A tenant stops paying rent — and you find out four weeks later

If a tenant in England stops paying, you have a route from the first missed payment — Grounds 10 and 11 cover arrears below the serious threshold and persistent late payment, both with four weeks' notice — and a much stronger one at three months' arrears, where Ground 8 becomes mandatory. What decides whether any of that works is not the size of the debt. It is whether you can put a date on every payment that was due, every payment that arrived, and everything you did about the gap.

That is the part a monthly statement cannot give you. And if an agent collects your rent, a monthly statement is usually how you find out.

The gap between "not paid" and "you know about it"

Rent falls due on a date. The agent's rent statement arrives on a different date — usually once a month, usually a week or two after the collection run, and usually after the money would already have reached you. So the earliest a landlord on a managed tenancy tends to learn about a missed payment is somewhere between two and six weeks after it was missed.

For a single late payment that is a nuisance. For a tenant who has genuinely stopped paying, it is the difference between a conversation in week one and a conversation in week five, and those are not the same conversation. In week one you are asking whether something has gone wrong. In week five you are asking for two months' rent from someone who has now had four weeks to decide they are not going to pay it.

The second half of the gap is worse and less visible. When the statement finally arrives, it tells you the position — it does not hand you the record. The dated ledger of what was due and what arrived, the emails sent, the dates of them, the tenant's replies: all of that sits in an agency's system, under their file reference, and you will not see it until you ask for it. Usually you ask for it at the exact moment you need it, which is the worst moment to start.

What the law actually gives you

Since 1 May 2026 there is one landlord-initiated route to possession in England, and it is a Section 8 notice on a statutory ground. Three of the sixteen grounds relevant to a private landlord are about rent:

• Ground 8 — at least three months' rent arrears, or thirteen weeks where rent is paid weekly or fortnightly. Mandatory, which means the court must order possession if the ground is made out. Four weeks' notice.
• Ground 10 — some rent arrears, below the Ground 8 threshold. Discretionary. Four weeks' notice.
• Ground 11 — the tenant has persistently delayed paying rent, whether or not they are in arrears now. Discretionary. Four weeks' notice.

Mandatory and discretionary is the distinction worth understanding before anything else. On a mandatory ground, if you prove the facts, the court orders possession. On a discretionary ground, the court also asks whether it is reasonable to order possession, and it decides that on the evidence in front of it. Ground 11 in particular is a claim about a pattern — "persistently" is not a number, it is a history — and a history you cannot produce in dated form is a history you do not have.

Where several grounds are cited, the longest notice period applies. And choosing the ground is a legal decision rather than an administrative one: this is general information about how the grounds are structured, not advice on which one fits your situation.

There is also a trap underneath all of it that has nothing to do with arrears. Since 1 May 2026, a court cannot make a possession order on any ground except 7A or 14 while a tenancy deposit duty is still outstanding — the money not in an approved scheme, or the prescribed information never given to the tenant. That is Housing Act 2004 section 215, as rewritten by the Act. A landlord with a watertight Ground 8 case and a deposit the agent protected late, or protected without ever sending the prescribed information, does not get an order. Deposit protection is not a separate topic from arrears. It is a precondition of doing anything about them.

What charging interest does, and what it does not

You can charge interest on late rent, within a cap. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 permits it at the Bank of England base rate plus three percentage points, and only once the rent is more than fourteen days overdue. Flat late fees of your own invention are not permitted.

Two things are worth knowing about that. The first is that it is small — it is interest, not a penalty, and on one month's rent it will not change anybody's behaviour. The second is that it runs from the due date, which makes it one more thing that depends entirely on the due date being recorded somewhere you can point at. The value of the charge is not the money. It is that it exists in the record as a dated consequence, applied consistently, from the day the rent was actually due.

What it costs to leave this as it is

The realistic version is not a dramatic one. It is a tenancy that drifts.

Month one is paid eleven days late and nobody mentions it, because the statement nets it off against the month before and the difference is invisible. Month two arrives short. Month three does not arrive at all. By the time that reaches a statement you are into month four, and you are now three months down — on £1,000 a month that is £3,000 you have not been paid, and the arithmetic is the same whatever your rent is: three months of it.

At that point you want Ground 8, because Ground 8 is the strong one. But you have to show the arrears stood at three months both when the notice was served and at the hearing, and the ledger that proves it belongs to a company you pay a percentage to. You may also want Ground 11 in support, which rests on the eleven-days-late month nobody ever told you about. And if the deposit was taken and dealt with by somebody else, section 215 is sitting there waiting to be checked against paperwork you have never seen.

None of those is a catastrophe on its own. Together they are the difference between a possession claim that is a formality and one that is an argument — months longer, with the rent still not arriving throughout.

Where Tenarize fits

Tenarize is software for private landlords in England who manage their own properties. It does not chase your tenant for you, and that is worth being plain about: there is exactly one automated message in this whole area, a single email to the tenant the day after the rent was due. Nothing repeating, nothing escalating, no automated pursuit on your behalf. Asking a person for money is a conversation between two people, and software that implies otherwise is selling you something.

What it does is remove the delay, and keep the record.

Rent is collected by Bacs Direct Debit, charged directly on your own Stripe account, with Tenarize taking no percentage of it. Bacs is not instant — up to seven working days on a new mandate, around four once it is established — and it is slower than a standing order. What it produces that a standing order does not is a dated, per-cycle record of what was charged, what cleared, what failed, and when.

The Arrears card on the Payments page is the live answer to who is behind right now: every active tenancy past its due day and unpaid, sorted by how overdue it is, with the property, the tenant, the days overdue and the amount. It is deliberately a different thing from the rent report beside it, which covers a historical range. A payment still moving through Bacs counts as paid, so a tenant who has done everything right does not appear on the list.

Your tenant sees the same position you do — that the rent is overdue, and by how many days — because it is the same calculation behind both views. You are not chasing somebody who has been shown nothing.

Late-payment interest can be switched on per tenancy at your own rate. Tenarize enforces the statutory cap twice: it refuses to save a rate above the current cap, and it recalculates the cap each time interest accrues, so a rate that becomes unlawful because the base rate fell is reduced automatically rather than quietly continuing. It accrues from the due date and becomes chargeable only past fourteen days. The tenant settles it as a separate payment, never bundled into rent. You can waive what has accrued for a cycle without switching the charge off — which is the version of this most landlords actually want.

If it gets as far as a notice, the Section 8 grounds are listed with their statutory minimum notice periods, and Tenarize works out the earliest valid expiry from the grounds you cite and pre-fills it. You can overwrite that date — the same field records a tenant's own notice to quit and a court order, where those periods do not apply — and if what you enter is shorter than a ground allows, it names the ground and the earliest valid date. It tells you; it does not stop you. It raises the section 215 warning on the same form where a deposit duty on that tenancy is still outstanding, which is the failure most likely to be discovered at a hearing rather than before one. Choosing the ground and serving the notice remain yours.

Everything logged against the tenancy comes out as a dated audit trail — a PDF, running from the day you took the tenancy on, that you can put in front of a court without reconstructing anything first.

What actually changes

You find out on day two instead of week five, from a list rather than a statement. The awkward conversation happens while it is still a conversation about one month, which is the only point at which it is an easy one. If it goes further, the ledger is already dated, already yours, and already in a form somebody else can read — and the deposit question that would have sunk the claim at the hearing came up on the notice form instead.

The debt is still the tenant's to pay, and no software changes that. What changes is that you never again work out what happened to your own property from a document somebody else wrote a month after the fact.

Where to check this yourself

• Repossessing your privately rented property after 1 May 2026 — GOV.UK, and the grounds for possession guidance behind it
• Housing Act 2004, section 215 — when a court may not make a possession order because of a deposit
• Deposit protection schemes and landlords — GOV.UK, including the approved schemes
• Tenant Fees Act 2019 — what may and may not be charged to a tenant
• Renting out a property — GOV.UK's overview of a landlord's duties in England
• Shelter and Citizens Advice — free, independent advice on a specific situation

If arrears on a live tenancy are already serious, that is a question for advice rather than a blog post. The two above are free, and neither will tell you only what you want to hear.

If you are weighing up collecting the rent yourself, the letting agent fee calculator puts your agent's annual cost next to Tenarize's on your own rent and fee figures, and shows the working. 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.