The court fee is £415. That is not what it costs you.

The pre-action half of it, yes, and we would rather explain the line than blur it. Serving a notice is not a reserved legal activity, and neither is auditing your compliance, building the evidence or negotiating a surrender. Issuing the claim, running it and appearing at the hearing are reserved, and doing them without authorisation is an offence under the Legal Services Act carrying up to two years on indictment, plus contempt of court. In Baxter v Doble the High Court looked at an unregulated eviction firm’s work in the round — drafting the papers, the witness statements, the applications, instructing the advocate, running the correspondence — and held that together it amounted to conducting litigation, even though the landlord was nominally acting in person and the firm never went on the record. The judge said it would be “wholly artificial” to pretend the client had done it himself. That firm escaped sanction only through a defence that turned on the law being unsettled at the time, and it is not unsettled now. So: we do the notice, the compliance and the bundle, and a regulated firm issues and runs it. You pay a solicitor once, for the part that needs one. Any firm that is not a firm of solicitors and offers to take the whole thing off your hands for a fixed fee is describing something a High Court judge has already said they may not do — ask them which regulator they answer to before you instruct them.

The list is shorter than it was and one item on it has moved, which is catching people out. Deposit non-compliance is now an absolute bar to a possession order on every ground except the two anti-social behaviour ones. Under the old regime it only ever affected a section 21 notice, so a great many landlords have filed it mentally under “no longer relevant”. It is more relevant than it has ever been. If the deposit was protected outside thirty days, or the prescribed information never went out, you do not have a claim until you either fix it or return the deposit in full — and our advice is to do that before you serve the notice, because there is authority both ways on whether a later cure saves an earlier notice and you do not want to be the case that settles it. An outstanding prohibited payment under the Tenant Fees Act bars possession the same way until it is repaid. What no longer bars possession, and this surprises people in the other direction: the gas safety certificate, the EPC and the How to Rent guide. Those were all creatures of section 21 and they died with it. They remain legal obligations with their own penalties and you should still comply — but on the current reading they will not stop a claim on a ground.

Longer than the published figure, and the published figure is already six months. The last Ministry of Justice medians put claim to order at eight weeks, order to warrant at about eight more, and warrant to actual repossession at nine and a half — roughly twenty-six weeks from issuing to getting the keys. Two things make that an understatement. First, it is a pre-reform median: it covers a period ending a month before the new regime started. Second, and more importantly, it is weighted by accelerated paper claims that no longer exist for private landlords. Nearly a third of the claims in that sample were decided without a hearing. Now every private possession claim is listed, so the claim-to-order leg has to lengthen. Our calculator adds six weeks to that stage and labels it as an estimate, because nobody yet knows the real number — the first quarter containing post-reform data has only just been published and a meaningful read will not exist until late in the year. Then add the notice period on top, which is four weeks for arrears and four months for a sale or moving in. The honest headline is that a private landlord starting today should be planning for something between seven and ten months, not six.

Because on most sets of numbers we have run, it is cheaper, and it would be dishonest to build a possession calculator that hides the arithmetic. The court route costs you the fee, the enforcement, the legal work and — overwhelmingly the largest item — every month of rent you do not receive while it runs. On a £1,650 property over seven months that is well over £11,000 of lost rent against a court fee of £415. You will recover about £530 in fixed costs, on paper, from a person who by definition has no money. So the break-even against a negotiated surrender is usually a five-figure sum, and a tenant who is going to have to move anyway will very often take a fraction of it to go in a fortnight. Three warnings, because this is where it goes wrong. It must be a written surrender with a date in it — handing keys back is not a surrender on its own, and a landlord who accepts keys and re-lets without a signed agreement has manufactured a claim against himself. Do not pay before it is signed. And do not use it as leverage: conduct intended to make somebody give up occupation is a criminal offence whether or not money changes hands, and an offer that arrives alongside a threat is exactly that.

Not for the mandatory ground any more. The threshold rose on 1 May 2026 from two months to three months on a monthly tenancy, or thirteen weeks on a weekly one, and the notice period rose from two weeks to four. It is still a mandatory ground, meaning the judge must make the order if it is proved — but there is a catch that costs landlords their claim regularly: the arrears must be at the threshold on the day of the hearing as well as on the day you served. A tenant who scrapes together a payment the week before the date drops you below three months and the mandatory ground evaporates in the hearing room. That is why you never plead it alone. The discretionary arrears grounds carry the same four weeks’ notice, survive a part payment, and put the decision in the judge’s hands rather than making it automatic. Two months’ arrears today gives you those, right now. One more thing worth checking before you count the balance: arrears attributable to Universal Credit the tenant was entitled to but did not receive do not count towards the serious arrears ground. If part of this is a payment failure rather than a tenant failure, a managed payment to landlord fixes the cause for nothing and is faster than any court.

Yes, on the sale ground, and there are three constraints people discover in the wrong order. It is mandatory, so proof gets you the order. It needs four months’ notice. And it cannot take effect in the first twelve months of the tenancy — measured to the date the notice expires, not the date you serve — so on a tenancy that began less than eight months ago you cannot usefully serve at all yet. Then the constraint that follows you afterwards: having used the sale or moving-in ground, you may not re-let or even re-market the property for twelve months, and that expressly includes short lets and holiday lets. It binds your agent as well as you, and breaching it is an offence with a penalty of up to £40,000. So if the actual plan is to get vacant possession and put it back on the market at a higher rent, this ground is not the tool, and using it that way is knowingly using a ground the court would not have granted — which is separately penalised and now triggers a rent repayment order of up to two years’ rent. If you genuinely are selling, the other question worth asking is whether you need vacant possession at all: a tenanted sale to an investor is slower to price but avoids four months of notice, seven months of process and a year of restriction.

You commit a criminal offence, and it is the single most expensive mistake available to a landlord. Unlawfully depriving a residential occupier of occupation — or attempting to — carries up to two years’ imprisonment and an unlimited fine on indictment, and so does a course of conduct likely to interfere with their peace or comfort, or persistently withdrawing services, done to make them leave. The version usually charged against landlords requires only that you knew or had reasonable cause to believe the conduct was likely to have that effect; it does not require that you intended it. Separately, the council can impose a financial penalty of up to £40,000 without prosecuting anybody, on the balance of probabilities. On top of that sits a rent repayment order of up to two years’ rent — nearly £40,000 on a £1,650 flat — and civil damages, where reported awards against landlords of assured tenants run from a few hundred pounds to around £19,000 once general and aggravated damages are added. Add it up and it is entirely possible to end a few thousand pounds of arrears by putting yourself sixty thousand pounds down. If the relationship has reached the point where locks are a tempting thought, that is the moment to hand it to somebody with no emotional stake in it.

Sometimes, and we would rather give you the honest version than the marketed one. The county court bailiff route costs roughly £480 all in. Transferring to a High Court Enforcement Officer costs roughly £1,600 to £2,100 once the transfer application and the enforcement fee are in, so three to four times the price. The published median from warrant to actual repossession by a county court bailiff is nine and a half weeks, and High Court enforcement is very widely marketed as materially faster. It probably is. But we could not find a single independent, quantified comparison, so we are not going to put a number on it, and neither should anyone selling it to you. Do the arithmetic yourself with your own rent: if you are losing £380 a week, saving six weeks is worth £2,280 and the premium pays for itself twice over; if the property is low-rent or the tenant is likely to leave on the order anyway, it does not. Two practical notes. Transfer is not automatic — the county court has a discretion and you have to ask, usually at the hearing, which is much easier than asking afterwards. And the claim that judges never allow it is a myth; they frequently do, when asked properly and at the right moment.

£195 for the pre-action compliance audit, and it is the cheapest money on this page because it is the money that stops you paying a £415 court fee for a claim that cannot succeed. We check the deposit position and the prescribed information, the tenancy agreement, whether the ground you want is actually open on your dates, and whether anything outstanding bars possession. £295 to draft and serve the notice on the correct prescribed form with a defensible expiry date and proper evidence of service. £650 for the full evidence bundle — reconciled rent schedule, service evidence, chronology, correspondence — put together so a solicitor can issue from it on day one instead of billing you to assemble it. And £450 for a negotiated surrender, payable only if they actually leave, because charging for an attempt would give us the wrong incentive on the one route that is usually cheapest for you. What we do not do is issue or run the claim; that goes to a regulated firm and you pay them directly, so there is no margin on it for us and no reason for us to push you toward court. Everything is fixed and quoted before anything starts.