The Renters' Rights Bill: what landlords need to track from day one
An Energy Performance Certificate is a piece of paper that costs about £80 and lasts ten years. It feels like the easiest part of property compliance: get one, file it, forget it for a decade.
The hidden cost shows up the day it expires. And in 2026, with MEES tightening and the C-rating proposals on the runway, that expiry now affects more than the marketing brochure.
What an expired EPC actually stops you doing
Letting
You cannot legally market a property to let, or grant a new tenancy, without a valid EPC of E or above. Letting agents who advertise without one are exposed to fines from Trading Standards. The fine for the landlord is up to £5,000 per breach, applied per property and per tenancy. A portfolio with twelve expired EPCs that all let on the same day is a five-figure exposure.
Evicting
Section 21 cannot be served without a valid EPC having been provided to the tenant. If the EPC expired during the tenancy and was never replaced, you have to refresh it before serving notice. That is a delay measured in weeks for the inspection, plus weeks to a re-let if the new EPC scores below E. We have seen landlords lose three months of possession because of an expired EPC nobody noticed.
Remortgaging
Most BTL lenders now check the EPC at remortgage. Many will not lend on F or G properties. Some will reduce the LTV on D and below. An expired EPC means an old rating; an old rating means the lender treats it pessimistically; the rate moves against you.
The decent home standard
The Renters’ Rights Bill brings the decent home standard into the private rented sector. The standard’s warmth criterion uses the EPC reference data. An expired EPC means there is no current evidence the property meets the standard, which means the local authority can serve an improvement notice on a property you genuinely have made energy improvements to but never re-certificated.
The 2030 problem
Government proposals (consultation closed late 2024, response due in 2026) are to require all new tenancies to be at C or above from 2028, and all existing tenancies from 2030. For a property currently at D or E, the route to a C is rarely cheap — cavity insulation, double glazing, sometimes a heating system replacement.
Landlords who let with an expiring EPC right now are sitting on a clock. If the property re-certificates at E in 2026, that is the last let-able rating before the C requirement bites. The right time to plan the upgrade is now, not the month before the new tenancy.
The administrative side
The reason landlords miss EPC expiries is rarely ignorance. It is administrative drift:
- EPC expires in October, but the tenancy is on a 12-month fixed term ending in March. Nobody checks the EPC at the renewal point.
- The portfolio uses one spreadsheet, and the EPC column is sorted by address, not by expiry date.
- The original PDF is on a former employee’s laptop, not in any shared system.
- The certificate was issued under a previous owner; the new owner’s records start from purchase, with no link back to the certificate.
None of these are dramatic. They are the ordinary slippage that catches careful people on busy weeks.
The fix
An EPC is a record on the property, not on the tenancy. The system holding it should:
- Show every property where the EPC expires within 12 months.
- Show every property below E now, and below C after 2028.
- Auto-pull from the central EPC register at periodic intervals so the rating stays current without re-keying.
- Block a re-letting workflow where the EPC is missing or below the threshold.
That is what we have built into our property platform. If you want to know how many of your properties are about to fall through the EPC trapdoor, we can run the numbers.