As of 31 July 2026, any Section 21 notice served before 1 May that had not had court proceedings issued is time-barred. The transitional protection is finished. Section 21 no longer exists in any form.
If you got your claim issued in time, nothing here applies to you — your claim proceeds as normal.
If you did not, this is where you stand.
Your old notice is gone, and it cannot be revived
There is no extension, no discretionary window, and no route to rely on a notice that is now out of time. It does not matter how valid the notice was when it was served, or how close to the deadline you came. Starting again means starting again.
That is worth stating plainly because the most common reaction we see is a search for a workaround. There isn’t one.
What starting again looks like
You need a Section 8 ground. Which one depends entirely on why you want possession.
Selling the property? Ground 1A. Moving in yourself, or a close family member? Ground 1 — though note this is not available to limited-company landlords. Both require the tenancy to have run for a minimum period, and both carry a restricted re-letting period afterwards that is considerably longer than the twelve months usually quoted — realistically sixteen months or more once notice and court timelines are counted. Breaching it carries civil penalties of up to £40,000.
Serious arrears? Ground 8, which is mandatory if the threshold is met at both notice and hearing. Be careful here: arrears arising specifically from a delay in a tenant’s Universal Credit housing payment cannot count toward the threshold.
Anti-social behaviour or breach of terms? Discretionary grounds, where the court weighs the evidence and may still refuse possession. The quality of your documentation does most of the work.
Notice periods run to four months for the most common grounds. Then the court queue, currently around 34 weeks from claim to possession order.
The honest timeline
If you start today on Ground 1A, you are realistically looking at four months’ notice plus eight months of court process before you have a possession order, and longer if enforcement is needed. That is next summer, not this autumn.
What to do this week
Work out your actual ground before you do anything else. Serving the wrong notice restarts the clock again, and that is the mistake that turns twelve months into eighteen.
Assemble the evidence first. For Ground 1A, that means genuinely marketing the property for sale. For Ground 1, something supporting the stated intention. Courts are looking harder at intent than they did, and a contested claim with thin evidence is a claim you lose slowly and expensively.
Check your compliance file before you serve. Deposit protection, gas safety, EICR, the Information Sheet. A defect in any of them hands the tenant a defence, and you will not find out until you are already months in.
And consider whether possession is what you actually want. A surprising number of the landlords who come to us at this point discover, on working the numbers, that the outcome they wanted was a different tenant or a properly evidenced rent increase — both of which are dramatically faster and cheaper than a possession claim.
General information about a legal deadline, not legal advice on your circumstances. If you have a live possession matter, speak to a solicitor or your landlord association without delay.
Need a second opinion?
We’re Property Lounge, an ARLA Propertymark accredited lettings agency in Guildford. If anything above raised a question about your own property, we’re happy to talk it through — whether or not you’re a client, and whether or not you ever become one. No charge, no obligation, and we won’t chase you afterwards.
You can see how our fully managed lettings service works, what it costs, or book a free rental valuation.
Call 01483 369209 or email lettings@propertylounge.co.uk.
