The Renters’ Rights Act: how will the reforms impact the student housing sector?

read time: 5 mins read time: 5 mins
10.10.25 10.10.25

The Renters' Rights Bill is just one step away from receiving Royal Assent and becoming the Renters’ Rights Act. The new legislation will introduce sweeping reforms to the private rented sector which we have considered at length in our previous insights. 

The minister, Baroness Taylor, said it wouldn’t be either right or fair for students to have less flexibility than other tenants just because of their educational status. This article examines what the new legislation means for the student housing sector.

The scope of the changes 

Purpose built student accommodation (PBSA) registered with a specified government approved national code of practice, currently ANUK/Unipol and Universities UK/GuildHE, falls outside of the assured tenancy system. All PBSA tenancies are common law tenancies and therefore the provisions of the Renters’ Rights Act will not apply. 

Student properties known in the industry as 'off-street' properties fall within the scope of the new legislation and it's this type of housing which is the focus of this article.

Key changes and their impact

Farewell fixed-term

Under the new law, any existing assured shorthold tenancies will automatically convert to periodic assured tenancies and 'relevant persons', i.e. landlords and agents, will no longer be able to grant fixed-terms, removing the financial security associated with 12 month fixed-term tenancies. You can read about the implications of this change in more detail here.

Tenants will be able to give two months’ notice at any time to bring their tenancies to an end; this will likely result in many tenants serving notices to quit at the end of the examination season – i.e. May or possibly earlier. Many undergraduate degree lectures and other contact hours stop at the Easter break and, with the majority of exams being on-line, this means that students could head home leaving landlords with empty properties and protracted void periods between academic years.

Abolition of section 21

With the abolition of section 21, landlords will only be able to obtain possession of their properties via one of the expanded statutory grounds for possession. A student housing landlord will be able to rely on one of the new statutory grounds, ground 4A, subject to satisfying the following conditions:

  1. The tenant must be a full-time student at the start of the tenancy or the landlord reasonably believed at the outset of the tenancy that the tenant would become a full-time student during the course of the tenancy.

    The onus is on landlords to verify that the tenant is a full-time student – see schedule 6 of the Education Reform Act 1988.
  2. The landlord must provide the tenant with a pre-tenancy written intent to recover possession. This needs to be given to existing assured shorthold tenants whose tenancies will automatically convert into periodic assured tenancies within one month of the new rules taking effect.
  3. The tenancy must have been entered into, i.e. signed, no earlier than six months prior to its start date. The competitive student letting market means that many landlords are used to tenants signing up nine to twelve months in advance of the new academic year. Landlords must overhaul their marketing timelines or ensure clear reservation agreements are made before formal tenancies are entered into at the start of March to ensure compliance with the new legislation.
  4. Landlords must provide tenants with at least four months’ notice expiring during the period of 1 June to 30 September. Clear planning and diary management will be key to meeting timelines.
  5. The landlord must intend to re-let to another student.

Under the new regime, students must give two months’ notice to their landlords if they wish to move on. By contrast, many of the statutory grounds of possession require landlords to give more than two months’ notice with the new section 4A ground requiring four months. Therefore, if landlords intend to recover possession at the end of the academic year, they might consider serving pre-emptive notices on one of the statutory grounds at least four months prior, even if they anticipate being served with tenant notices to quit.  

Rental periods and pre-tenancy payments

In a recent article we highlighted that rent periods under the new tenancy regime cannot be longer than one calendar month. 

Currently many student letting agreements provide for termly or quarterly rent periods. Termly periods align with student finance payments so students will need to budget carefully to ensure that they can meet their monthly payments.

The Tenant Fees Act 2019 will be updated to include a new 'prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent’. A pre-tenancy payment of rent is prohibited if paid before the tenancy is entered into. Advance payments are routinely requested from students where landlords are unable to guarantee payment of rent. Going forward, landlords will need to rely on professional guarantors to minimise the risk of students falling into arrears. 

Conclusion

Student landlords are looking at strategies to significantly mitigate the impacts of this new regime. 

The PBSA exemption will almost certainly encourage student landlords to look at their portfolios to see whether there is any scope to amalgamate their student properties, to create a larger student development qualifying for registration under one of the codes and exemption from the assured tenancy regime. 

We may see student landlords offering licences to occupy as opposed to tenancies; this is considered at length in an earlier article. Other landlords may simply decide to get out of the student housing market altogether. 

Suffice to say that the Renters’ Rights Act will be a game changer for all landlords, not just those in the student housing sector and we can expect it to be subjected to some serious judicial stress testing following implementation.

For more information about when the Renters’ Rights Act will become law, please read our progress update here. For further information, please contact our property litigation team.

Sign up for legal insights

We produce a range of insights and publications to help keep our clients up-to-date with legal and sector developments.  

Sign up