There is only one residential tenancy left. The money is in the exceptions.

No. Assured shortholds no longer exist for private lettings in England. Every existing one converted automatically to an assured periodic tenancy on 1 May 2026, and no new one can be granted. Nor can you grant a fixed term: provisions purporting to make an assured tenancy a fixed term are of no effect, and asserting a fixed term against a tenant is itself a breach carrying a civil penalty of up to £7,000. This matters more than it sounds, because the template market has not caught up. Agreements headed “Assured Shorthold Tenancy Agreement for a term of twelve months” are still being sold, still being downloaded, and still being signed — and they are wrong twice before the first clause. If you are using a document you bought before May, or one an agent gave you, or one you have reused for years, it needs replacing rather than amending. The practical consequences are real: a tenant can serve two months’ notice from day one whatever your document says, your rent increase clause does not work, and any advance rent provision beyond one month is unenforceable.

Yes, but only by falling outside the assured regime altogether, and that is a question of fact rather than drafting. The categories that are outside it are set out in the Housing Act and the main ones are: the tenant is a company rather than an individual; the rent is over £100,000 a year; the rent is at or below the low-rent threshold; it is a genuine holiday letting; it is a letting by a specified educational institution to its own students; you are a resident landlord; or it is a business tenancy. There is also a route for purpose-built student accommodation, which can still use fixed-term common law tenancies — but only where the provider is a member of an approved code, and if that membership lapses the exemption goes with it. What you cannot do is manufacture your way into one of these categories. A “holiday let” to somebody who plainly lives there is a sham and will be treated as the tenancy it really is. A company let where the company is a shell created to hold the tenancy of somebody’s home is the same problem in a different suit. The exemptions are boundaries, not devices, and they are policed on substance.

The commercial terms, yes. The instrument itself, only if it is not a deed. The Legal Services Act makes preparing instruments relating to land a reserved instrument activity, and then excludes “an agreement not intended to be executed as a deed”. So a licence to occupy and a tenancy at will are ours to draft, and so is a lease of three years or less taking effect in possession at the best rent. A lease of more than three years must be executed as a deed and one of more than seven must be registered at HM Land Registry — and both preparing that deed and lodging the registration are reserved. Carrying on a reserved activity without authorisation carries up to two years on indictment, so this is not a line we are going to blur for a fee. What we do on those is the part that decides the value: term, rent and review, break rights and the conditions attached to them, the repair standard, the service charge and whether it is capped, alienation, permitted use, and the contracting-out sequence. The solicitor prepares the deed. In our experience that division produces a better lease than either party doing both, because the commercial negotiation and the drafting are genuinely different skills.

Exclusive possession. Street v Mountford settled it in 1985 and nothing has shifted since: exclusive possession, for a term, at a rent, is a tenancy however the document is headed. If you grant somebody a space they can lock and exclude you from, you have granted a lease, and calling it a licence achieves nothing except making you look like you were trying something. The consequences are not academic. On the commercial side a lease carries security of tenure under the 1954 Act unless it has been properly contracted out, so a purported licence that turns out to be a lease has handed the occupier a right to renew you never intended to give. On the residential side a purported licence that is really a tenancy has handed them the full assured regime, and you cannot get possession without a ground. A genuine licence is possible and useful, but it requires you to actually behave like a licensor: real rights of entry without notice, a genuine ability to relocate the occupier between spaces, and services that require regular access. If you never exercise those rights, a court may take the view they were never real. The test is what you do, not what you wrote.

Whenever you are granting a business tenancy and do not want the tenant to have a right to renew — which is most of the time. The procedure has three parts and the sequence is where people get it wrong. First, you serve a warning notice in the prescribed form. Second, the tenant makes a declaration. Third, the lease is endorsed referring to both and confirming that sections 24 to 28 are excluded. The critical point is timing: all of this must happen before the parties become contractually bound, which means before exchange of any agreement for lease — not before completion of the lease itself. Doing it in the wrong order is the classic and expensive error, and it is usually discovered years later when you want the property back. On the declaration: if there are fourteen clear days or more between the notice and the tenancy being entered into, a simple declaration is enough. If there are fewer than fourteen, it must be a statutory declaration sworn before a solicitor independent of the transaction — not yours and not theirs. And if the lease is materially amended after the notice was served, you may need to run the whole procedure again. One thing worth knowing: the Law Commission is consulting on simplifying all of this, but nothing has changed yet and you must follow the current procedure.

A lodger agreement, which is an excluded licence, and it is a genuinely different animal from a tenancy. Sharing accommodation with a resident landlord — or with a member of the landlord’s family — makes somebody an excluded occupier. That means no assured tenancy, no deposit protection scheme, and, most significantly, no court order is needed to end the arrangement once it has been lawfully brought to an end. Notice is whatever your agreement says, or at common law usually one rental period. There is a persistent myth that excluded occupiers get four weeks’ notice; they do not — that rule applies to occupiers who are not excluded, and the two get confused constantly and in both directions. Three things to get right. The exclusion depends on the landlord occupying the property as their only or principal home, so it fails if you have moved out. It depends on genuinely shared accommodation, so a self-contained annexe with its own kitchen and bathroom is not sharing and is a tenancy again. And do not protect a deposit in a scheme — it is not required and doing it invites the argument that you thought this was a tenancy all along.

The document has not. The risk has, considerably. The structure still works: a company let to the operator’s limited company sits outside the assured regime because the tenant is not an individual, and the operator then grants assured periodic tenancies downstream. Three changes matter. First, rent repayment orders now reach superior landlords. The Supreme Court decision that protected the owner at the top of a rent-to-rent chain has been reversed by statute, and orders now also reach company directors personally where they consented, connived or were negligent. Second, the cap has risen from twelve months’ rent to twenty-four, with a two-year window to apply and a longer list of qualifying offences. So if you are the property owner, you can no longer treat the operator’s licensing failures as somebody else’s problem — check the position yourself, in writing, before you grant. Third, and this one helps you: a term in a superior lease or a mortgage prohibiting letting to benefit claimants or families with children is now void, retrospectively. That is the only restriction that has gone; a general prohibition on sub-letting is untouched, and written consent from the freeholder, headlandlord and lender remains the thing these arrangements most often fail on. No amount of drafting fixes a missing consent.

More than before, and one item is new. Every new tenancy needs a written statement of terms served before the tenant signs — not after — with prescribed content: your full name and a service address in England or Wales, all the tenants’ names, the commencement date, the rent and when it is payable, whether bills are included, the statutory rent increase procedure, the deposit, the tenant’s minimum notice, a statement that you can only end the tenancy by a court possession order after a prescribed notice, the repairing obligations and the safety requirements, and the tenant’s rights on pet requests and disability improvements. Tenancies already running on 1 May 2026 needed the government information sheet served by 31 May — the actual document, not a link to it — or a full written statement where the tenancy was oral. The penalty is up to £7,000, rising to £40,000 for a continuing or repeat breach. It does not bar possession, but a tenant defending a claim will raise it. Everything else still applies: deposit protection and prescribed information within thirty days — and that one is now an absolute bar to possession on every ground except the two anti-social behaviour ones — plus gas safety, the electrical report, the EPC, How to Rent and right to rent checks.

£145 for an assured periodic tenancy with the written statement of terms and the compliance pack that has to go with it, which covers the overwhelming majority of residential lettings because there is now only one agreement for them. £295 for the agreements that sit outside the assured regime — a company let, a high-rent common law tenancy, a genuine holiday letting or a qualifying student arrangement — because those need real drafting rather than a form: the statute is not doing the work, so the contract has to. A lodger agreement is £95. £450 for a commercial licence to occupy or a tenancy at will, both of which we can prepare because neither is a deed. And from £950 for a commercial lease, where we agree the commercial terms and a regulated firm prepares and registers the instrument — because preparing a deed relating to land, and lodging anything at the Land Registry, are reserved legal activities and we are not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of a fee. Everything is fixed and quoted first. If the tool has told you that your facts produce a document we cannot lawfully prepare, it will have said so before you got to the price.