Booking the gas safety check early: does it move your next deadline?

A gas safety check carried out in the two months before it is due is treated as having been done on the due date. Your anniversary does not move forward, and nothing is lost by going early.

That single rule is the difference between a landlord who can group visits into convenient weeks and one who believes every early check permanently drags the date backwards. It is regulation 36A, added in 2018, and it is short enough to read in full.

The baseline: twelve months from the last check

Regulation 36(3)(a) of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 requires a landlord to ensure each appliance and flue is checked for safety "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 the last check. Not the tenancy, not the calendar year, not the date on the certificate you happen to have filed.

Regulation 36A(4) gives that anchor a name: the "deadline date" is the last day of the 12 month period within which the check is required.

Going early costs nothing

Regulation 36A(1):

"Where a safety check of an appliance or a flue made in accordance with regulation 36(3)(a) or (b) is or was completed within the period of 2 months ending with the deadline date, that check is to be treated for the purposes of regulation 36(3)(a) and (b) as having been made on the deadline date."

So if your deadline date is 30 November, a check on 5 October is treated as a check on 30 November, and your next deadline is the following 30 November. You have not shortened anything.

Before 2018 that was not the case, and the caution it bred still circulates: do the check early and every future deadline creeps earlier with it. That is no longer how it works, and the practical consequence is a two month window before every deadline in which you can book whenever the engineer is free.

For a landlord with several properties that window is the only scheduling room the regulations give, and it is worth using deliberately rather than by accident.

Going late is a different rule, and much narrower

Regulation 36A(2) lets a landlord check within the two months beginning with the deadline date instead, which sounds like a two month grace period. Read 36A(3) before relying on it:

"The discretion conferred by paragraph (2) may be exercised — (a) only once in relation to each appliance or flue in the relevant premises; and (b) only in order to align the deadline date in relation to the next safety check of that appliance or flue with the deadline date in relation to the next safety check of any other appliance or flue in the same relevant premises."

Two limits, and both matter:

1. 1Once per appliance. Not once a year. Once, ever, for that appliance or flue.
2. 2Only to align within the same premises. It exists so a boiler and a gas fire in one house can be brought onto one date. It is not a grace period and it is not available simply because the engineer could not come.

And the limit most relevant to a portfolio: "the same relevant premises" means one property. There is no provision anywhere in these regulations that lets you align the gas dates of number 12 with number 40. A portfolio's gas deadlines cannot lawfully be gathered onto one day.

Two dates that come with each check

The check is not the whole obligation. Two more deadlines attach to it:

• The record goes to the tenant within 28 days. Regulation 36(6)(a): a copy of the record must be given to each existing tenant of the premises "within 28 days of the date of the check". A check carried out and never sent is a breach with a certificate attached.
• The record is kept until two further checks have happened. Regulation 36(3)(c) requires it to be retained "until there have been two further checks of the appliance or flue", or, where the appliance is removed from the premises, for 2 years from the date of its last check.

The record itself has a prescribed content list in 36(3)(c), including the date of the check, the address, the landlord's name and address, each appliance and its location, any safety defect found, any remedial action taken, and the engineer's name, signature and registration number.

What to do with this

1. 1Work from the deadline date, not from the certificate date. They are the same only if the last check happened exactly on time.
2. 2Use the two months before. Book when it suits, keep the anniversary, and stop treating an early check as a cost.
3. 3Do not plan around 36A(2). Once per appliance, same premises only. It is a tidying provision, not a safety net.
4. 4Diary the 28 days as well as the 12 months. The giving is a separate duty from the doing.

LetCompliance computes each property's next gas deadline from the date of the last check rather than a typed reminder, and records when the certificate was sent as well as when the check was done, alongside the electrical, energy and deposit dates that run on their own separate clocks.

Source: Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, regulation 36 and regulation 36A, read on 21 September 2026. Regulation 36A was inserted on 6 April 2018 by S.I. 2018/139.