The rent is an argument. The deadline is not.

It is the date specified in the notice, and it is a bar on the court’s jurisdiction rather than a limitation period. Section 29A(1) says the court “shall not entertain” an application under section 24(1) by either party, or under section 29(2) by the landlord, if it is made after the end of the statutory period. Section 29A(2) defines that period as ending on the date specified in the landlord’s section 25 notice, or immediately before the date specified in a tenant’s section 26 request. Because the words remove the court’s power rather than create a defence, there is no application to extend time, no relief from sanctions and no discretion — and a 2025 county court decision confirmed that the rules on relief cannot be used to cure it, since that would amount to judicially extending a limitation period. If the date passes, your tenancy terminates and you become a trespasser, however strong the case you were going to run. Two practical traps worth more than any argument. First, a claim is brought only when the request to issue and the court fee are delivered to the court office. In that same 2025 case the tenants filed the claim form two weeks before the deadline but marked the fee “not applicable” and paid nothing; the court returned it, they refiled after the deadline, and the claim was struck out. Do not issue on the last day, and do not issue without the fee. Second, check the notice itself — it must be in the prescribed form, must state whether the landlord opposes, must state the grounds if it does, and must be given by the competent landlord. A defective notice is a different problem with a different answer, and both need a solicitor.

Yes, and it is the only route — but the timing is unforgiving. Section 29B allows the landlord and tenant to agree that an application may be made before the end of a specified period expiring after the statutory period. Three conditions decide whether it works. First, the agreement must be made before the end of the current statutory period. Once the period has expired there is nothing left to extend and an agreement one day late is worthless. Second, further extensions must form an unbroken chain — section 29B(2) requires each new agreement to be made before the end of the period specified in the current one. If one lapses, the whole thing falls. Third, it is not free. Section 29B(4) provides that the section 25 notice or section 26 request is then treated as terminating the tenancy at the end of the extended period — so extending your time also extends your liability, and pushes back the date from which everything else runs. Form. The Act prescribes no form and does not require writing, and in practice solicitors exchange emails. That is not a reason to be casual: get it in writing, signed or clearly agreed by both parties’ solicitors, identifying the new date precisely and unambiguously. Never rely on an assurance that the other side “will agree” an extension. Until it is actually agreed, the original date is the one that binds, and if the other side changes its mind or simply does not reply in time, you have lost the tenancy and there is no remedy.

There is a real prize and a real price, and almost nobody explains the second. The prize is section 26(6). Once you make the request, the landlord has two months to serve a counter-notice stating on which of the section 30(1) grounds it will oppose. If it misses that deadline it cannot oppose your renewal at all, however good its redevelopment case would have been. That is a genuine tactical advantage, and it also puts you in control of the timing, since you choose the commencement date within the six to twelve month window. The price is interim rent. Section 24B(3) provides that interim rent runs from the earliest date that could have been specified in your request — not the date you actually specified. So if you give the full twelve months’ notice, you are exposed to interim rent from month six. And since the 2003 reforms, where the landlord does not oppose and the whole property is renewed, section 24C makes the interim rent simply the new rent — no cushion, no discount, no separate valuation. A section 26 request can therefore accelerate your rent increase by up to six months. Two other things to weigh. Section 29A(3) bars any application by you until two months have passed from the request, unless the landlord counter-notices first — so a premature application is as fatal as a late one, and your window is narrower than it looks. And section 26 is only available where your tenancy was granted for a term of years certain exceeding one year; a periodic tenant cannot use it. On balance a request suits a tenant who wants certainty and thinks the landlord may be slow; waiting suits a tenant in a falling market who would rather not accelerate anything.

Only the grounds it stated in its section 25 notice or section 26(6) counter-notice — it cannot add one later. There are seven, in section 30(1), and they divide in two ways that both matter. Discretionary grounds are (a) disrepair resulting from your failure to repair, (b) persistent delay in paying rent, (c) other substantial breaches or any other reason connected with your use or management of the holding, and (e) sub-letting of part where the whole is worth substantially more. Each is qualified by words to the effect that you “ought not to be granted” a new tenancy, which imports a genuine judicial discretion — a tenant who has cured the problem before the hearing frequently survives. Mandatory grounds are (d) suitable alternative accommodation, (f) redevelopment, and (g) the landlord’s own occupation. If one of those is made out the court must refuse the renewal. The second division is compensation. It is payable where the renewal fails by reason only of grounds (e), (f) or (g). It is not payable on (a), (b), (c) or (d). That is precisely why a landlord who wants to redevelop will often plead disrepair or late payment alongside ground (f): succeeding on the fault ground removes your compensation entirely. Defeating the fault ground can therefore be worth the whole compensation figure to you even if you lose the renewal, and it is frequently the more winnable fight. Ground (d) is worth a closer look than it usually gets — the alternative accommodation must be suitable for your requirements, and the statute expressly includes the requirement to preserve goodwill among those requirements.

Yes, and the leading case is a tenant win. Under ground (f) the landlord must prove a firm and settled intention, objectively achievable, to demolish or reconstruct the premises or a substantial part of them, or to carry out substantial work of construction — and that it could not reasonably do so without obtaining possession. In S Franses Ltd v The Cavendish Hotel (London) Ltd [2018] UKSC 62 the Supreme Court allowed the tenant’s appeal unanimously. The landlord had devised a scheme costing roughly £770,000 with no practical utility whatever other than removing the tenant — including demolishing internal walls in order to rebuild them — and its own witness accepted it would not carry out the works if the tenant left voluntarily. Lord Sumption: “The acid test is whether the landlord would intend to do the same works if the tenant left voluntarily.” A conditional intention is not the intention the ground requires. Four things to take from it. The landlord had offered an undertaking to the court to carry out the works and still lost — an undertaking does not cure a conditional intention. The test applies to each element of the scheme separately, so a landlord cannot smuggle removal works through inside a genuine project. Intention is assessed at the date of the hearing, not the date of the notice, so a shaky case can firm up and you should not assume an early weakness survives. And the landlord does not have to show the scheme is sensible or profitable — ground (f) requires a genuine and unconditional intention, not a good one. Then run section 31A, which is the other and often better defence: could the works be carried out under a reservation of access rights in the new lease, or by you accepting a tenancy of an economically separable part?

No, and this is the correction most commentary still has not made. In MVL Properties (2017) Ltd v The Leadmill Ltd [2025] EWHC 349 (Ch) the High Court considered ground (g) where the landlord of a well-known Sheffield music venue opposed renewal intending to run a music venue itself in the same premises. The tenant argued that the landlord was simply appropriating its goodwill and that the Franses analysis should apply. The court rejected it: motive is irrelevant to ground (g), and Franses was not extended to it. A landlord may carry on the very business the tenant was carrying on, in the tenant’s premises, and take the benefit of the goodwill attached to the location. The tenant’s human rights argument — that the transfer of adherent goodwill breached Article 1 of Protocol 1 — also failed: future income streams are not present possessions, the tenant had only a contingent right of renewal, and the five-year rule in section 30(2) was itself held to strike a fair balance. So where are the defences? First and best, the arithmetic in section 30(2): the landlord cannot use ground (g) if its interest was purchased after the beginning of the five years ending with the termination of your tenancy, where the holding has been comprised in business tenancies throughout. Two points people get wrong — the five years runs back from termination, not from the notice or the hearing; and “purchased” means acquired for money, so an interest inherited or received as a gift does not engage the bar at all. Check the title and the date and consideration on the transfer. Second, the genuineness and objective achievability of the intention: funding, consents, programme, cost. And note that preparatory fitting-out work can itself count as occupation, so a landlord need not be trading on day one.

The rateable value of the holding, or twice it, and the multiplier is 1. Section 37(2) gives the rateable value multiplied by the appropriate multiplier, and the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 (Appropriate Multiplier) Order 1990 set that multiplier at 1 for any relevant date on or after 1 April 1990. It has not been changed in thirty-six years. So in practice compensation is the rateable value, doubled where the section 37(3) condition is met — that the premises comprised in the holding have been occupied for the purposes of a business for the fourteen years immediately preceding the termination. Note carefully what that test measures: occupation of the premises for business purposes, not occupation by you under this lease. Where there was a change of occupier and the successor succeeded to the business, the periods can be aggregated, so a tenant who bought a business with the premises may reach fourteen years without having held the lease that long. The trap that changes the answer this year. Section 37(5) fixes the rateable value by reference to the valuation list in force on the date the section 25 notice or the section 26(6) counter-notice was given — not today’s date, and not the date of the hearing. The 2026 rating list took effect on 1 April 2026, replacing the 2023 list, with an antecedent valuation date of 1 April 2024. Because section 25 notices run six to twelve months ahead, notices given in late 2025 on the 2023 list are still working through to terminations now. Both lists are therefore live, and a tool that simply asks for “your rateable value” will get this wrong. Where the holding is not separately shown in the list, or forms part of a hereditament, section 37(5A) to (5D) provide for apportionment by a valuation officer with an appeal to the Upper Tribunal.

Very possibly not, and this is worth checking before you accept it. Section 38(2) provides that where the premises have been occupied for the purposes of a business for the five years ending with the date on which the tenant is to quit — with continuity of the business through any change of occupier — any agreement purporting to exclude or reduce the compensation payable under section 37 is void. Not voidable, not subject to challenge: void. It does not matter that you signed it, that it was negotiated, or that you took advice. Outside that five-year window section 38(3) does permit exclusion or modification by agreement, and standard institutional leases very often contain such a clause — which is exactly why it is worth working out whether the five-year condition is met before you take the clause at face value. As with the fourteen-year doubling test, the measure is business occupation of the premises, so occupation by a predecessor who carried on the same business counts. One related point that is genuinely useful. Section 37A gives you a remedy where an order refusing a new tenancy, or a decision by you to quit without applying, was obtained by misrepresentation or the concealment of material facts. So a landlord who succeeds on ground (f) and then never carries out the works, or on ground (g) and never occupies, is exposed to a claim for the damage or loss you suffered. It is compensation rather than restoration of the tenancy — you do not get the premises back — but it is a real remedy and it is worth keeping an eye on what actually happens to the building afterwards.

Yes, and the difference favours you in one important respect. Section 34(1) sets the rent at which the holding might reasonably be expected to be let in the open market by a willing lessor, having regard to the terms of the tenancy other than those as to rent, disregarding four things: (a) any effect on rent of the fact that you or your predecessors have been in occupation; (b) any goodwill attached to the holding by reason of your business; (c) the effect of qualifying improvements; and (d) for licensed premises, any addition to value attributable to the licence where its benefit belongs to you. The crucial structural difference is that there is no upward-only ratchet. A rent review clause is a contractual valuation on whatever assumptions the parties agreed, and an upward-only clause means the rent cannot fall. Section 34 has no such limit: if the market has fallen the court can and does order a rent below the passing rent. On the published rating evidence, retail rateable values were essentially flat across the nine years to April 2024 while industrial rose by more than half — so for some tenants a renewal is an opportunity rather than a threat, and that is under-used. The improvements disregard, and what people get wrong about it. Section 34(2) disregards an improvement carried out by a person who was then the tenant, otherwise than in pursuance of an obligation to the immediate landlord, if it was carried out during the current tenancy — and there is no time limit at all on those. The twenty-one year rule applies only to improvements carried out under an earlier tenancy, and then only where the holding has been continuously comprised in protected tenancies and the tenant did not quit at the end of any of them. The expensive half is the obligation point: works you were required to carry out, typically a mandatory fit-out under an agreement for lease, are not disregarded, and you pay rent on your own money.

Only by justifying each change, and the burden is a real one. Section 35(1) says the terms other than duration and rent are to be agreed or, failing agreement, determined by the court, and that the court shall have regard to the terms of the current tenancy and to all relevant circumstances. The leading authority is O’May v City of London Real Property Co Ltd [1983] 2 AC 726, where the landlord wanted to convert a clear lease into a full service-charge lease and offered a rent reduction to compensate. The House of Lords refused. Lord Hailsham LC: “the burden of persuading the court to impose a change in those terms against the will of either party must rest on the party proposing the change, and that the change proposed must, in the circumstances of the case, be fair and reasonable”, with departures requiring a good reason based on essential fairness. Note that the burden falls on whoever proposes the change — it applies to you as well as to the landlord. In practice this means the existing lease is the starting point and not much moves. Changes tend to succeed where the law or market practice has changed and made the old term obsolete, where the factual background to the original term has fallen away, or where the change is modernisation of machinery without shifting the economic burden. They tend to fail where the landlord is trying to transfer cost or risk — converting a clear lease into a service charge lease, imposing materially tighter alienation controls, or inserting a break clause the tenant does not want. Do not treat the landlord’s draft as the starting point. The existing lease is. On duration, section 33 gives the court discretion to order a term “reasonable in all the circumstances” up to a maximum of fifteen years, raised from fourteen on 1 June 2004; in practice orders cluster well below the maximum, and where a redevelopment case is coming but not yet ripe a landlord’s redevelopment break is the usual compromise.

It is the rent you pay for the period between the old tenancy ending and the new one starting, and since 2004 it is much less favourable to tenants than the old advice suggests. Either party may apply once a section 25 notice has been given or a section 26 request made, and no application can be entertained more than six months after the relevant tenancy has ended — a hard deadline that landlords do sometimes miss, to their cost. When it starts. It runs from “the appropriate date”, which section 24B defines as the earliest date that could have been specified in the notice or request — not the date actually specified. So a landlord who serves the full twelve months’ notice cannot backdate interim rent twelve months; it starts six months after the notice. The same rule cuts against a tenant who serves a section 26 request with a long lead-in. How much. This is where the 2003 reforms changed things. Where the landlord gave a section 25 notice not opposing renewal (or the tenant made a request and the landlord did not counter-notice), and a new tenancy of the whole of the property is granted, section 24C makes the interim rent equal to the rent under the new tenancy. No cushion, no discount, no separate valuation. The old rule that interim rent came at a discount to market is obsolete for the commonest case. There are two escapes: if that figure would differ substantially from what the court would have set at the appropriate date — which is the answer in a falling market — or if the terms of the new tenancy differ enough to affect it materially. Where section 24C does not apply at all — an opposed renewal, or a renewal of part only — section 24D asks what is “reasonable for the tenant to pay”, valued as if a tenancy from year to year of the whole property were granted. Both the yearly-tenancy assumption and the “reasonable for the tenant to pay” formula produce a genuine discount, and that survives.

The law has not changed and nothing is in force. The Law Commission is conducting a review of Part II. Its first consultation, on models of security of tenure, closed in February 2025, and its interim statement of 4 June 2025 concluded that the contracting-out model should be retained — the status quo — having received the broadest support. Its second consultation paper, on the technical operation of the Act, was published on 16 June 2026 and closes on 16 September 2026. After that comes a final report, then a government decision, then a Bill, then commencement. There is no Bill before Parliament. And do not assume reform means improvement: the Commission is provisionally proposing to exclude new periodic tenancies from the Act, to raise the qualifying duration threshold from six months to one or two years, and it is consulting on replacing rateable value with rent as the basis of compensation, on revisiting the higher-rate criteria and on removing compensation altogether. It is also considering expanding ground (f) to cover retrofit works. Nothing currently proposed touches the section 29A deadline. What we charge. £950 for the rent and terms position — the section 34 rent on the holding with the disregards argued properly, the section 33 term, the section 35 terms on O’May principles, and the interim rent modelled both ways. £2,450 fixed to run the valuation side through to settlement alongside your solicitor. The compensation calculation and the section 38(2) check are included, and so is telling you the deadline when you first send us the notice. What we will not do is hold the deadline. We are valuers. Calculating the statutory period, identifying the competent landlord under section 44, agreeing any extension under section 29B and issuing the claim are legal steps with a jurisdictional consequence, and they belong to a solicitor. Instruct one first. Then come and argue about the rent.