Four free calculators for the landlord dates that are easiest to get wrong

There are now four free calculators at tenarize.com/tools. They take no account, no email address and no card, they answer the question completely on the page, and three of the four run the same statutory logic the Tenarize product runs — from a copy of the same code, checked automatically so the two cannot drift apart.

They exist because of a pattern in the questions landlords actually ask. Almost none of them are about the law in general. They are about a date: is this notice long enough, have I still got time, when does this certificate run out, when does this reach me. And a date is the one part of a legal duty where being nearly right is the same as being wrong.

The problem with these particular dates

Four duties, four ways the arithmetic goes wrong quietly.

Notice periods are not one number. A Section 8 notice can require anything from two weeks to four months depending on which ground you cite, and where you cite several, the longest one binds the whole notice. A landlord who cites serious arrears alongside a ground for moving back in has given a four-month notice, whatever they wrote on it.

The deposit clock starts a day earlier than people count it. The deposit protection duties run "within the period of 30 days beginning with" the day the deposit is received. "Beginning with" makes the day of receipt day one, so the last lawful day is the date of receipt plus twenty-nine. Count from the following morning, as almost everyone does, and you have given yourself a deadline one day after the real one.

A certificate interval is not always the interval. An EICR lasts at most five years — but if the report itself specifies an earlier retest date, that earlier date is the one that binds. And Legionella risk assessments have no statutory interval at all, so any tool that hands you an anniversary for one has invented a legal deadline.

Landlord registration has a rumour problem. The Private Rented Sector Database has a launch date, a fee and a set of regional dates circulating, and not all of those come from the government.

What being a day out actually costs

None of these are duties where the cost scales with how wrong you were.

A notice that is too short does not get shortened by the court or held over until it ripens. The possession claim is refused, and the period starts again from the day you serve a corrected one — so a fortnight's miscalculation costs the whole notice period plus however long it took to find out.

A deposit protected on day thirty-one is not slightly late. It is a breach, and it stays a breach after you fix it: the tenant's ability to apply to the court survives you eventually complying. Both halves of that duty carry it independently, which is the part that catches people — putting the money in a scheme and never sending the prescribed information is a complete failure of the duty, not half of one.

A lapsed gas safety certificate is a criminal matter rather than an administrative one, and the gap between "I renewed it in the spring" and "I renewed it fourteen months ago" is invisible until somebody asks.

And the certificates are about to become considerably harder to be vague about, because landlord registration will ask you to upload them with their dates.

The common shape: you do not find out you were wrong at the moment you were wrong. You find out at the moment it matters, which is the worst possible moment to be starting a four-month clock.

The four tools

Section 8 notice period

Pick the grounds you are citing and the date you are serving, and it shows the earliest date each ground allows a notice to expire — and which of them is setting the deadline for the whole notice. Sixteen grounds, with their statutory minimums: four months, two months, four weeks or two weeks depending on the ground, and none at all for grounds 7A and 14.

What it will not do is tell you whether a ground applies to your situation, or that your notice is valid. Choosing the ground is yours, and a notice can be exactly the right length and still fail on the form, the service or what was outstanding at the time.

Deposit protection deadline

Enter the date the deposit reached you and it gives you the last lawful day for both duties — the money into an authorised scheme, and the prescribed information to the tenant. It counts the way the statute counts, which is the whole reason the page exists.

It gives you a date. It cannot know whether the money actually arrived at a scheme, or whether what you sent your tenant was the prescribed information rather than a covering email.

Certificate expiry date

Pick a certificate and its issue date and it gives you the expiry, plus the date to have the next visit booked by. It carries the rules that trip people up rather than smoothing them over: a gas check carried out in the two months before expiry keeps the original anniversary, so booking early does not shorten your next cycle — a genuinely useful rule that a lot of landlords have never been told. The EPC runs ten years. The EICR runs five at most, with the report's own retest date overriding it.

Legionella and fire risk assessments deliberately get no date, because the law sets none.

Landlord database registration

Whether the new register applies to a property, and when registration opens where it is. Pick your region from the nine the draft regulations name and it gives you the date — 15 December 2026 in the West Midlands, running through to 15 August 2027 in the South West.

It is careful about two things, and they are what make it worth a page. Eight of those nine dates exist only in an instrument that is still in draft, so the tool says "(draft)" against them rather than presenting all nine as settled. And it separates what the government has published from what is merely circulating: the £65 annual fee is named as the rumour it is, because regulation 14 sets no amount at all, and no regional deadline is offered, because the dates are when registration opens rather than when it closes.

What they cannot tell you, in writing

Every one of the four carries a limits section, and those sections are not small print bolted on at the end. They are the reason the rest of the page is worth reading.

A tool that computes a legal date and does not say what it cannot see is inviting you to trust it further than it has earned. So each page says outright: it does arithmetic on dates you type in, it does not advise, and having an in-date certificate is not the same thing as being compliant — the gas check still has to have been done by a Gas Safe registered engineer, the EICR's remedial work still has to have been carried out, and the tenant still has to have been given a copy.

Each page also carries the date its rules were last read at source, and names the document somebody has to re-read to move that date. A page that computes a statutory deadline and will not say when it was last checked is asking for a kind of trust it has not done the work for.

Where these came from

The three statutory calculators are not reimplementations of what Tenarize does. They run copies of the product's own modules — the Section 8 grounds table, the deposit deadline logic, the certificate intervals — and a check in our build fails if a copy drifts from the original.

That matters more than it sounds. Two different answers to "is this notice long enough", one on a public page and one inside the product, would be worse than either being wrong on its own. So a landlord working out a notice period at tenarize.com/tools and a landlord reading a warning inside Tenarize are being told the same thing by the same code.

The landlord database checker is the exception, and worth naming as one: there is no product feature behind it, because there is no register to integrate with yet. It runs against GOV.UK's announcement and the draft regulations, and nothing else — so it carries no drift check, and we would not claim it does.

What this changes

The everyday version of these four duties is not dramatic. It is a landlord with a deposit in their account on a Tuesday, a certificate somewhere in an email thread, and a rough sense that there is time. The calculators turn each of those into a date on a screen in about fifteen seconds, which is roughly fifteen seconds less than it takes to decide to look it up properly later.

If you want the dates to arrive rather than be looked up, that is the product: expiry reminders before a certificate lapses rather than after, the deposit deadline tracked from the date the money was actually received and recorded as done on time or done late rather than folded into one tick, and Section 8 grounds with the earliest valid expiry worked out from the ones you cite and a warning naming the ground if you set it shorter. Tenarize warns and saves anyway, because the same field records a tenant's notice to quit and a court order — it does not decide for you whether your notice is good.

But the calculators are free, they are complete, and there is nothing to sign up to. If all you needed was the date, take the date.

Where to check this yourself

• Repossessing your privately rented property after 1 May 2026 — GOV.UK, and the grounds for possession guidance
• Deposit protection schemes and landlords — GOV.UK, including the three approved schemes
• Landlords' responsibility for gas safety — HSE, with the Gas Safe Register
• Electrical safety standards in the private rented sector — GOV.UK, the EICR guidance
• Minimum energy efficiency standard: landlord guidance and find an energy certificate — GOV.UK
• Legionella: landlords' responsibilities — HSE
• Implementing the Renters' Rights Act 2025: our roadmap — GOV.UK, for the database and the ombudsman
• Shelter and Citizens Advice — free, independent advice on a specific situation

The four calculators are at tenarize.com/tools, free and without an account. If you want the dates tracked for you rather than calculated one at a time, Tenarize is £15 a month for one to five properties and the first month is free. The help centre is free to read either way.