Somewhere between the abolition of Section 21 and the introduction of periodic tenancies, one of the Renters’ Rights Act’s most straightforward obligations has quietly become one of its most commonly missed — and it carries a penalty of up to £7,000.
By 31 May 2026, every landlord in England with an existing tenancy was required to give their tenant the government’s Renters’ Rights Act Information Sheet — a prescribed document explaining, in plain terms, what the Act changes for them. It’s not optional guidance. It’s a legal requirement with a hard deadline and a real penalty attached.
How widespread is the gap? Nine days before the deadline, the government’s own Information Sheet had been downloaded around 153,000 times. Set that against a private rented sector running into several million tenancies, and the arithmetic suggests a significant proportion of landlords either hadn’t served it yet or weren’t aware they needed to. Download numbers don’t map perfectly onto compliance — some landlords will have received copies through their agent or another route — but the gap between the download figure and the size of the sector is hard to explain away entirely.
Two mistakes are catching people out specifically.
The first is treating a website link as service. It doesn’t count. The Information Sheet has to actually reach the tenant — handed over, posted, or emailed directly to them — not simply made available somewhere the tenant could theoretically find it. A link buried in a portal login or a general terms page doesn’t satisfy the requirement.
The second is not being able to prove it happened. This is the one that causes real damage later. If a landlord ever needs to bring a possession claim, a tenant’s defence can include a challenge over whether the Information Sheet was properly served. Without a dated record — an email with a read receipt, a signed acknowledgement, tracked post — a landlord can find themselves unable to prove compliance at exactly the moment it matters most, in the middle of a court process they can least afford to complicate.
What to do if you’re not sure. Check whether the Information Sheet was served to every current tenant, by every method your agent or you actually used, and locate the record. If you can’t find clear evidence, the fix is simple: serve it again now, by a method that creates a paper trail, and keep that record indefinitely. A late service is far better than no service, and dramatically better than being unable to prove either way when it’s tested.
The Information Sheet requirement was never framed as one of the Act’s headline changes — most coverage focused on Section 21 and periodic tenancies. But headline changes get attention by default. This is the one that’s easy to overlook precisely because it sounds administrative, and it’s the one with a specific, quantified financial penalty attached to getting it wrong.
General information, not legal advice. Property Lounge, Guildford.
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