The Private Rented Sector Database: What Landlords Need to Do

The Renters' Rights Act 2025 creates a national register of private landlords and their properties in England: the Private Rented Sector Database, also referred to as the Property Portal. It hasn't launched yet, but when it does, registration will be mandatory — and being unregistered is expected to affect your ability to let your property and serve valid possession notices. Here's what we know so far, what's still to be confirmed, and how to get ahead of it.

What Is the PRS Database?

The Private Rented Sector Database is a national digital register established by the Renters' Rights Act 2025. It will hold an entry for every private landlord in England and an entry for every property they rent out. Landlords will need to register, demonstrate compliance with their legal obligations, and keep their information up to date.

You may see it called the “Property Portal” in government material and industry coverage — the two names refer to the same thing. The database is the register itself; the portal is the digital service landlords, tenants, and councils will use to interact with it.

Parts of the register will be publicly accessible. A prospective tenant will be able to look up a property before signing a tenancy and see whether the landlord is registered and compliant. Local authorities will use it to identify landlords in their area and to target enforcement at those who haven't registered or whose compliance is lapsed.

Why It Exists

The database addresses a long-standing gap: nobody knows exactly who England's private landlords are. Local authorities have historically had no reliable way to identify the landlords operating in their area, which makes enforcement of housing standards slow and patchy. Councils typically only discover a non-compliant landlord when a tenant complains.

The database changes that in three ways:

• Visibility for enforcement. Councils will be able to see every registered landlord and property in their area, and — more importantly — identify rented properties that are missing from the register.
• Transparency for tenants. Prospective tenants will be able to check a landlord's registration and compliance status before committing to a tenancy, in the same way you can check a company on Companies House.
• A single point of compliance. Rather than compliance being demonstrated ad hoc — a certificate here, a licence there — the database gives landlords one place to show they've met their obligations.

It sits alongside the other institutional reforms in the Act, including the PRS Ombudsman, which all private landlords will also need to register with. For the full picture of what's in force now and what's still to come, see our complete Renters' Rights Act timeline.

Who Must Register

Registration will be mandatory for private landlords in England. The requirement is expected to work at two levels:

A landlord entry. You register yourself as a landlord: your name, contact details, and confirmation that you meet the requirements to let property. This applies whether you own one buy-to-let or a portfolio of fifty, and whether you self-manage or use an agent. Using a letting agent does not remove the registration obligation — the entry is about you as the landlord, not about who manages the property day to day.

A property entry for each rental. Each property you let is registered separately and linked to your landlord entry. A landlord with four properties will have one landlord entry and four property entries. If you sell a property or stop letting it, the entry would be updated accordingly.

The fine detail — how joint ownership is handled, how company landlords register, what happens when a property changes hands mid-tenancy — will be set out in secondary legislation before launch. If you let property in England in any capacity, the safe working assumption is that you will need to register.

What Registration Involves

The government has indicated that landlords will need to register each property, upload compliance documents or confirm they hold them, and keep the information up to date. In practice, that points to the familiar set of compliance evidence:

• Gas Safety Certificate (CP12), renewed annually
• Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR), renewed at least every five years
• Energy Performance Certificate (EPC)
• Licensing details where the property is subject to HMO or selective licensing

Whether you'll upload the documents themselves or simply declare that you hold valid versions is one of the details yet to be confirmed. Either way, the practical requirement is the same: you need current, valid certificates for every property, and you need to be able to lay your hands on them.

Note the phrase “keep the information up to date”. This is not a one-off registration like protecting a deposit. When your gas certificate renews each year, your database entry will need to reflect it. Registration is an ongoing obligation that mirrors your compliance calendar.

When: The Phased Rollout

Here's the honest position: the database is not yet open, and most of the detail is not yet fixed.

The main provisions of the Renters' Rights Act came into force on 1 May 2026, but the database was not among them. It is being developed now and is expected to launch in stages, with the rollout anticipated from 2027 onwards. The following are all still to be confirmed:

• The go-live date — expected 2027 onwards, in stages, but no fixed date has been announced
• Registration deadlines — how long landlords will have to register once the service opens
• Fees — a registration fee is anticipated, but the amount has not been set
• The exact data and document requirements — to be defined in secondary legislation

Be wary of anyone quoting you precise dates or fee amounts for the database right now — they don't exist yet. What is certain is the direction of travel: registration will be mandatory, it will cover every private landlord and rental property in England, and it will require demonstrable compliance.

Penalties: What Happens If You Don't Register

The Act backs the database with real consequences, and they go beyond fines.

Financial penalties. The Renters' Rights Act gives local authorities civil penalty powers of up to £7,000 for a first breach, rising to £40,000 for serious or repeated breaches, with criminal prosecution available for the worst cases. Database offences are expected to sit within this enforcement framework, with the specific penalty levels for non-registration confirmed in the implementing legislation.

Restrictions on possession. Non-registration may prevent landlords from serving valid possession notices. This echoes how deposit protection and gas safety compliance already gate possession proceedings: if your paperwork isn't in order, your notice is vulnerable. With Section 21 gone and every possession claim now running through Section 8, a defect like an unregistered property is exactly the kind of gap a tenant's solicitor will look for.

Restrictions on marketing and letting. The database is also expected to be linked to the lettings process itself, with unregistered landlords restricted from marketing or letting properties. The precise mechanism — and how it will be enforced against landlords and agents — is yet to be confirmed, but the intent is clear: registration is designed to become a precondition of operating in the sector, not an optional extra.

How It Interacts with Selective Licensing

A reasonable question: if there's a national register, what happens to selective licensing schemes run by local councils?

The short answer is that they are different tools and, for now, both apply. Selective licensing is a local scheme: a council designates an area, and landlords in that area must obtain a licence, pay a fee, and meet licence conditions. The PRS Database is national: it registers who landlords are and what they let, everywhere in England.

Registering on the database will not exempt you from a selective licensing scheme, and holding a selective licence will not exempt you from the database. If your property is in a designated area, expect to need both — and expect your licensing details to form part of your database entry. Whether the government eventually rationalises the overlap between national registration and local licensing is a question for future policy; no such change has been announced.

The practical takeaway: check whether your properties fall inside any current or proposed licensing designations now, because that's a live obligation today, and it's information you'll likely need again at database registration.

How to Prepare Now

You can't register yet, but the landlords who find registration painless will be the ones whose records are already in order when the service opens. Everything the database is expected to ask for is something you should already hold. Sensible steps:

• Audit your certificates. For every property, confirm you have a current Gas Safety Certificate, a valid EICR, and an EPC. Diarise the renewal dates.
• Fill the gaps. If an EICR has lapsed or you can't locate an EPC, fix it now rather than in a scramble when registration opens.
• Get everything in one place, digitally. Certificates scattered across email attachments, contractor PDFs, and a folder in the loft are exactly what makes a registration exercise miserable. A single digital home for each property's documents — with expiry dates tracked — means registration becomes a data-entry task, not an archaeology project. This is where a document platform like HouseFile quietly earns its keep, but even a well-organised set of cloud folders beats the shoebox.
• Confirm your licensing position. Check each property against local HMO and selective licensing designations.
• Sort your record-keeping generally. The database is one more reason — on top of the Section 8 evidence burden — to run proper records. Our guide to landlord record-keeping requirements covers what to keep and how.
• Watch for the secondary legislation. The detailed rules — dates, fees, data requirements — will arrive before the database goes live. We'll cover them as they're published.

The Bottom Line

The PRS Database will put every private landlord and rental property in England on a national, partly public register, with compliance visible to tenants and councils. It is expected to arrive in stages from 2027 onwards, and the key details — dates, fees, exact data requirements — are genuinely not yet fixed, so treat any confident specifics with suspicion.

What you can be confident about is what it will ask of you: to be identifiable, to be compliant, and to be able to prove it. None of that should be new work. If your certificates are current, your licences are in place, and your documents live somewhere organised and retrievable, database registration will be an afternoon's admin. If they don't, the time to change that is now — not because the database is imminent, but because everything it will check is something you're already required to have.