The PRS Database: what landlords will have to register, and when

What the database is, and what it is for

The PRS Database is a register of private rented sector landlords and their properties in England. Registration is mandatory, it carries an annual fee, and it is per property, not just per landlord.

Its effect is visibility. One register will hold who lets which property, who lives there, and whether its safety certificates are in place. That changes the question a landlord faces. It is no longer only "are my certificates current?" but "can I prove it, for every property, on demand?"

It sits alongside the wider reforms in the Renters' Rights Act, whose first phase has applied since 1 May 2026.

The staged rollout, and what "late 2026" means in practice

The database is rolling out region by region from late 2026. It does not switch on everywhere on one day.

In practice, that means three things:

• Your start date depends on your postcode. A landlord with properties in two regions may register in two stages.
• The deadline is not a reason to wait. The data the register asks for is data you should already hold.
• Check, do not assume. GOV.UK is the place to confirm whether your region is live. A guide, including this one, can go out of date.

Landlords who treat "late 2026" as a distant date tend to find that filling in the form is the easy part. Finding the certificate data is what takes the time.

The data you will need per property

Registration asks for data in four groups. Gather it before your region goes live.

Landlord contact details

Who you are and how to reach you. Straightforward for a single landlord. Less so where ownership sits with several people or a company, so settle internally who the named contact is.

Property details

The address and the facts about the property itself. If you hold this in more than one system, make sure they agree before you submit.

Occupancy

Who lives there and on what basis. Occupancy changes over time, so this is data that goes stale.

That matters more now that fixed terms have been replaced by periodic tenancies. A tenant can end a tenancy with two months' notice, so occupancy can change at any point in the year rather than at a predictable end date. The register is only as accurate as the last time someone updated it.

Safety information

Gas, electrical and energy performance certificates. This is the group most likely to cause trouble, for the reasons below.

Why the certificate data is the part that fails

Each certificate runs on its own cycle, and each has its own delivery rules:

• Gas safety: an annual check by a Gas Safe registered engineer, where the property has a gas or LPG appliance. The record goes to existing tenants within 28 days of the check, and to new tenants at the start of the tenancy.
• EICR: every 5 years, by a qualified person. A copy goes to existing tenants within 28 days, and to new tenants before they move in.
• EPC: valid for 10 years, and must be provided to the tenant.

Three certificates, three cycles: 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. Across a portfolio of 150 properties, those cycles never line up. Some certificate is always about to expire.

And the certificate alone is not the whole duty. For gas and electrical safety, the tenant has to receive a copy within a set time. A register entry that says "gas safety record: current" says nothing about whether the tenant got it within 28 days. That proof has to live somewhere too.

The annual gas check is the one that bites. Over 150 properties, a portfolio with gas in most of them is renewing a gas safety record somewhere almost every week. Each renewal changes the data the register holds.

What actually goes wrong

The certificate exists, but it is a PDF attached to an email from the engineer, saved under the engineer's job number rather than the property address. The expiry date is in the document but nowhere else. Registration needs the data, and someone has to open every file to find it.

Or the gas check is not needed because the property is all-electric, and nobody recorded why. A blank where a certificate should be looks like a gap, not an exemption.

The register does not create these problems. It exposes them, per property, in a format someone else can read.

The Ombudsman, in one paragraph

A Landlord Ombudsman is being introduced as part of the same set of reforms as the database. The details of membership, scope and timing should be taken from current GOV.UK guidance rather than from a summary, because they are still settling. For planning purposes, assume the records that support your registration will also be the records you rely on if a tenant raises a complaint.

What to do now, in order

1. List every property you let, with its address as you would register it.
2. For each, record whether it has a gas or LPG appliance. If not, record that, and why.
3. Find the current gas safety record, EICR and EPC for each property, and note the expiry date of each.
4. Renew anything expired or close to expiry before you register.
5. Check that each certificate was given to the tenant within the required time, and keep proof of that.
6. Settle who the named landlord contact is for each property.
7. Check GOV.UK for when your region goes live.
8. Put every expiry date somewhere that will warn you before it passes, not after.

Steps 1 to 5 are a one-off clean-up. Do them once, properly, and the registration itself becomes a matter of copying data you already trust.

The last step is the one that keeps the register accurate after day one. Registering is a single event. Keeping the data current is the ongoing job, and it is the problem our property compliance work is built around.