Raising the rent across a portfolio: every tenancy has its own clock

There is no portfolio rent review. There is no single date on which your rents go up, no way to serve one notice for eight tenancies, and no shortcut if they all started in different months.

Section 13 of the Housing Act 1988 works one tenancy at a time, and the earliest date each increase can take effect is calculated from that tenancy's own history, not from the calendar and not from what you did with the others.

For a landlord with one let this is barely worth a paragraph. For a landlord with eight it is the difference between eight valid notices and a handful of void ones.

What Section 13 says now

The Renters' Rights Act 2025 rewrote parts of this section on 1 May 2026. Four changes matter, and the third and fourth are the ones most landlords have not caught up with.

1. Notice is two months. Section 13(2)(a) now reads that the new period must begin not earlier than "two months" after the notice is served. The old subsection 13(3), which set the minimum by reference to the length of the rental period (six months for a yearly tenancy, a month for a weekly one), has been omitted.

2. Section 13 is now the only route up. New subsection 13(4A) says the rent "may not be greater than the rent for the previous period" except by a Section 13 notice, a tribunal determination, or a narrow agreement following one. It then adds that any provision in the tenancy to the contrary "is of no effect".

So a rent review clause in the agreement does not work any more. If your tenancies carry one, it is not the mechanism you are relying on, whatever it says.

3. The tenant can only agree a lower rent. Under 13(4)(b) the landlord and tenant may agree "a new rent which is lower than that proposed in the notice", or agree not to vary it at all. The old wording allowed a "variation of the rent which is different from" the proposal. Negotiating upwards from your own notice is no longer available: the figure on the notice is a ceiling.

4. The tenant's challenge route is the tribunal. Under 13(4)(a) the tenant applies to the appropriate tribunal under section 14(A3) before the new period begins.

The clock, per tenancy

This is the part that scales badly, and it is worth setting out exactly.

The new rent must take effect at the beginning of a new period of the tenancy, beginning not earlier than all of the following:

• Two months after the notice was served, and
• If this is the first increase: the date 52 weeks after the date on which the first period of the tenancy began (section 13(2)(b)(ii)), and
• If you have increased it before: the "appropriate date" in section 13(3A), which is 52 weeks after the date the last increase took effect, or 53 weeks in the case described in 13(3B).

Read that again with a portfolio in mind. The anchor is not the tenancy start date for every tenancy. It is:

So two tenancies that began on the same day drift apart the moment you increase one of them and not the other. After a few years, eight tenancies have eight unrelated anniversaries, and none of them is the date you signed anything.

The 53 week case. Subsection 13(3B) catches a specific drift problem. Because 52 weeks is slightly less than a year, repeated annual increases creep backwards through the calendar. Where a tenancy has been increased at least once since the 2003 order, and the 53rd week after the last increase begins more than six days before the anniversary of the first increase, the appropriate date becomes 53 weeks rather than 52. It is a correction for accumulated drift, and it only appears on tenancies you have been raising for several years, which in practice means your oldest ones.

Doing it eight times

None of the above is hard. It is hard to hold in your head, and it fails quietly: a notice served a week too early does not bounce, it simply does not take effect, and you find out when the tenant pays the old rent.

What a portfolio actually needs, per tenancy, is four dates:

1. 1When the first period of the tenancy began. Not the day you signed, not the day they moved in if those differ: the start of the first period.
2. 2When the last increase took effect, if there has been one, and when the first increase took effect, because 13(3B) compares against it.
3. 3The earliest permitted effective date, computed from those.
4. 4The date you served the notice, because the two months runs from service.

The notice itself must be in the prescribed form, which for a private tenancy is Form 4A. Form 4 is the social housing version, and serving the wrong one is an easy mistake to make from a search result.

A practical order for a portfolio:

• Work out each earliest date first, then choose the service dates. Doing it the other way round, picking a date you would like the rent to change and working back, is what produces notices that are a fortnight early.
• Do not batch the effective dates. It is tempting to move all eight rents on 1 April. For most portfolios that is not lawfully available, and forcing it means some notices are served too early.
• Expect the oldest tenancies to be the awkward ones. They are the ones with a long increase history and therefore the ones where 13(3B) can push you to 53 weeks.
• Keep the figure you propose defensible. The tenant's route is the tribunal, and the rent you put on the notice is now the most you can end up with, because any agreement can only be lower.

What this does to the record you keep

The quiet consequence of all this is that a rent increase is not a fact about a property. It is a fact about a tenancy, and it has to be stored against the tenancy, with its dates, for as long as that tenancy runs.

If your rents live in a spreadsheet of properties, the information Section 13 needs is not in it: not the first period start, not the date each past increase took effect, and not which of them was the first. Rebuilding that from emails, two years later, on eight tenancies, is a bad afternoon.

LetCompliance stores the rent against the tenancy rather than the address, keeps each increase with the date it took effect, and builds the Form 4A from those dates. It sits alongside the rest of the let, the certificates, the deposit clock and the notices, so the history is there when the next increase is due.

Source: Housing Act 1988, section 13, read on 21 September 2026 together with its Textual Amendments notes. The changes described above were made by the Renters' Rights Act 2025 and came into force on 1 May 2026 (S.I. 2026/421). Subsections 13(3A) and 13(3B), the 52 and 53 week rules, were inserted in 2003 and are unamended.