Registration is mandatory, it opens from late 2026, and no local authority has a published date. This is the preparation guide — what the register will ask you for, document by document, and which of those you can put right now rather than in a hurry later.
You’ll need to register every property with your contact details, property details, and three certificates — Gas Safety, EICR and EPC. Registration isn’t open yet (rollout starts late 2026), but everything on that list is worth assembling now.
This page is about the registration itself — what you will have to produce and how to be ready. If you want the wider picture of what the database is and where it sits in the Act’s phasing, that is our PRS Database explainer. If you want to know where your own area stands, that is the per-authority checker, which covers all 294 English local authorities.
This guide is part of our landlord compliance series — sourced guides to the biggest deadlines and duties facing English landlords right now.
The implementation roadmap sets out what regulations will require, at minimum, for each private rented property. It falls into three groups.
Your contact details as landlord — including capturing the relevant information from all joint landlords, not just whoever usually handles the letting.
Property details — the full address, the type of property, the number of bedrooms, the number of households or residents, and whether the property is occupied and whether it is furnished.
Safety information — Gas, Electrical and Energy Performance Certificates.
Two of those three groups are things you already know. The third is the one that takes time, because it depends on documents that expire, that sit with a managing agent, or that were never obtained.
Gas Safety Certificate (CP12). Required annually where there are gas appliances, from a Gas Safe registered engineer. The usual problem is not absence but continuity: you need the current one, and if you are asked to demonstrate compliance you want the run of them, not just the latest. If a managing agent has been arranging these, ask for the full set now rather than at registration.
Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR). Required for private rented properties in England, renewed at least every five years, and the report must be satisfactory. This is the one small landlords most often lack, because the requirement is newer than gas safety and a five-year cycle is easy to lose track of. If yours is unsatisfactory or approaching five years old, that is a job to book, not a document to find.
Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). Valid for ten years. Worth checking the expiry date rather than assuming, and worth reading in light of the separate energy-efficiency deadline: the minimum standard rises to EPC C equivalent on 1 October 2030, and there is a dated route to compliance that closes on 1 October 2029. If you are going to touch the EPC anyway, our EPC C by 2030 guide explains why the timing matters.
If you own jointly — a couple, siblings, a family arrangement — establish now who holds what. The roadmap is explicit that information will be captured from all joint landlords, and “my brother has the certificates” is not a position you want to be resolving against a deadline.
Enforcement does not only bite at the point of letting. Councils will be able to act against a landlord who fails to register, and separately against anyone who markets a private rented property where the landlord is not registered.
Two practical consequences. First, the moment your region’s rollout is live, an advert is itself an exposure — you cannot advertise now and register when a tenant is found. Second, if you use a letting agent, this is a shared problem: the agent placing the advert is exposed too, which means agents will start requiring proof of registration before they list. Being unregistered will make you unlettable through an agent before it makes you liable to a council.
The tiers are real: up to £7,000 for initial breaches, and up to £40,000 — or criminal prosecution instead — for serious, persistent or repeat breaches. Providing fraudulent information to the database sits in the higher tier.
But there is a distinction worth holding onto, because it is the same one that matters everywhere in this Act. A tier is the statutory ceiling. A starting point is the figure GOV.UK’s statutory guidance tells councils to begin from before adjusting for aggravating and mitigating factors. For the written-statement duties, guidance publishes both — a £4,000 starting point inside a £7,000 ceiling.
For database offences, the guidance does not yet publish starting points at all. They are listed as forthcoming. So anyone quoting you an expected fine for failing to register is quoting the ceiling and calling it a forecast. What is honestly knowable today is the maximum, not the likely.
Your area’s date. The rollout is phased regionally from late 2026 and government has published no per-authority dates. We maintain a page for every one of the 294 English local authorities that says exactly this, and is built to carry the real date the moment one is announced rather than a guess in the meantime. Check your local authority.
The fee. An annual fee is confirmed as mandatory. The amount has not been set, and is to be confirmed closer to launch. Figures circulating elsewhere are analogies drawn from selective licensing or other registration schemes — they are not official, and we do not repeat them.
The penalty starting points. As above: tiers yes, starting points no.
This is deliberate on our part. The registration regulations themselves — the instrument that will set the requirements for making and updating entries — are still to come as part of Phase 2. Until they exist, the detail below the roadmap’s outline is genuinely unsettled, and a guide that invents it is worse than one that says so.
1. Build one folder per property. Address, property type, bedroom count, whether occupied and furnished, current tenant household size. Then the three certificates. That is the registration record set, and assembling it is the whole job.
2. Check every expiry date, not every document’s existence. Gas certificate within twelve months, EICR within five years and satisfactory, EPC within ten years. An expired document is the same problem as a missing one.
3. Book the EICR if yours is old, unsatisfactory or unknown. This is the long-lead item — it needs a qualified electrician, remedial work is common, and demand will rise sharply as regions go live.
4. Sort joint-landlord details now. Full contact information for every joint owner, and an agreement about who holds the records.
5. Talk to your agent about who registers what. The duty to register is the landlord’s; the marketing prohibition catches the advertiser. Both of you need to know which of you is doing what before the first advert after your region goes live.
6. Do not wait for your area’s date to start. Nothing on this list requires knowing the date, all of it is work you would do anyway to demonstrate compliance to a council, and the whole point of a phased rollout is that some regions get much less warning than others.
When do I have to register? Rollout begins in late 2026 and is phased by region. No per-area dates have been published, so nobody can tell you your date yet.
What will I have to provide? Your contact details as landlord including all joint landlords; property details — full address, property type, bedrooms, number of households or residents, whether occupied and furnished; and safety information — Gas, Electrical and Energy Performance Certificates.
How much will registration cost? An annual fee is mandatory but the amount has not been set by government. It is to be confirmed closer to launch.
What is the penalty for not registering? Up to £7,000 for an initial breach and up to £40,000, or criminal prosecution, for continuing or repeated breaches. GOV.UK’s statutory guidance has not yet published starting-point figures for database offences.
Can I advertise a property before I have registered it? No. Councils will be able to act against anyone marketing a private rented property where the landlord is not registered, as well as against the unregistered landlord.
My property is jointly owned. Do we both register? The roadmap states information will be captured from all joint landlords, so gather full contact details for every owner rather than assuming one registration covers the group.
Does my letting agent register for me? The duty sits with the landlord. Agents are exposed separately through the marketing prohibition, so agree in advance who is doing what.
UK Property Portal is written and published by Dan Woodcock, working independently from UK. It is a one-person operation — there is no newsroom and no research team behind it — and every figure, date and threshold on this page is sourced, attributed and dated to the document it comes from. Read the full editorial standard →
See where the rollout stands for your own area.
All 294 English local authorities, each with the honest position — and built to carry the real date the moment government publishes one.
Check Your Local Authority →Free. No account needed.