England’s landlord register is now close enough to plan for. The government’s implementation roadmap commits to starting the rollout of the Private Rented Sector Database, the PRS Database, from late 2026, region by region, and this week the trade body Propertymark, a trade body representing agents, warned that the database risks duplicating paperwork licensed landlords already file unless it is coordinated with existing licensing systems. That fight is worth following, but it is not the part that costs money. The parts that do are already written into the Renters’ Rights Act 2025: what has to go on the register, what happens to possession rights if it does not, and penalties running to £40,000. As of 13 August 2026, the one thing still genuinely undecided is the price.
What landlords must register
The roadmap sets a minimum for every let property. Landlords register themselves and each dwelling, giving contact details, the full address, the property type, the number of bedrooms, the number of households or residents, and whether the property is occupied and furnished. Alongside that sits the safety paperwork: gas, electrical and Energy Performance Certificates.
Read as an investor rather than as a form-filler, that is a disclosure regime built entirely out of documents a compliant landlord already holds. Nothing on the list is new information. What is new is that the absence of it becomes visible and enforceable at the point of marketing, rather than surfacing years later in a dispute. A flat whose EPC cannot be produced stops being an untidy file and starts being a property that cannot lawfully be advertised.
When the PRS Database rollout starts
Status matters here and it is easy to overstate. The Act has Royal Assent, so the database is legislated. The database provisions are not yet commenced, so nothing is required of a landlord today. The roadmap states the government will commence rollout of the database from late 2026, in a first regional stage covering landlords and local councils, followed by a second stage extending it further. The roadmap gives no end date for the rollout. Only Stage 1, from late 2026, has a confirmed start.
The same phase carries the Private Landlord Ombudsman, though on a slower clock. The government expects mandatory membership in 2028, and only when it is satisfied the service is ready. Anyone reading the two as a single 2026 event is compressing about two years of sequencing.
The fee nobody has set yet
This is the most searched question about the database and the honest answer is that there is not one yet. Section 81 of the Act gives the power to charge fees for landlord and dwelling entries. The roadmap confirms landlords will pay an annual fee and says it will be confirmed closer to launch. That is the whole of the published position.
A figure of £46 has been circulating. It came from a think tank’s proposal, not from government, and budgeting against it would be treating a suggestion as policy. What can be said with confidence is structural rather than numerical: the fee is annual, and it attaches to dwelling entries as well as landlord entries. Cost therefore scales with the number of doors held rather than the number of landlords. The government has not yet said whether the landlord entry and each dwelling entry carry separate charges or one blended fee, so the exact multiple for a larger portfolio is not fixed either.
Propertymark’s objection is that landlords already licensed under a selective scheme will file much of this twice. It is a reasonable point and it is also a lobbying position from a body that represents agents, so it is an argument being made rather than a change that has happened. If it succeeds the effect would be at the margin of the fee, not the existence of the register. Landlords already paying for selective licensing should assume both costs until told otherwise.
No entry, no possession order
The enforcement is where this stops being administrative. Section 90 provides that a court may not make an order for possession while the landlord is in breach of the duty under section 82(3)(a) to hold an active database entry. The carve outs are narrow: Ground 7A and Ground 14, both antisocial behaviour grounds, still run. Everything else does not.
Follow that through to the case that actually happens. A landlord who has not registered, facing a tenant in arrears, has no route to a possession order on the arrears ground until the entry is made. The register converts a filing omission into a rent problem with no exit, which is a cash flow risk rather than a compliance one. It sits directly on top of the tighter possession regime that replaced Section 21 in May.
Section 91 sets the money. A local authority may impose a penalty of up to £7,000 for breaching the registration requirements, rising to up to £40,000 where it is satisfied an offence under section 92 has been committed. Penalties can also be repeated on a continuing breach after 28 days.
What this means for property investors
For anyone buying tenanted stock, the register becomes a due diligence surface rather than background policy. The duty attaches to whoever is the landlord at the time, so a clean entry is not something inherited on completion. The practical move is to pull the gas, electrical and EPC documents before exchange, because those are the register’s inputs and a gap in them is a gap in the ability to market or repossess the unit later.
Three things to price. An annual per property fee at an unknown level, which should be carried as a range rather than left out of the model. A period from late 2026, with no published end date, where obligations arrive region by region, so two identical properties may be on different clocks. And a possession bar that turns an unregistered seller’s habits into the buyer’s problem the day the keys change hands. None of those change whether a deal works. All of them change what needs checking before it does.
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