What replaced the How to Rent guide in England

If you are looking for the How to Rent guide, it no longer exists in England. It was withdrawn on 1 May 2026 and replaced by the Renters' Rights Act Information Sheet 2026, which is the document you now give a tenant before the tenancy is agreed.

It is free to download from GOV.UK, in standard, large-print and easy-read formats. It is not a renamed version of the old guide — it is a different document, setting out the tenant's rights under the Act, and serving the old one does not discharge the duty.

What to do with an old copy

If you have a PDF of the How to Rent guide saved in a folder, or attached to a welcome-pack template, or sitting in an email draft you reuse — delete it rather than leaving it somewhere it might be attached by mistake. The failure mode here is not forgetting to serve a document. It is serving the wrong one, confidently, from a template that worked for years.

The same goes for a move-in checklist that names the guide, and for any letting particulars or tenant-facing page that references it.

When you serve it

Before the tenancy is agreed. It belongs with the things that have to have happened before the tenant moves in, rather than in the paperwork you catch up on afterwards.

There is also a deadline that has already passed, and it is the part of this most likely to apply without your knowing. GOV.UK states that landlords had to give the Information Sheet to tenants on existing tenancies by 31 May 2026, with a penalty of up to £7,000 for not doing so.

That deadline is the reason this is worth checking rather than assuming. A tenancy that started in 2024 and has been running quietly ever since is exactly the kind that never triggered a reason to open the file.

If you never served it

Serve it now. It is a free download, the tenant is entitled to have it, and a gap you have closed is in a materially better position than one you have not.

Under the old regime a landlord might have waited for the renewal to tidy this up. That option has gone: fixed terms were abolished by the same Act, so an assured tenancy in England is periodic from the day it starts and there is no renewal date coming. Whatever you do about this, you do it on a date you choose. We wrote about that change and what else moved with it in what the Renters' Rights Act actually changed for a private landlord.

Proving you served it, which is the harder half

Serving the Information Sheet takes a minute. Proving, eighteen months later, that you served it is the part that catches people, and it is not a problem the document itself solves.

There is no receipt. Nobody countersigns it. If a dispute arises and you cannot show it was provided, you are relying on your own recollection of an ordinary afternoon that you have no particular reason to remember.

What actually works is deciding, before it matters, how it gets recorded:

• Send it in a way that leaves a dated trail. An email with the document attached, or a link to the GOV.UK page, timestamps itself and survives you changing phone, laptop or letting arrangements.
• Record it against the tenancy, not in your inbox. An inbox is organised by date, not by property. Two tenancies and four years later, the thing you need is a record filed under the tenancy it belongs to.
• Do it at the same point every time. A step that happens at a consistent moment in your process is one you can testify to as a habit, which is worth considerably more than remembering one specific occasion.

None of that requires software. It requires a decision, made once, and then followed.

How Tenarize handles it

The Information Sheet is an item on the compliance checklist, sitting alongside the certificates for the same reason they do: it has to have happened before the tenancy starts, and afterwards it is very hard to prove it happened at all unless it was recorded at the time.

That item requires a document, deliberately: you cannot tick it and move on. Attaching the copy you served is what turns "I am sure I sent it" into something with a date on it, filed against the tenancy it belongs to. The tenant's own portal is where the documents they are entitled to live, so the copy they were given and the record that they were given it are the same event rather than two things to reconcile later.

Where to check this yourself

• The Renters' Rights Act Information Sheet 2026 — the document itself, free to download in all three formats
• Renters' Rights Act: an overview for landlords — GOV.UK's summary of what changed on 1 May 2026
• Renting out a property — where this sits among a landlord's other duties in England

If you are unsure whether a particular tenancy was served correctly, that is a question for advice rather than a blog post. Shelter and Citizens Advice are both free and independent.

Serving the Information Sheet is a minute's work. Being able to show you served it, to a particular tenant, on a particular date, is the part worth having a system for. In Tenarize it is an item on the compliance checklist that requires the document rather than just a tick, and the tenant sees their copy in their own portal.

It is £15 a month for one to five properties, with the first month free. The help centre is free to read either way.