Why your compliance dates never line up, and what the law lets you do about it

Every compliance deadline in a let runs on its own cycle, anchored to its own event. Gas runs on twelve months from the last check. Electrical runs on up to five years from the last report, or less if that report says so. The deposit clock is thirty days from the day the money arrived. A licence expires when the council decided it would.

With one property that is four dates. With eight properties it is around forty, none of them aligned, none of them tied to a date you chose, and several of them anchored to events years in the past.

Landlords deal with this by trying to batch: book all the gas checks in one week, put all the certificates on one anniversary. The law permits far less of that than people assume, and the one provision that does allow it is narrower than its reputation.

Gas: twelve months, and the two month window

Regulation 36(3)(a) of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 requires each appliance and flue to be checked "within 12 months of being installed and at intervals of not more than 12 months since it was last checked for safety".

The anchor is therefore the last check, not the tenancy, not the calendar year.

Regulation 36A, added in 2018, is the part worth knowing:

• 36A(1): checking early costs you nothing. A check completed "within the period of 2 months ending with the deadline date" is treated as having been made on the deadline date. So you can do the check up to two months before it is due and keep the same anniversary. Without this rule, an early check would pull every future deadline forward.
• 36A(2) and (3): you may go two months the other way, once. A landlord may instead check within the two months beginning with the deadline date. But that discretion may be exercised "only once in relation to each appliance or flue" and "only in order to align the deadline date ... with the deadline date in relation to the next safety check of any other appliance or flue in the same relevant premises".

Read 36A(3)(b) carefully, because it is the trap. The alignment allowance is within one property. You may bring the boiler and the gas fire in the same house onto one date. You may not use it to bring number 12 into line with number 40.

So there is no lawful way to align gas checks across a portfolio. What 36A(1) does give you is a two month window before each deadline in which you can book convenient visits without losing the date, which is a scheduling tool rather than an alignment one.

Two more dates attach to each check: the record must go to each existing tenant within 28 days of the check (36(6)(a)), and the record must be retained "until there have been two further checks", or for 2 years from the last check where the appliance is removed (36(3)(c)).

Electrical: five years, unless your own report says less

Regulation 3(2) of the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020 defines the interval as "at intervals of no more than 5 years", or, where the most recent report "requires such inspection and testing to be at intervals of less than 5 years, at the intervals specified in that report".

This is the quiet one. A portfolio does not have a five-year electrical cycle. It has whatever interval each individual report set, and a property with older wiring can come back with three years, or one. The date you need is not five years from the report; it is the next inspection date printed on the report itself.

The distribution dates matter here too, and they differ from gas:

• a copy to each existing tenant within 28 days of the inspection,
• a copy to the local housing authority within 7 days of a written request,
• a copy to any new tenant before they occupy,
• a copy to a prospective tenant within 28 days of a written request,
• and the report retained until the next inspection is due, to be handed to whoever does it.

Deposits: thirty days from the money, not the tenancy

Section 213 of the Housing Act 2004 requires the scheme's initial requirements to be met "within the period of 30 days beginning with the date on which it is received", and the prescribed information to be given to the tenant and any relevant person, in the prescribed form, within the same 30 days.

The anchor is the day the money arrived. Not the day the agreement was signed, not the day the tenant moved in. On a portfolio with staggered move-ins, that is a set of unrelated 30 day countdowns, each started by a bank transfer.

Section 213(9) closes the obvious escape: the requirements apply "despite any agreement to the contrary".

Licensing: whatever the council decided

The fourth cycle is the one with no national rule at all. Licence duration, renewal process and fee are set by the local authority, and a landlord whose properties sit in more than one council area is running more than one regime at once, with different expiry dates and different conditions attached to each licence.

If your properties are spread across councils, the only reliable source for each is that council's own page, which is also where the fee that applies to you is published. Ours is in the landlord licence fees hub, taken from each council's own published schedule.

What actually works

Given that alignment is mostly unavailable, the workable approach is not to tidy the dates but to stop holding them in your head.

1. 1Record the anchor, not the deadline. Store the date of the last gas check, the date of the electrical report and its own next-inspection date, the date each deposit was received, and each licence expiry. Deadlines computed from anchors stay correct; deadlines typed in by hand drift.
2. 2Use the gas two month window deliberately. Because 36A(1) preserves the anniversary, you can cluster visits into convenient fortnights without cost. That is as close to batching as the law allows.
3. 3Never assume five years on an EICR. Read the next-inspection date off each report.
4. 4Track the giving, not just the doing. Gas 28 days, EICR 28 days to the tenant and 7 to the council on request. A check carried out and never sent is a breach with a certificate attached.
5. 5Treat the deposit clock as starting at the bank. It is the one deadline that begins with somebody else's action.

LetCompliance holds each of these against the property and the tenancy, computes the next date from the anchor rather than from a typed reminder, and scores the portfolio on the six statutory areas so the gaps are visible without opening every record.

Sources: Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, regulation 36 and regulation 36A, the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, regulation 3, and Housing Act 2004, section 213, all read on 21 September 2026.