England’s landlord register (PRS database): every date, the £65 fee and the fines

England only — Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate registration schemes

I let property in Surrey, so my own window is 15 March to 14 June 2027. That sounds comfortably far away until you read the field list the service is going to ask for: date of birth and contact details for every landlord, the ownership structure of every property, bedroom count, how many people live there, the rent and how often it is paid, whether bills are included, and the current gas, electrical and EPC certificates with any MEES exemption. Most landlords I speak to could produce about two thirds of that today. The other third is in an agent's inbox, a filing cabinet, or a certificate that quietly expired.

This page is the working version of what I put together for my own portfolio: the exact dates, a deadline finder, a cost calculator, the full list of what you will be asked for, and a checklist you can tick off as you go. Everything here is cited to the government's own guidance, and where the guidance genuinely does not answer a question yet, I say so rather than guessing.

Find your registration deadline

Type a county, town or borough — or tap your region on the map below.

The rollout at a glance

Nine regions, one a month, darkest first. Tap a region to load its dates above.

Arranged roughly by geography, shaded by how soon registration opens. Darker means sooner.

What it will cost you

£65 per property, per year, renewed annually. Not one payment for a portfolio.

Registered properties	Each year	Monthly equivalent	Over three years	Over five years
1	£65	£5.42	£195	£325
2	£130	£10.83	£390	£650
5	£325	£27.08	£975	£1,625
10	£650	£54.17	£1,950	£3,250
20	£1,300	£108.33	£3,900	£6,500
50	£3,250	£270.83	£9,750	£16,250

Four questions landlords ask about the fee

Question	Answer
Will registering early cost me more?	No. The government says the fee will be pro-rated during the rollout, so that landlords who sign up first do not pay more. Registering in December rather than on your deadline day should not cost you extra.
Is it tax deductible?	It is a cost of running your letting business, so in normal circumstances it sits with your other allowable expenses against rental income — or against company profits if you let through a limited company. Confirm the treatment with your accountant.
Can I pass it on to the tenant?	Not as a charge. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 limits what a landlord or agent can take from a tenant to a short list of permitted payments, and a registration fee is not one of them. It can only reach the rent through a section 13 rent increase, at most once a year, which the tenant can challenge.
Will it go up?	Probably, over time. The draft regulations deliberately do not fix the amount, so that it can change to account for things like inflation, and the database operator sets it by reference to its costs. Budget for £65 now and assume it will rise.

All nine regional dates

Registration opens region by region from 15 December 2026. Each region then has three months.

Region the property is in	Registration opens	Last day to register	Order
West Midlands	15 December 2026	14 March 2027	1st
East of England	15 January 2027	14 April 2027	2nd
East Midlands	15 February 2027	14 May 2027	3rd
South East	15 March 2027	14 June 2027	4th
Yorkshire and the Humber	15 April 2027	14 July 2027	5th
North West	15 May 2027	14 August 2027	6th
North East	15 June 2027	14 September 2027	7th
London	15 July 2027	14 October 2027	8th
South West	15 August 2027	14 November 2027	9th

What the PRS database actually is

A national database of landlords and rented homes, with real consequences attached to being missing from it.

The Private Rented Sector Database — the PRS Database, or what most landlords will simply call the national landlord database — was created by the Renters' Rights Act 2025. The public-facing service built on top of it is called Register your rental property. It requires landlords of assured and regulated tenancies to register both themselves and each property they let.

Three things it is designed to do, in the government's own framing: give tenants information before they commit to a home, give councils the property-level data they currently have to assemble by hand, and give landlords a single place to see what they are legally required to do.

What makes it different from a voluntary accreditation scheme is that it is wired into the rest of the regime. Registration is not just an administrative box. It is a precondition for advertising a property and a precondition for obtaining possession. A landlord who is not on the register is not merely unregistered — they are, in practice, unable to get their property back through the courts on the ordinary grounds.

It sits alongside a set of reforms that have already landed. Section 21 and fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies ended on 1 May 2026, which means the section 8 grounds are now the only route to possession — and registration is about to become a gate in front of that route. If you have not yet worked through what the Act changed, start with the Renters' Rights Act overview and the commencement tracker.

How to register your rental property

What is confirmed about the process — and what has not been published yet.

The service you will use is called Register your rental property. It is the front end of the national landlord database, and this is how registering is confirmed to work.

Step	What happens
1. Wait for your region	The service opens region by region from 15 December 2026. Once it is live you can register properties in any region, ahead of their own deadline.
2. Start it yourself	Landlords must begin and complete registration personally. An agent may supply certain information on your behalf, but cannot register for you.
3. Register as a landlord	Your name, date of birth, correspondence address and contact details — or the company, Companies House number and director details if you let through a limited company. Joint owners each register separately.
4. Register each property	Address, ownership type, property type, bedrooms, occupants, households, rent and frequency, bills included, licence status, and your gas, electrical and EPC information.
5. Pay the fee	£65 per property, per year. Charged per dwelling, not per landlord.
6. Use your numbers	You receive a Landlord Registration Number and a Property Registration Number. The Act says both will have to appear in written adverts, but the government says that part switches on later, with guidance first. More below.
7. Keep it current and renew	Changes must be updated within 28 days. Each entry lasts a year; if you let several properties, later ones renew on the same date as your first, so there is one renewal date to diarise.

Everything the PRS database will ask for

Published in the government's guidance, grouped the way the service groups it.

This is the part worth acting on now, because none of it is quick to assemble under time pressure. The lists below are taken from the official guidance on what the service will ask for.

About you as a landlord	Notes
Full name	The legal owner, not a trading name
Date of birth	Individual landlords
Home address	Your residential address, not the property's. Organisations give an address that cannot be a PO box
Telephone number and email address	Used for service notifications
Company name, type and Companies House number	Company landlords
Name, date of birth, email and phone number of the person making the entry for the organisation	Company landlords
Names and dates of birth of directors or governing body members	Where no Companies House number is supplied
Lead trustee details with evidence of authority	Trusts

About each property	Why it trips people up
Full address including flat or unit identifier	Inconsistent addressing across tenancy, EPC and gas certificate is the single most common mess
Ownership type: freehold, leasehold or commonhold	Needs the title, not a memory
Property type	House, flat, maisonette, bedsit and so on
Number of bedrooms	Must match how the property is actually let, including any room converted from a reception
Whether the property is licensed, and the licence type	Selective, additional or mandatory HMO
Whether it is an HMO	Declared at registration
Property manager or agent details	Who is actually running it day to day

About the tenancy and the rent	Why it trips people up
Occupancy status — let, or available to let	Determines whether it needs registering at all in the first phase
Number of occupants and number of households	Households, not just people — this is what drives HMO status
Furnishing level	Furnished, part furnished, unfurnished
Rent amount	The rent actually being paid now, not the advertised figure
Rent frequency	Weekly and monthly get mixed up constantly — a £250 weekly rent is not £250 a month
Whether any utilities or bills are included	Common in HMOs and in all-inclusive lets

Safety and energy documents	What to check before you start
Gas safety record	In date — twelve-month cycle. Find the current certificate, not last year's
Electrical Installation Condition Report	Five-year cycle in the private sector, with any C1 or C2 remedial work evidenced
Energy Performance Certificate	Ten-year validity, and the rating drives your MEES position
MEES exemption details	Only if an exemption is actually registered on the PRS Exemptions Register

Two of these deserve their own pages, because they are where landlords most often find a gap: the gas safety record and its twelve-month cycle, and the EICR and what a C1 or C2 code obliges you to do.

Limited companies, SPVs and trusts

A question from the comments on my YouTube video about the register: how does this affect landlords who own through a limited company?

Same duty, different landlord. If a limited company owns the property and is the landlord on the tenancy, the company registers — not you personally — and the company pays the £65 for each property it lets.

Your set-up	What gets registered
One limited company that owns your lets	One landlord entry for the company, then a property entry and a £65 fee for each property. The landlord registration number belongs to the company.
Several SPVs	Each company is a separate landlord, so each makes its own landlord entry and gets its own number. Register every property under the company that owns it and is named on the tenancy.
Some properties in your own name, some in a company	Two landlord entries: one for you as an individual, one for the company. Put each property under whichever of the two is the landlord on that tenancy.
A property owned jointly	The draft regulations say joint landlords each make their own landlord entry but share a single entry for the property.
A property held in a trust	The lead trustee's name, date of birth, address and contact details, with evidence of their authority to act.

What a company has to supply

• The company name and its type of legal entity
• An address that is not a PO box, plus a telephone number and email address
• Its Companies House number, or charity number if it has one
• The name, date of birth, email and phone number of the person making the entry on the company's behalf
• If there is no Companies House number, the names, dates of birth and addresses of all directors, partners or members of the governing body

Does the company protect the directors?

For civil penalties, the company is the landlord, so the company is the one fined. The criminal offences are different. Section 92 of the Act says that where an offence by a company is committed with the consent or connivance of one of its officers, or is down to their neglect, the director commits the offence as well and can be prosecuted personally. That covers knowingly or recklessly giving false information, carrying on with a breach after a penalty, and repeat breaches. Incorporating does not put a wall between you and the register.

The possession restriction applies to companies in exactly the same way. An unregistered SPV cannot get a possession order on the ordinary section 8 grounds any more than an individual landlord can.

Your readiness checklist

Tick these off as you go — your progress is saved in this browser.

Keeping your registration up to date

Registering is not a one-off. The draft regulations add an ongoing duty that most coverage has missed.

Section 78 of the Act requires landlords to keep their entries up to date, and the draft Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026 set the clock: information and documents in your entries must be updated within 28 days of becoming out of date.

Something changes	What to do
You renew the gas safety record, EICR or EPC	Add the new certificate within 28 days
The rent changes after a section 13 increase	Update the rent within 28 days
Tenants move out and new ones move in	Update the occupants and households within 28 days
Your phone number, email or address changes	Update your landlord entry within 28 days
You get, renew or lose a property licence	Update the licence details within 28 days

Do you pay again when something changes? Nothing published so far charges for updating an entry — the fee is annual, per property. Each entry lasts a year and then has to be renewed, and if you let several properties the later ones renew on the same date as your first, so you have one renewal date. An entry that is not renewed becomes inactive, which puts you straight back in breach.

Registration numbers in adverts

The detail most coverage has skipped, and the one letting agents will notice first.

Registration produces two numbers: a Landlord Registration Number for you, and a Property Registration Number for each property. Two separate marketing rules sit in section 82 of the Act, and they do not switch on at the same time.

Rule	What the Act says	When it bites
No marketing unless registered	A property must not be marketed for let unless the landlord and the property both have active entries on the database.	Once the registration requirement applies to the property. For homes that are empty today, the government says future legislation will require registration before they are marketed.
Numbers in adverts	Written adverts must include the unique identifiers for the landlord and the property.	Not yet. The government says this comes in under future legislation as the public side of the service rolls out, with guidance published first.

Where a property is jointly owned, the draft regulations say each joint landlord makes their own landlord entry, sharing one entry for the property. So a couple who own a flat between them need two landlord registrations, not one — and when the advert rule does switch on, expect both of their numbers to be needed in the listing.

Fines, possession and rent repayment

Three separate consequences, frequently mixed up in the coverage.

What happened	What can follow	Who decides
Letting or advertising a property without the required registration	Civil penalty up to £7,000	Local council
Knowingly or recklessly giving false or misleading information, carrying on a breach more than 28 days after a penalty, or a further breach within five years	Civil penalty up to £40,000, or criminal prosecution	Local council, or the courts
Continuing to fail to register after a civil penalty	A rent repayment order can follow	First-tier Tribunal
Seeking possession while in breach of the duty to register	Possession order restricted, except on ground 7A or ground 14 (anti-social behaviour)	The court

Who actually fines you? The local council for the area the property is in. A civil penalty is imposed by the council, not by a court, and you can appeal it to the First-tier Tribunal. Prosecution for the section 92 offences takes place in the magistrates' court, and a landlord who has already been given a financial penalty for conduct cannot then be convicted of the false-information or repeat-breach offences for the same conduct.

The possession restriction is the one that matters most

Since section 21 ended on 1 May 2026, the only way to recover a property in England is a section 8 ground. Registration sits in front of that door. If you are in breach of the duty to register, the court cannot make a possession order against you except on ground 7A or ground 14, which are the anti-social behaviour grounds.

Read that again in practical terms: an unregistered landlord with serious rent arrears, or one who needs the property back in order to sell, has no route to possession until the registration is fixed. That is a far bigger commercial risk than a £7,000 penalty, and it is why I would not leave this to the last fortnight of the window.

Rent repayment orders

A rent repayment order is a separate route with its own test. It requires a qualifying offence and a tribunal decision — it does not follow automatically from a missed deadline. What has changed is the scale: for offences committed on or after 1 May 2026, rent repayment orders run to up to two years' rent, doubled from twelve months, and the list of qualifying offences was widened.

So the honest version is this. Missing a registration deadline does not automatically hand your tenant two years of rent. But continuing to fail to register after the council has already penalised you can put a rent repayment order on the table, and the ceiling on that order is now twice what it used to be.

Who can see your information

The biggest worry in the comments on my video — and the part the government has decided least.

There are three audiences for what you register, and only the first has been settled.

Who	What they get	Status
Your council	The information you register, to target enforcement. Giving councils property-level data they currently have to assemble by hand is one of the stated aims.	Confirmed
Tenants	The government says tenants will be able to use the service to check whether a landlord is compliant with key legal requirements.	Coming later
The general public	The government says it does not envisage all the data being publicly accessible, and will publish the list of what the public can see at a later stage, through further regulations.	Not yet decided

So, to the questions people keep asking — will my rent be public, will my home address be public, could someone search my name and find every property I own? None of that is decided in anything published so far. Anyone telling you for certain that names, rents or addresses will or will not be shown is ahead of the government. What is settled is that the information exists and councils can use it.

Can you opt out or have your details removed? No. Registration is a legal duty for a landlord of an assured or regulated tenancy, not a service you can decline. Data protection law still governs how the operator holds and uses what you give it.

Existing tenants and empty homes

Two questions I get constantly, with different answers.

The practical version: if it is let today, it needs registering in your window. If it is empty today, register it before you advertise it, and expect that to become a formal requirement rather than good practice.

Lodgers, council homes, small HMOs and other edge cases

The duty follows the type of tenancy, not the size of the landlord.

Registration applies to landlords of assured and regulated tenancies in England. That one phrase answers most of the edge-case questions I get.

Situation	Do you register?
A lodger in the home you live in, sharing your kitchen or bathroom	No. A letting by a resident landlord cannot be an assured tenancy (Housing Act 1988, Schedule 1, paragraph 10), so a genuine lodger arrangement sits outside the duty.
Rooms let to “lodgers” in a house you do not live in	Almost certainly yes. If you do not live there, they are not lodgers in the legal sense. Room lets in a house you do not occupy are normally assured tenancies, and the property is in scope.
A small HMO that does not need a licence	Yes. Licensing and registration are separate duties. You declare the HMO status and licence position when you register.
A property you already hold a selective or HMO licence for	Yes. A licence does not exempt you. See below.
A council home	Not on this service. Council tenancies are secure tenancies, not assured ones.
Supported exempt accommodation	No. The government has confirmed it is outside the service.
A property you own but do not let	No, while it is not let. If you decide to let it, future legislation will require registration before it is marketed.

The expired EPC question

Where the published guidance genuinely stops — and where it does not.

This is the question I have been asked more than any other since the announcement, and it deserves a careful answer rather than a confident one.

An EPC is valid for ten years. The duty to provide one is triggered when a property is to be sold or rented out (Energy Performance of Buildings Regulations 2012, regulation 6), not continuously through a tenancy. So a certificate that expires part-way through an ongoing tenancy does not have to be renewed simply because it has expired. So a tenant who moved in during 2018 on a 2016 certificate does not, by that fact alone, trigger a renewal in 2026.

What the published material does not yet settle is how the registration service will handle that. The service asks for EPC information. Whether it will accept a legitimately expired certificate on a continuing tenancy, or push you towards a new one, is not answered in the guidance available as at 10 September 2026. Anyone telling you definitively either way is guessing.

Do not confuse validity with the minimum standard

Two separate things get tangled here. Certificate validity is one question. The minimum energy efficiency standard is another, and it is moving.

Question	Position now	What is coming
How long does an EPC last?	Ten years from issue	New EPC methodology compulsory for new certificates from 1 October 2029
What rating do I need to let?	Band E, unless a valid exemption is registered	Band C for all tenancies by 1 October 2030, not just new ones
What is the penalty?	Currently capped at £5,000 in total under MEES	Proposed up to £30,000 per property, per breach under the new regulations

If your portfolio has D and E rated stock, the register is the small problem. We cover the bigger one in detail on what the 2030 EPC C requirement actually means and how MEES and its exemptions work today. There is also a rundown of the grant funding that can take a chunk out of the upgrade cost.

Does it replace selective or HMO licensing?

No. Do not let a licence lapse on this assumption.

The government's own guide keeps selective licensing in place as a complementary tool. Its argument is that the database removes the biggest barrier councils face — simply knowing which properties are rented — which may reduce how much licensing is needed over time. That is a long way from abolishing it.

So you may end up doing all three: national registration, a selective licence if your council operates a scheme in that street, and an HMO licence if the property is licensable. They are separate duties with separate fees, separate renewal dates and separate penalties.

If it does, the property licensing guide covers what the application involves and what councils look for.

HMOs, rooms and converted flats

The one genuinely unanswered charging question.

£65 per property is straightforward for a self-contained house or flat on a single tenancy. It is not obvious what it means for:

• A house let by the room on six separate tenancy agreements
• A building converted into four self-contained flats under one title
• A property with a licensed HMO on the upper floors and a separate ground-floor let

HMO status is something you declare during registration, and the fee is described as being calculated per property rather than per landlord. But whether "property" means the building, the dwelling or the tenancy in each of those cases is not settled by the guidance published so far. The sources checked do not support a universal answer, and I would rather say that than invent one.

What to do in the meantime: build a schedule of your units, the tenancy arrangement on each, and any existing licence, so that when the detailed instructions land you can price it in an afternoon instead of a weekend. If you let by the room, the HMO licensing guide is the place to start on the licensing half of it.

Can your letting agent do it for you?

Not the registration itself. Parts of the paperwork, yes.

The government is explicit that landlords must start and complete the registration themselves. Agents will be able to supply certain information on your behalf, with further instructions to follow, but the duty and the liability stay with you. Full stop.

That makes one conversation worth having now, well before your region opens:

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

This is an England scheme. The rest of the UK already has its own.

Nation	Scheme	Shape of it
England	Register your rental property (PRS Database)	New. £65 per property per year, regional rollout from 15 December 2026
Scotland	Scottish Landlord Register	Long established. Registration with the local authority, renewed on a three-year cycle
Wales	Rent Smart Wales	Long established. Registration and licensing are separate steps, with training required to be licensed
Northern Ireland	Landlord Registration Scheme	Long established. One registration covers the landlord's properties, on a three-year cycle

The structural difference worth noticing: England has gone for an annual, per-property fee. Northern Ireland and Scotland charge per landlord or per multi-year cycle. Over a ten-property portfolio across a decade, that design choice is the difference between a few hundred pounds and several thousand.

HMRC and rent increase disputes

Announced at the same time. A different reform, and not live yet.

Alongside the register, the government said that initial decisions on rent increase challenges will move to HMRC's Valuation Office, with the stated aim of faster decisions and less pressure on the tribunal system.

It is not operating yet. A tenant challenging a rent increase today still applies to the First-tier Tribunal, and that stays the route while the new arrangements are built. Tenants also will not pay the increased rent until the case is finally decided.

One thing this is not: a system that approves your rent increases. It is a route for challenging them. If you are working through a rent increase, the mechanics are on the section 13 notice page, and there is a calculator for the numbers.

A twelve-step preparation plan

Organisation, not extra law. This is the order I would do it in.

1. List every English property you let. One line each, with the full address exactly as it appears on the title.
2. Put the region against each one. Use the finder above. Sort by deadline.
3. Set an internal target four weeks before each real deadline. The real date is when you are in breach; your date is when you act.
4. Decide whether to do them all in December. If you own across regions, doing everything in one sitting once the service opens removes eleven months of tracking.
5. Budget the fee. £65 per property, annually, as a fixed cost. Keep any agent admin charge separate from it so you can see what the agent is charging you for.
6. Pull the certificates. Gas, EICR, EPC for each property, in one folder per property. Open every file — a corrupt scan you cannot read is the same as not having it.
7. Check the dates on all of them. Anything expiring before your registration window is a job to book now, not later.
8. Reconcile the rent. Confirm the current rent and its frequency against your bank statements, not against the tenancy agreement, which may be out of date.
9. Confirm occupancy. Number of people and number of households, per property. This drives HMO status.
10. Sort the joint ownership. Every joint owner needs their own landlord registration, so establish now who is doing what.
11. Have the agent conversation. Written allocation of who supplies what, who checks it, and what it costs.
12. Keep the completion evidence. Registration numbers, confirmation emails, dates. Then diarise the annual renewal, because this repeats every year.

If you can answer three questions for every property — what is due, who is doing it, and where is the evidence it was done — you are ready. Most landlords cannot answer the third one, and that is the gap the register is going to expose.

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