Fixed Terms Abolished: What the Renters' Rights Act's Day-One Provisions Actually Require of Every Landlord

The Renters' Rights Act does not ease itself in gradually. From the moment its commencement provisions took effect, every new tenancy granted in England became a periodic tenancy by operation of law. There is no transitional grace period for landlords who prefer to finish out existing arrangements before adapting. The fixed-term tenancy, the instrument around which an entire generation of buy-to-let underwriting, mortgage covenant compliance, and void period management has been structured, is now a legal artefact. Understanding what replaced it, and what obligations now attach to landlords immediately, is not optional due diligence. It is the baseline requirement for continued lawful operation.

The political architecture behind this change has been visible for years. The 2019 consultation, the 2022 White Paper, the original Renters (Reform) Bill introduced under the previous administration, all pointed toward the same destination. What changed between those earlier iterations and the Act that is now in force is the pace and the absence of compromise. The previous government had floated phased implementation and a functioning court system as preconditions. The current administration abandoned both conditions and pressed ahead, a decision that has drawn criticism from the National Residential Landlords Association and sector solicitors alike, though that criticism changes nothing about the legal position landlords now occupy.

What Does the Abolition of Fixed Terms Actually Change in Practice?

The immediate legal consequence is that every new tenancy granted after the Act's commencement is an assured periodic tenancy, rolling on a monthly basis by default unless the parties agree a different period, and that period cannot exceed one month. Landlords who attempt to contract around this by inserting fixed-term language into new agreements are not simply drafting poorly. They are creating instruments that courts will read as periodic from the outset, with the fixed-term clauses treated as void. The liability this creates is not theoretical. A landlord who believes they have locked a tenant in until a specified end date, structures their refinancing around that assumption, and then discovers the tenant has served one month's notice and departed lawfully, has suffered a material financial injury that no court will remedy.

The loss of the fixed term also removes the contractual mechanism landlords have historically used to manage rent reviews. Under the old model, a new fixed term, offered at a higher rent, functioned as a de facto rent review agreed by the tenant's signature. That route is closed. Rent increases in periodic tenancies must now follow the Section 13 procedure, meaning a prescribed notice, a minimum notice period, and a tenant right to challenge at the First-tier Tribunal. The tribunal's jurisdiction to set a market rent is now the ceiling, not a backstop. Landlords who have not yet internalised the Section 13 process as their sole mechanism for upward rent adjustment are operating with an outdated mental model of how their income can be managed.

Mortgage compliance adds a further layer of complexity that is receiving insufficient attention in the immediate post-commencement commentary. A significant proportion of buy-to-let mortgage products contain covenants requiring the landlord to grant assured shorthold tenancies with fixed terms of at least six or twelve months. Those products were written against a legal framework that no longer exists. Lenders have been updating their terms at varying speeds, and some have confirmed that periodic tenancies are acceptable under revised covenant language. Others have not. Landlords with existing facilities who are now granting new tenancies should not assume their lender has quietly adapted. The obligation to check sits with the borrower, and a breach of mortgage covenant, even an inadvertent one triggered by a change in the law, can in principle allow a lender to enforce. The prudent course is written confirmation from the lender before any new tenancy is granted.

How Should Landlords Restructure Their Letting Agreements and Void Period Assumptions?

The abolition of fixed terms forces a fundamental rethink of tenancy documentation. The standard AST template that solicitors and letting agents have been issuing for three decades is now legally incorrect as a starting instrument. A periodic tenancy agreement requires different drafting, particularly around the notice provisions available to each party, the rent review mechanism, and the grounds on which possession can be sought. Landlords who are self-managing and relying on downloaded templates should treat any document that still references a fixed term as a liability rather than a protection.

On possession, the critical shift is that the Section 21 no-fault route is gone entirely. Every possession claim must now be grounded in one of the statutory grounds set out in Schedule 2 to the Housing Act 1988 as amended by the Renters' Rights Act. The expanded grounds include new provisions for landlords wishing to sell or move in a family member, but those grounds carry notice requirements and a prohibition on re-letting within twelve months of recovering possession. The practical consequence is that a landlord who recovers a property under the selling ground, then finds the sale falls through and decides to re-let, faces a potential unlawful eviction claim and financial penalty if that re-let occurs within the prohibited window. Shared owners may ultimately be carved out of the twelve-month rule, but that exemption is not yet confirmed in statute, and relying on anticipated secondary legislation before it is enacted is not a defensible position.

Void period modelling also changes structurally. Under a fixed term, a landlord could reasonably project the minimum tenancy length and price their offering accordingly, accepting a lower monthly rent in exchange for a twelve-month lock-in. That trade-off is gone. A tenant can now give one month's notice at any point after the tenancy begins, which means a landlord could, in theory, incur the full cost of tenancy setup, referencing, and any incentive offered to secure a tenant, only to face a void after six weeks. This is not an argument for panic, because most tenants have rational reasons to stay put, but it is a structural shift in the risk profile of each letting that should be reflected in rent pricing rather than absorbed silently.

The forward-looking question for landlords is not whether they can restore some version of the fixed-term dynamic through creative drafting. They cannot. The question is whether the periodic tenancy model, properly understood and properly priced, remains a commercially viable proposition for their specific portfolio. For landlords with properties in high-demand urban markets where tenant turnover is low by choice rather than by contract, the practical impact of abolition will be modest. For landlords operating in student markets, where the annual cycle of occupation has been engineered around the September-to-June fixed term for decades, the disruption is acute and the solutions are not yet settled. Student tenancies are not categorically exempt from the Act, and the government's stated intention to consult on a specific student ground for possession has not yet produced legislation. That gap is live risk, not resolved policy.

Landlords who treat the commencement of the Renters' Rights Act as an administrative inconvenience to be managed through template updates are underestimating the depth of the structural change. The fixed term was not merely a contractual convenience. It was the load-bearing column of a letting model built around predictable income, lender covenant compliance, and manageable possession timelines. Its removal requires rebuilding around a different set of assumptions, and the landlords who do that work now, with properly drafted agreements, confirmed lender positions, and repriced rents that reflect the new risk profile, are the ones who will remain solvent when those who deferred the work face the consequences.