decide in March that they want to leave by May, hand in notice, and the landlord is left with a vacant property in a dead period of the letting calendar. That is a genuine risk, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Alongside this, Section 21 no-fault eviction notices are abolished. Landlords can no longer serve a notice to quit simply because a fixed term has expired or because they want possession back for the next cohort. Instead, they must rely on one of the statutory grounds under Section 8, the most relevant of which for student HMOs is the new Ground 4A.
The government acknowledged, during the passage of the Bill, that the student HMO market is structurally different from the broader private rented sector. Students leave en masse at predictable times of year. Landlords need to relet to an entirely new cohort. Without a mechanism to align possession with the academic calendar, the model breaks down.
Ground 4A is the government's answer to that problem. It is a new mandatory possession ground that allows landlords to serve notice on student tenants in an HMO, requiring them to vacate on a specific date between 1 June and 30 September in any given year, provided at least four months' notice is given. To use it, the property must meet the definition of an HMO, meaning three or more occupiers from two or more households. The tenants must be full-time students, or the landlord must have reasonable grounds to believe they will be. The landlord must also have served a written statement at the outset of the tenancy, notifying tenants of the intention to rely on Ground 4A.
For the transition period specifically, landlords whose existing tenancies convert on 1 May 2026 must serve that written notice within 28 days of conversion, and transitional guidance issued in February 2026 by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government confirms that where notice is served between 1 May and 31 July 2026, only two months' notice is required rather than the standard four. That concession is meaningful for this first cycle.
But there is a critical limitation to Ground 4A that every student landlord needs to understand, and that we think has not been widely enough communicated in the sector.
Ground 4A cannot be used where the tenancy was entered into more than six months before the tenancy start date.
Read that again. If you signed a tenancy agreement with a group of students more than six months before they were due to move in, you cannot use Ground 4A against those tenants. This is not an administrative quirk. It goes to the heart of how student lettings have operated for years. The traditional student letting cycle in cities like Lincoln and Nottingham sees landlords and agents marketing properties from October, November, and December, with tenancies signed as early as November for a July start the following year. That is eight or nine months in advance. Under the new rules, those tenancies fall outside the protection of Ground 4A entirely, and the standard operating model for student lettings is now incompatible with the primary possession protection the Act provides.
This is not a marginal edge case. It is a structural problem, and it requires a structural response. Our answer is a two-stage letting process: we market, conduct viewings, reference tenants, and sort guarantors in the autumn as normal, but we issue a promissory letter rather than a signed tenancy. The formal tenancy is only signed once the six-month window opens, preserving Ground 4A without sacrificing the early-market momentum that landlords rely on. You can read exactly how that process works in our dedicated post on the six-month trap linked above.
For the 2025/26 academic year, many of our landlords' tenants are still on existing ASTs that were in place before the Act received Royal Assent. Those tenancies convert to assured periodic tenancies on 1 May 2026. But where a valid Section 21 notice has already been served before that date, the existing tenancy framework remains in play.
This is not a loophole. It is a transitional provision that parliament specifically anticipated. The legislation makes clear that extant Section 21 notices remain valid provided proceedings are issued within the required timeframe. The last date on which a Section 21 notice can be served is 30 April 2026, and any landlord whose current tenants fall outside the Ground 4A conditions needs to understand that window and act within it. Court proceedings must then be issued by the earlier of six months from service or 31 July 2026, whichever comes first.
We want to be transparent about this because we think clarity matters. We are not encouraging landlords to evict tenants they want to keep. In the vast majority of cases, tenants are moving on naturally at the end of the academic year regardless. The Section 21 process simply gives landlords the formal legal footing to recover possession during this transitional window, before the AST framework disappears entirely.
If you are one of our managed landlords and you have not yet had a conversation with us about whether a Section 21 notice is appropriate for your current tenancy, please contact your branch now. The window is closing.
We want to make a prediction, and we accept that predictions are sometimes wrong. But based on our read of how the market is likely to respond to this legislation, we think there is a genuinely positive structural shift on the horizon for student HMO landlords, and almost nobody in the sector is discussing it.
Once fixed terms are abolished and tenancies become periodic, the cycle of students signing a year in advance effectively comes to an end. No landlord will want to sign tenancies more than six months in advance and lose access to Ground 4A. The letting window compresses, and the natural rhythm of tenancy start dates shifts. We believe it shifts toward June.
Our thinking on the new letting calendar is that June is the most efficient start date under the new regime. Most undergraduate students finish their exams in May. A Ground 4A notice served in February requires possession by June, which is exactly where students are in their year anyway: finished with their academic commitments, ready to head home. The tenancy starts in June, students use the property for storage through the summer months, and they move in fully come September when the new academic year begins. The June-to-September period is not a void in any meaningful sense. The tenancy is live, rent continues to run, and the property is simply used lightly rather than intensively. That lighter use means lower energy consumption, fewer maintenance callouts, and less wear on appliances and fixtures, all of which represent a real reduction in the annual running cost of the property, particularly for landlords on utilities-inclusive arrangements.
If Ground 4A protects landlords on the way out of a tenancy, the greater risk on the new periodic model sits at the other end: students giving two months' notice to leave mid-year.
There is nothing in the Act that prevents a tenant from serving notice in December that they want to vacate by February. In a traditional AST, this would have been a breach of the fixed term, with financial consequences for the tenant. Under the periodic model, it is entirely lawful. The question is what drives early notice, and in our experience the answer is almost always the same: students who leave mid-tenancy are students who are unhappy with the property's condition, feel ignored when they raise problems, or are living in a house that is cold, damp, or poorly maintained.
The protection that the fixed term provided has gone, and nothing replaces it except the quality of the accommodation and the quality of the management. The Renters' Rights Act is going to accelerate a separation that was already underway between landlords who invest in their properties and those who do not. That is, ultimately, a good thing for the standard of student housing. But it requires landlords to take property condition seriously in a way that the fixed-term model did not strictly demand.
There is a further dimension to this risk that we cover in detail in our post on joint tenancies under the new rules. Under a joint periodic tenancy, notice served by one tenant brings the entire tenancy to an end for everyone in the house, not just the departing student. The other tenants cannot prevent it. A single notice from one dissatisfied member of a group of five can displace the other four and leave a landlord with a property to re-let mid-year. Understanding that risk and having a clear plan for managing it is something every student HMO landlord needs to work through.
We want to be straightforward about what we are doing operationally to prepare for life under the Act.
We have updated our management agreements (we'll start sending new agreements out this summer) and tenancy agreements to reflect the new periodic tenancy model, with Ground 4A written statements built in as standard for all qualifying HMO properties. We have restructured our letting calendar around the six-month signing rule, using the promissory letter approach described above. We are running compliance checks across all managed properties to ensure deposit protection, licensing, gas safety, and electrical records are in order, because deposit protection in particular remains a prerequisite for obtaining a possession order under the new regime. We are reinforcing our maintenance response standards, because the commercial logic of keeping tenants in place under the new model runs directly through the quality of how problems are handled. And there is still much that has not changed: HMO licensing obligations, the rent arrears possession ground, anti-social behaviour grounds, and the fundamental demand for good student property in university cities. These are the foundations the market continues to rest on.
If you are a landlord with us and you have questions about how the Act affects your specific property, your current tenancy, or your plans for the next letting cycle, please get in touch. The legal landscape has changed in ways that are genuinely complex, and the right answer is different depending on whether your property is an HMO, how far in advance your tenants signed, and what your plans are for the coming years.
The Renters' Rights Act is imperfect legislation for the student sector. The six-month restriction on Ground 4A is poorly calibrated against the reality of how student lettings operate. The exclusion of one and two-bedroom student properties from Ground 4A is a genuine gap that parliament declined to close despite repeated attempts during the Bill's passage. The risk of early notice from tenants is real, not theoretical and it could result in a year round lettings cycle for 1-2 bedroom properties.
But we do not think this is the end of the student HMO market, as some have suggested. The fundamental demand for good quality, well-managed student housing is not going anywhere. Universities in Lincoln, Nottingham, and Hull continue to grow. Students still need somewhere to live that is not purpose-built accommodation, which remains in short supply and out of budget for many. The letting cycle will adapt. Landlords who manage good properties through capable agents will find their footing.
What the Act does, more than anything, is raise the stakes for quality. The legal scaffolding that previously protected landlords from the consequences of substandard housing has largely been dismantled. What replaces it is a simpler, if less comfortable, truth: the best protection you have is a good property, well managed, with tenants who are happy to stay.
That has always been our philosophy at Student Housing. The Act has just made it everybody else's necessity.
We have published a full eight-part series covering every aspect of the Act in detail. You can start with our Q&A covering the most common landlord questions, or go straight to whichever topic is most pressing for you.
Post 1: The End of Fixed Terms — What Periodic Tenancies Mean for Student Lets
Post 2: Ground 4A Explained — The New Possession Right for Student HMOs
Post 3: The Six-Month Trap — Why Signing Early Could Cost Landlords Their Rights
Post 4: Section 21 Is Gone — The Transitional Window and Why It Matters Now
Post 5: The New Letting Calendar — Why We Think Tenancies Will Start in June
Post 6: Why Students Can Leave When They Like — and How to Make Sure They Don't
Post 7: Joint Tenancies Under the New Rules — One Tenant Leaves, the Whole Tenancy Ends
Post 8: What Hasn't Changed — and Why Good Management Still Wins
If you would like to discuss how the Renters' Rights Act affects your properties directly, speak to your local Student Housing branch in Lincoln, Nottingham, or Hull.
Student Housing is a student letting agency operating in Lincoln, Nottingham, and Hull. This article is written for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Landlords should seek independent legal guidance where required.
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Founder & Director
Harry started Student Housing while at university after seeing how poorly students were treated by traditional letting agents. Today, he leads the company across Lincoln, Nottingham, and Hull, with a focus on fair pricing, great service, and student-first thinking.
