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The PRS database: what landlords must register, and when

If you let a home in England, you’ll have to put yourself and the property on a new government register over the next year. Its official name is the “Register your rental property” service. Everyone else calls it the PRS database (PRS is short for private rented sector). It came in with the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, and the first region opens on 15 December 2026.

It’s one more piece of admin. Here’s what it actually asks for, what it costs, and the part that catches out landlords who use a letting agent.

Who has to register

You do, if you’re a private landlord in England with a property currently let on an assured or regulated tenancy. An assured tenancy is the standard one for a private let. Companies, trusts, charities and partnerships acting as landlords are in too.

Joint owners each register. One of you registers the property and invites the others. If you part-own the property and are entitled to possession, you count as a joint landlord even if your name isn’t on the tenancy agreement.

An HMO with one licence is one registration for the whole building, not one per room.

Your letting agent can’t do it for you

This is the bit worth reading twice if your agent handles everything.

You have to start the registration yourself, signed in with GOV.UK One Login. Once the property has a registration number, you can ask your letting or managing agent to fill in the tenancy and safety details. But the responsibility stays with you. If the record isn’t complete within 28 days, the registration can be switched off, and that’s your breach, not the agent’s.

Agents can only register a property on your behalf in narrow cases, such as the landlord’s death or incapacity. “I assumed the agent did it” won’t be one of them.

What it asks for

At registration:

• your personal and contact details (or, for a company, its Companies House number and a contact)
• the property address, number of bedrooms and whether it’s currently let
• a correspondence address in England or Wales
• contact details for any managing agent, superior landlord or freeholder

Then, with the registration or within 28 days of it:

• the gas safety certificate, if there’s a gas supply
• the electrical safety certificate (EICR)
• the EPC - the service looks it up on the EPC register and asks you to confirm it’s the right one
• tenancy information, including the rent
• any licence, such as an HMO licence

Keeping it up to date

The database isn’t a one-off form. When something changes, you have 28 days to update it. That includes a new tenancy, a change to your own details, and every safety certificate that’s renewed or expires.

That last one is the easy one to miss if your agent books the gas engineer. The certificate gets renewed, the tenant gets their copy, the agent files it, and nobody tells the database.

There’s a simple tell. If your agent books the work, the renewal shows up as a charge on your monthly statement - “Gas safety certificate £85” or “EICR £180”, say. When you see one of those lines, a new certificate exists, and the 28 days have probably started. Ask the agent for a copy and upload it, or ask them to. If you’re not sure where those lines sit, the guide to reading a letting-agent statement walks through one.

The fee: £65 a property, but less this first year

The fee is £65 per property per year, with no VAT. Registering yourself as a landlord is free, and so is updating a record. A landlord with three properties pays £195 a year.

During the rollout, the first fee is cut so that nobody pays for the days before 15 November 2027. gov.uk gives two examples: registering on 15 December 2026 costs £5.34, and registering on 25 June 2027 costs £39.60. All your properties then renew on the same date, one year after your first registration.

So there’s no saving in waiting until your region’s deadline. Registering early costs less.

The fee is tax-deductible, and gov.uk says so on the guidance page. It goes against your rental income alongside your other allowable expenses. You’ll pay it yourself rather than through your agent, so it won’t appear on your statement. Make a note of it somewhere you’ll find in January.

When your region opens

The register doesn’t close. Each region gets a three-month window to register the properties that are already let, so the government isn’t hit by every landlord in England at once. The second date below is your deadline (before midnight), not the day the service shuts. After it, an unregistered let property in that region is a breach.

You don’t have to wait for your region to open, either. You can register any time from 15 December 2026.

It goes by where the property is, not where you live. If you have properties in more than one region, you can register them all at once from 15 December.

During the rollout, only properties that are let (or get let during that time) have to be registered. An empty property will need registering before it’s advertised in future.

What happens if you don’t

Councils enforce it. The fines are:

• up to £7,000 for not registering yourself or a property
• up to £40,000 for knowingly or recklessly giving false or misleading information, or for repeated breaches

Once your region’s window has opened, a tenant can also apply to the First-tier Tribunal for a rent repayment order against a landlord who should have registered and hasn’t.

Is any of it public?

Not at the moment. gov.uk says landlord and property information isn’t shared publicly now, but some of it may be in future, and it can be shared with other agencies where the law allows. A privacy notice will be updated before any change.

Where the time goes, and where you can get some back

None of this is hard. It’s fiddly, and it repeats: a renewal every year, an upload every time a certificate is renewed, an update every time a tenancy changes. Put it next to Making Tax Digital and the January return and the paperwork side of letting has grown a lot in two years.

If you use an agent, a good part of what the database wants already passes through them. The rent is on every statement. So is every certificate renewal, as a line with a date and an amount. The trouble is getting at it, because a statement is a PDF built for reading, not for looking things up.

That’s the part RentSorter does. Upload your agent’s statement and it comes back as a spreadsheet: rent, fees and every cost on its own row, checked against the statement’s own totals. Filter for “gas” and you’ve got every safety check this year and what it cost. The same sheet gives your accountant the income and expenses for the return.

It won’t register you or remind you about certificates. You’ll still have to do that bit yourself. But you’ll spend less of the year retyping PDFs.

Questions people ask

Before you rely on any of this

This is a plain-English summary of the government’s guidance as published on 29 October 2026, not legal advice. Dates and fees can change, so check gov.uk’s guidance for landlords before you register.