PRS Database checker

Stevenage is in England — so the PRS Database applies here

Stevenage is an English local authority. The Private Rented Sector Database was created by the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 and covers privately rented property in England, so landlords letting here will be in scope. Signing up will be mandatory for all PRS landlords once the database opens. It forms part of Phase 2 of the Act’s rollout, following the Phase 1 tenancy reforms that took effect on 1 May 2026.

The schedule is published — by region, not by council

Registration opens on 15 December 2026 in the West Midlands, then a further region each month until August 2027. Each region gets a three-month window, so the last deadline in the country is 14 November 2027. Your deadline follows the property’s location, not where you live.

What government has published is a table of nine regions. It has not published a list of individual councils, and we have not yet mapped all 294 English local authorities onto their regions — so rather than guess which row Stevenage belongs in, this page sends you to the table itself: the PRS Database explainer carries all nine regions with both dates. Find the region Stevenage sits in and that is your deadline.

One qualification that applies everywhere: the regulations setting this schedule are a draft laid before Parliament and not yet made, so the dates await parliamentary approval and can still move.

Landlord details, property details, and your safety certificates

The roadmap states regulations will mandate registration and fee payment and — subject to the will of Parliament — at minimum, for each PRS property: landlord contact details, including from all joint landlords; property details — full address, property type, number of bedrooms, number of households or residents, and whether it’s occupied and furnished; and safety information — Gas, Electrical and Energy Performance Certificates.

These are national requirements set by regulations, not local ones — they apply the same way in every English local authority. Registration isn’t open yet, but gathering your Gas Safety Certificate, EICR, EPC, deposit protection and licensing details now means registration is straightforward whenever your area’s rollout begins.

A £7,000 fine — and, far worse, you cannot get a possession order

The fee and the penalty tiers are now published:

The fee is £65 per property, per year. It is mandatory, charged per property rather than per landlord, and recurs annually rather than being a one-off cost. Worth knowing where that figure sits: the draft regulations do not set it — they leave the fee to be determined by the Database operator by reference to its relevant costs, under section 81(4) of the Act. So £65 is the figure MHCLG has published for the service, not a number written into the legislation.

The penalty for letting or advertising an unregistered property is a civil penalty of up to £7,000. Repeat it, or commit a serious offence such as giving the database fraudulent information, and the ceiling rises to £40,000 — or you can be prosecuted instead.

One thing still genuinely unpublished, and it matters if you are trying to size the risk: those are statutory ceilings, not expected fines. GOV.UK’s civil-penalties guidance tells councils a starting point to work from before aggravating and mitigating factors, and for database offences it does not yet publish starting points at all. Anyone quoting you a likely fine for failing to register is quoting the ceiling and calling it a forecast.

But the fine is not the part that should worry a landlord most. Once the duty to register is in force for your region, a landlord in breach cannot obtain a possession order at all, except where possession is sought on ground 7A or ground 14 — the tenant anti-social behaviour grounds. Every other ground, including rent arrears and the landlord-sale and moving-in grounds, will be unavailable while the property remains unregistered.

We’ll tell you when a rollout date covering Stevenage is published

Government hasn’t published one. When it does, we’ll send it to you, sourced and dated, so you don’t have to watch GOV.UK yourself.