When does landlord registration reach your region? The draft dates, region by region

Until last week the honest answer to "when does landlord registration reach me?" was that nobody outside the West Midlands knew. That has changed. The draft Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026 set a commencement date for all nine English regions, and they run from 15 December 2026 to 15 August 2027.

They are draft regulations, laid before Parliament and not yet made, so every date below is subject to approval and could still move. But they are the first official document to say which region goes when — and they answer two other questions that the lettings press has been answering badly for a month.

The nine dates

Each region in Schedule 1, with the date the requirement starts there:

• West Midlands — 15 December 2026
• East of England — 15 January 2027
• East Midlands — 15 February 2027
• South East — 15 March 2027
• Yorkshire and Humber — 15 April 2027
• North West — 15 May 2027
• North East — 15 June 2027
• London — 15 July 2027
• South West — 15 August 2027

Two details in that schedule are worth more than the dates themselves.

The first is that each region is defined by naming its local authorities — the West Midlands is "the areas of Birmingham City Council, Coventry City Council, Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council" and so on down the list. So "am I in the West Midlands for this purpose?" is a question with a published answer rather than a guess at a boundary. The schedule pins those areas as they existed on 15 December 2026, which stops a later reorganisation quietly moving somebody's date.

The second is that London is eighth. If you have been reading this as a London-first reform, it is very nearly the opposite.

What your region's date actually means

It is the date registration opens to you, not the date you have to be finished by.

GOV.UK's announcement of 9 September 2026 sets the shape: "When an area is called forward to register, landlords with properties in the region will have a three-month period to sign up." Alongside that sits one hard backstop — "all landlords actively letting property will need to have registered by 14 November 2027."

That backstop is the only completed date the government has published. A three-month window from a regional commencement date gives you an obvious piece of arithmetic, and plenty of people are publishing the result as though it were a government deadline. It is not one yet. Take the window as the rule it is, work from your own region's date, and treat 14 November 2027 as the line nobody is behind.

One scope point from the implementation roadmap that has not changed: the requirements initially apply only to landlords with properties "under let, or which become occupied during rollout". An empty property you are not letting is outside the first wave — until you let it.

The fee: what the regulations actually say

A figure of £65 per property per year has been repeated so widely that it now gets quoted back as fact. It is not in the regulations, and the regulations explain why no figure exists to quote.

Regulation 14 is one sentence: the amount of a fee "is to be determined by the database operator by reference to the relevant costs." The Renters' Rights Act 2025 gives the operator a cost-recovery power, and the draft instrument leaves the number to them. There is no amount in the instrument because the instrument was never going to carry one.

So the position today is that a fee is certain, an annual renewal is certain, and the amount is genuinely unpublished. If you are budgeting for 2027, budget a range and revisit it — do not build a plan on a number no government page carries.

What you actually have to hand over

This is the part that turns a registration exercise into a compliance exercise, and it is the reason to read Schedule 3 now rather than in the week your region opens.

A dwelling entry asks for the address, who the landlord is and how to reach them, the ownership and dwelling type, the number of bedrooms, the current let status, and contact details for a freehold owner, superior landlord or property manager where there is one. Then it asks for the letting itself: the number of occupants and the number of households, the rent, how often it is paid and which utilities it includes, and whether the property is furnished, part furnished or unfurnished.

Then it asks for the safety position, per property:

• Whether HMO, additional or selective licensing applies, with the licence number where there is one
• A copy of the [gas safety](https://www.hse.gov.uk/gas/landlords/) record, if one exists, and its issue date
• A copy of the [EICR](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electrical-safety-standards-in-the-private-and-social-rented-sectors-guidance), or the appropriate installation certificate, and the expiry or issue date
• Whether a valid EPC has to be given to the current tenant, and a copy of the most recent one
• Where the rating is below the minimum energy efficiency standard, whether an exemption is registered

Read that list again as a landlord rather than as a form. You are not being asked whether you are compliant. You are being asked to upload the certificates and state their dates, per property, on a government record, on a date chosen for you.

Why this is a filing problem before it is a form problem

Nothing in Schedule 3 is a new duty. Every certificate on that list was already required. What is new is that the evidence stops living in your email archive and starts living somewhere a regulator can read it, with a date attached, next to your name.

For a landlord with one property and a folder that is genuinely in order, this is an afternoon. For a landlord with six properties, a managing agent who has held the files for years, and a gas certificate that was definitely renewed but is definitely not findable, it is something else. The uncomfortable version of this is not being caught out by the register — it is opening the form and discovering that you cannot answer question 11 for three of your properties, three weeks before your region's window closes.

The other thing worth sitting with: registration renews annually, and the entry stays live. A certificate that lapses is no longer a private problem you will get to. It is a field that has gone out of date on a record you are required to keep current.

Where Tenarize fits

Tenarize will not register you. There is no service to register with yet, nobody can submit anything until 15 December 2026, and when the service opens it will be the landlord's to use. Any product promising otherwise is describing something that does not exist.

What it does do is hold the answers, in the shape the form is going to ask for them. Every property carries its address, type, bedrooms, furnishing status and licensing details as structured fields rather than as notes. Occupancy is counted in people and households, which is the same count Schedule 3 asks for and not the same thing as a bedroom count. Rent, payment frequency and which bills the rent includes are recorded against the tenancy.

The certificates are the part that matters most here. Gas safety, EICR and EPC sit on a compliance checklist with the document itself stored against the property, its expiry date held as a date, and a reminder before it lapses rather than after. From sixty days out you can book the renewal from the reminder — it picks the right trade from your own suppliers and drafts the email, though uploading the new certificate afterwards is still something you do by hand.

None of that is registration. It is the difference between answering Schedule 3 from a screen and answering it from memory.

If you want to know where you stand before the draft regulations are approved, the landlord database checker is free and needs no account — it says what applies to you, and is careful to say which of the widely-quoted figures the government has not actually published. The certificate expiry calculator does the other half.

What changes for you

The register is not the thing to be anxious about. The register is a deadline attached to a question you already had to be able to answer, and the useful effect of a published date is that it converts "I should sort the files out" into a month.

Between now and your region's date, the work is small and finite: know which certificates you hold, know what each one expires on, and know that the next one is booked before it does. Do that and registration is a form-filling afternoon. Leave it and registration is the moment you find out what is missing, with a window closing and a certificate that takes an engineer three weeks to come out for.

Where to check this yourself

• The draft Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026 — legislation.gov.uk, where the nine regional dates, the fee provision and Schedule 3 all come from
• Stronger protections and greater confidence for renters — GOV.UK's announcement of 9 September 2026, for the launch date and the 14 November 2027 backstop
• Implementing the Renters' Rights Act 2025: our roadmap — GOV.UK, for the scope of the first wave and the PRS Landlord Ombudsman
• Landlords' responsibility for gas safety — HSE, with the Gas Safe Register for checking an engineer
• 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
• House in multiple occupation licence — GOV.UK, and your own council for additional or selective schemes
• Shelter and Citizens Advice — free, independent advice on a specific situation

The longer explanation of what the database is, who it covers and how it sits beside the ombudsman is in the private rented sector database explained.

If you would rather your certificate dates were somewhere you can read them off than somewhere you have to go and find them, Tenarize is £15 a month for one to five properties, and the first month is free. The help centre is free to read whether you sign up or not.