The Renters’ Rights Act took effect in England on 1 May 2026. Three months on, the first market data covering the new regime has landed, and it points in one direction: rents on new tenancies are being repriced upward, quickly. Goodlord’s June index puts annual new-let rent inflation in England at 6.5%, its highest reading in almost two years, while the official whole-market measure from the ONS sat unchanged at 3.3% over the same 12 months. The gap between those two numbers is the story, and it matters to anyone who owns or is buying tenanted property.
Rents three months into the Act
Goodlord’s Rental Index is built from tenancies processed through its platform, so it measures rents actually agreed on new lets rather than advertised asking prices. For June 2026 it recorded an average new-let rent in England of £1,309. That is 6.5% higher than the same month last year and 8.1% higher than May. The index had recorded annual inflation of just 1.7% across April and May, so June is a sharp break, not a drift. Goodlord is a lettings platform with a commercial interest in the market it measures, and its index covers its own processed tenancies rather than the whole market, so the figure deserves scrutiny rather than repetition.
The scrutiny comes from the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, published 22 July 2026, which measures the whole rented stock including sitting tenants. It shows average UK private rent up 3.3% in the 12 months to June 2026, to £1,388, a growth rate unchanged from May. England ran at 3.4%, with the North East highest at 6.3% and London lowest at 2.2%.
These two measures are not in conflict. New lets are a small slice of the stock in any given month, so a spike in new-let pricing takes time to show up in the whole-market number. What the pair tells you is where the pressure is: not on sitting tenants, but at the point a tenancy turns over.
Why new lets reprice under the Act
The mechanism is written into the Act. In-tenancy rent increases are now limited to one per year, served through a Section 13 notice that the tenant can challenge at tribunal. Before 1 May, a landlord who underpriced a new tenancy could correct it within months. Now the opening rent has to carry the full year, and any correction waits twelve months and survives a possible tribunal reference. Priced that way, a higher opening rent is not opportunism. It is the rational response to a rule that removed the ability to adjust later.
Goodlord’s own release is careful about how much June proves. Rents always strengthen over the summer, and this is one month of data from one platform. Its chief executive William Reeve says June may prove “a one-time recalibration of the market, or the beginning of a new normal”. Both readings are live. If July and August hold the pattern, the recalibration argument weakens and the structural one strengthens.
The advance rent squeeze
The Act also capped advance rent payments, a protection aimed at rental bidding wars. The early reporting suggests a side effect: tenants who used rent in advance to compensate for a thin UK credit file, international students in particular, are finding it harder to secure tenancies at all. That is a demand-side note worth watching rather than settled evidence, but it fits the pattern of a market adjusting around the rules rather than to them.
Sellers face their own new constraint. A landlord who uses the selling ground to recover possession and then fails to complete cannot re-let the property for twelve months. Estate agency Hamptons has estimated that between 80,000 and 100,000 unsold rental homes would have been caught had that rule applied last year. The estimate is Hamptons’ own and has not been independently verified, but the rule itself is in force, and it changes the cost of a failed sale for any landlord exiting with tenants in place. We covered the possession side of this in Possession After Section 21: What Owners Face Now.
What this means for property investors
If you hold tenanted stock, the repricing event is now the tenancy turnover, not the annual review. A sitting tenant paying below the new-let market is a known quantity under the Act: you can move the rent once a year by Section 13, and the tribunal is the ceiling. That makes the gap between passing rent and local new-let evidence the number to track on every unit you own.
If you are buying, the same gap is where the value sits, and where the mispricing risk sits too. A rent roll full of long-sitting tenants may be well below the £1,309 new-let average Goodlord recorded, but the catch-up is slower and less certain than it was before 1 May. Underwrite on the passing rent, treat the reversion as upside on turnover, and do not underwrite 6.5% as the new annual run rate. One month of platform data does not set a trend, and the whole-market measure is still running at 3.3%. Our checklist for this is in Buying a Tenanted Property: The Handover Checklist, and the supply backdrop is in Record Rents as Rental Supply Falls.
Tenanted blocks and portfolios with documented rent schedules are exactly the stock we vet. Browse what is currently available at our live listings, or join the insider list to see deals before they are published.