Every tenancy is periodic now: what changed

Since 1 May 2026 there is one kind of assured tenancy left in the private rented sector, and it is a periodic tenancy. Every new let starts as an assured periodic tenancy. Every assured shorthold tenancy that was running on that date converted to one automatically, with no new agreement to sign and nothing for either side to do. A periodic tenancy rolls on from one rent period to the next with no end date built into it, which is a real change to how you plan around a property rather than a paperwork tidy up.

Most landlords we deal with across Doncaster and Rotherham had taken in the Section 21 headline. Fewer had worked out what losing the fixed term does to the ordinary running of a tenancy, and that is the part that turns up in practice about four months later, usually at an awkward moment.

What a rolling assured periodic tenancy actually is

The tenancy runs in periods that follow the rent. Rent paid monthly means the tenancy rolls month to month. Each period runs into the next automatically, indefinitely, and the tenancy continues until the tenant brings it to an end or a court grants you possession on one of the revised Section 8 grounds.

There is no expiry date. There is no renewal. There is nothing to extend, and nothing that lapses if you forget to do anything on a particular day. That last point is worth sitting with, because a lot of landlord admin used to hang off the renewal date: the rent review, the inspection, the decision about whether to keep the tenant, the gas safety appointment that was always booked to suit the anniversary. All of that now has to be diarised on its own.

The government has an overview of the Act aimed at landlords which sets out the tenancy structure in short form. If you have not read anything official since the spring, start there rather than with a forum thread.

The conversion happened whether you noticed or not

Existing tenancies converted on 1 May 2026 by operation of the Act. Your old AST paperwork did not become void, but the clauses in it that depend on a fixed term stopped having any effect. A twelve month term written into an agreement signed in 2025 does not bind either party now.

You also had a duty to give existing tenants the government information sheet for tenants by 31 May 2026. If that slipped, serve it now and keep a dated record of how you sent it. Late is better than not at all, and it costs you nothing but the ten minutes.

Notice now runs mostly in one direction

This is the asymmetry landlords find uncomfortable, and it is worth stating plainly rather than softening.

The tenant can end the tenancy at any point by giving two months' notice to quit. They do not need a reason, they do not need your agreement, and there is no minimum period they have to stay first.

You cannot end it at all except through the courts. Possession is only available on the revised Section 8 grounds, and a number of those grounds carry four months' notice. The rent arrears ground needs three months' rent outstanding before a possession order is available. Antisocial behaviour has a shorter notice period and you can apply to the court immediately. Our post on the revised possession grounds and how they work in practice goes through them properly, because the choice of ground now decides your timescale before anything else does.

So the practical position is that a tenant can be gone in two months and you cannot get a property back in less than four unless behaviour is the issue. Plan on that basis.

What it does to void planning

The old model was a fixed term ending in, say, June, followed by a decision. You knew roughly when the risk fell and you could schedule works, marketing and finance around it. That model has gone.

Voids are not necessarily more frequent now. They are less predictable, which is a different problem and in some ways a more annoying one. A few things follow from it:

• Keep the property continuously lettable rather than doing everything in a burst before a known end date. Deferred works become a problem when notice arrives in November.
• Keep a cash reserve sized for a void you did not see coming, not for a void you planned.
• Keep the gas safety certificate, EICR and EPC live and to hand. If you are scrambling for compliance documents after notice is served, you lose weeks of marketing time you did not need to lose.
• Expect seasonality to hit you differently. A tenancy that would once have ended in a busy summer market can now end in the second week of January. Demand across Doncaster, Barnsley and Sheffield is genuinely thinner then.

The counterweight is that re-letting is faster if the property is ready and priced sensibly, so the way to manage the unpredictability is on the residential lettings side rather than in the tenancy agreement. There is nothing left in the agreement to fix it with.

The worry about tenants leaving early

The common version of this is that periodic tenancies mean tenants will churn, and a landlord who used to have twelve months of certainty now has two.

Two honest points. First, nobody has reliable data yet on how tenant behaviour has changed since May, and anyone quoting you a percentage this early is making it up. Give it a couple of years. Second, moving is expensive and disruptive for tenants as well, and the deposit, the removals and the time off work have not got cheaper. Most people do not move because a clause stopped applying to them.

What you can influence is ordinary and unglamorous. Fix things when they are reported. Answer messages. Do not push the rent to the top of what the market might just about bear, because you now get one increase a year, it has to be served on Form 4A with at least two months' notice, and the tenant can challenge anything above open market rent at tribunal. An increase that provokes a challenge and a move costs more than the increase was worth.

Selling a tenanted property

Fixed terms used to give both sides a natural exit point for a sale. Now there is no such point, so the sequence matters.

You cannot use the sale ground, or the moving in ground, during the first twelve months of a tenancy. That is a hard block. After twelve months the sale ground is available with four months' notice, so from a standing start you are looking at a meaningful lead time before vacant possession, plus court time if the tenant does not leave.

The other route is to sell with the tenant in place to another landlord, which for a decent tenant on a sensible rent is often the better outcome and a quicker one. Either way, get the deposit position straight first. Under the Act a possession order is only available if the deposit was properly protected, returned, or the dispute over it resolved, so a deposit that was protected late or never protected at all is now a possession problem and not just a penalty risk. The rules on protecting a tenancy deposit have not changed, but the consequence of getting them wrong has. We use the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, membership G13462, for deposits we hold. If a sale is likely, speak to a solicitor before you serve anything.

The AST paperwork online is now wrong

A large amount of the free tenancy paperwork circulating on the internet still assumes a world that ended on 1 May 2026. Template agreements with a six or twelve month fixed term. Clauses saying the tenancy will continue as a statutory periodic tenancy afterwards. References to Section 21, to break clauses, to renewal fees. Old prescribed forms, and Section 21 claim forms that lapsed for good after 31 July 2026.

Using one of those does not make your tenancy an AST again, because the tenancy type comes from the Act and not from what you wrote down. It does make your agreement misleading to the tenant, it can create clauses that are unenforceable, and it makes you look like a landlord who has not kept up if the matter ever reaches a tribunal or the ombudsman. Check the date on anything you download. If it does not reference the Renters' Rights Act by name, discard it. Our summary of what the Act requires from landlords now covers the wider set of changes, including rental bidding, rent in advance and pet requests, all of which affect the pre tenancy paperwork as much as the agreement itself.

Where to start

Pull out your current agreements and identify every clause that refers to a fixed term, a renewal or Section 21. Note the date each tenancy started, because the twelve month block on the sale and moving in grounds runs from that date and you will want it to hand. Then set your own reminders for rent reviews and safety certificates, since the renewal date that used to prompt them no longer exists.

If you would rather not track that per property, it is part of what we do on managed lettings across Doncaster, on one all in fee with no setup, renewal, inspection or admin charges. Call the office on 01302 244104 if you want to talk through a specific tenancy.