In short: private landlords spent £6.41 billion on repairs last year, took fewer than one tenancy in eighty to court, and are rated higher on repairs than any social landlord in England.
Updated 6 October 2026
The key facts
In this article:
4.7 million households, 19% of all households in England, according to the English Housing Survey 2024-25. At a mean household size of 2.3 people that is roughly 10.8 million people living in a home rented from a private landlord, which makes it the second largest tenure after owner occupation.
It is also the youngest and most diverse part of the housing market. 69% of households with a household reference person aged 16 to 24 rent privately. The share of private rented households with a household reference person from an ethnic minority background rose from 18% in 2019-20 to 30% in 2023-24, the largest increase of any tenure. 76% of private renting households have someone in work, and 1.6 million of them include dependent children.
Whatever anyone thinks of the sector, one in five households in England is in it, and no credible plan exists to house them without it.
Mostly by choice, and often for work. Job-related reasons were the second most common reason for moving within the private rented sector in 2024-25, cited by 23% of movers, behind only the desire for a larger property at 24%. Being asked to leave by a landlord accounted for 13%.
That matters more than it sounds. A homeowner moving for a job pays stamp duty, legal fees, agency commission and removals, and waits on a chain. A renter gives notice. Since the Renters' Rights Act came into force on 1 May 2026, fixed terms have gone, so a tenant can give two months' notice from day one without negotiating a break clause or paying to leave.
If the country wants a labour market where people can take a job 200 miles away, the private rented sector is the mechanism that delivers it.
Landlords do, to the tune of £6.41 billion in a single year. HMRC's Property Rental Income Statistics, published on 28 August 2026, show 1.92 million unincorporated landlords declaring repairs and maintenance against rental income in 2024-25, making it the most commonly declared expense of any category. That averages £3,339 per landlord, or roughly one pound in every ten collected in rent.
The figure understates the true cost. HMRC excludes capital improvements by definition, so a new kitchen, an extension and most energy efficiency work are not in the total at all. Any landlord who did the work themselves and never put it on a tax return is invisible in the data.
A tenant whose boiler fails makes a phone call. The owner finds several thousand pounds. The tenant's exposure to the physical condition of the building is capped at nothing, which is a genuine transfer of risk and worth something real.
Yes, and on the numbers it takes about nine years. Of households who bought a home in the year to 2024-25, 43% had previously been private renters. The median first-time buyer deposit was £36,500, and among buyers aged 16 to 34, 78% funded the deposit from their own savings.
Take a couple renting an average English home at £1,451 a month. Private renters aged 16 to 34 spend 36% of gross household income on rent, which puts their income at roughly £48,400 before tax and £38,300 after, leaving about £1,744 a month once rent is paid. Saving a fifth of that reaches the median deposit in a little under nine years. Someone starting at 22 buys at about 31, and the observed median age of a first-time buyer is 34.
In London, where renters aged 16 to 34 spend 47% of gross income on rent, the same discipline takes closer to twelve years. The stepping stone still works. It is simply much longer than it was.
Rarely. Across the four quarters to June 2026, private landlord and accelerated possession claims in England and Wales totalled roughly 58,400. Set against 4.7 million privately rented households in England, that is about 1.2% of tenancies in a year, and a possession claim is not the same as an eviction, since fewer properties are recovered than claims issued.
The survey data points the same way. The English Private Landlord Survey 2024 found that 6% of landlords had evicted a tenant in the previous two years, and that 44% said their most recent tenancy ended because the tenant gave notice, against 8% who said they had asked the tenant to leave. From the tenant's side, the English Housing Survey records 63% of ended tenancies finishing because the tenant wanted to move, against 14% where the landlord or agent asked them to leave.
None of that means Section 21 should have survived. A power exercised rarely is still a power, and the minority who used it badly could not be reached any other way. But a power used on 1.2% of tenancies a year is a different instrument from one used routinely.
Yes. At 68%, private renters are the most satisfied group in English housing on repairs and maintenance, according to the English Housing Survey 2024-25, ahead of housing association tenants at 58%, council tenants at 55% and leaseholders at 49%. Private renters are also the least likely to be dissatisfied and the least likely to be unhappy with the answer when they do complain.
They achieve that in a stock measurably older and more converted than any of the others, and without a regulator, a board or a published service standard.
One number inside that deserves attention from anyone in this industry. Where the landlord handles repairs directly, 68% rises to 74%. Where an agent or property manager handles them, it falls to 59%, and dissatisfaction rises from 17% to 28%. Agents, ourselves included, are the weak link in a system that otherwise performs well.
Yes, and this is where the criticism lands. 22% of private rented homes fail the Decent Homes Standard, against 14% of owner occupied homes, 12% of council homes and 9% of housing association stock. 11% have surveyor-recorded damp, against 4% in owner occupied homes, and nearly half of private renters report condensation, damp or mould themselves.
A sector housing 1.6 million households with children cannot be relaxed about that, and nobody serious argues it should be.
Two things are true at once, and the honest version holds both. On the physical state of the building, private landlords are the worst performing group in English housing. On the service delivered to the people living in those buildings, they outperform every social landlord in the country. Policy built on the assumption that landlords are uniformly bad misses the second half entirely.
Because the landlord frequently does not own the defect causing it. Most London flats are leasehold, which means the roof, the external walls, the guttering and the shared drainage belong to the freeholder. A leaseholder landlord cannot lawfully repair the failed parapet soaking the wall of their own flat, and has no right of access at all if the source is the flat above.
Diagnosis is the second problem. Rising, penetrating and condensation damp look alike on a wall and need completely different fixes, and condensation is the largest category by volume with no single defect to repair. That is why 11% is recorded by surveyors while 47% of renters report damp themselves.
Then there is the work itself. A proper structural repair means floors up and walls opened, followed by weeks of drying before replastering, which is close to impossible around a tenant in occupation and expensive enough that many owners reach for a dehumidifier instead. Recurrence afterwards depends on heating and ventilation the landlord does not control, with fuel poverty the dominant driver.
None of this is a legal defence and it is not offered as one. Landlords carry the liability whether or not they own the cause. But policy that assumes indifference will not fix a problem caused by leasehold structure, old fabric and cost.
EPC C by 1 October 2030 and the reformed Decent Homes Standard by 2035. The government response of 21 January 2026 confirmed a single compliance deadline for all tenancies in England and Wales, with a cost cap of £10,000 including VAT and a maximum penalty of £30,000. The deadline is confirmed policy, not yet law: it requires new primary powers and then an amending statutory instrument, expected in force during 2027. Our guide to EPC rules for landlords covers what the standard involves.
Three more obligations sit alongside it. The reformed Decent Homes Standard applies to the private rented sector from 2035. Awaab's Law, which sets statutory timeframes for investigating and repairing damp and mould, is due to be extended from social housing to the private rented sector, with a consultation expected by the end of 2026. And the Housing Health and Safety Rating System was reformed on 23 June 2026, cutting the assessed hazards from 29 to 21 and allowing councils to impose a civil penalty of up to £7,000.
Consider two identical Victorian terraces on the same street, both rated EPC E. In October 2030 the let one is illegal to rent until it reaches band C. The owner occupied one faces no obligation whatsoever. Same brickwork, same boiler, same draughts, no deadline. The duty attaches to the tenure rather than the building, and the cost of the upgrade falls on a group that is simultaneously being told it is the problem.
Grant support that follows the building rather than the tenant's income. The Warm Homes Local Grant currently keys eligibility to who lives in the property, which means two identical houses on the same street get different treatment, and a landlord cannot plan a programme of works around who happens to be in occupation.
Three other changes would cost the Treasury very little. A tax system that does not tax a mortgaged higher rate landlord more heavily than a company holding the identical property. Enforcement resource aimed at the criminal end, instead of compliance burden spread evenly across everyone who already complies. And transparency on letting agents' terms and conditions, where fees are published but the terms behind them are not.
The cheapest change of all is in the language. A minister who said plainly that most landlords look after their tenants well, that the reforms target the ones who do not, and that the state intends to help the rest meet the new standards would lose nothing. The compliant majority currently hear every announcement as aimed at them, and a great many are weighing whether to stay. The single largest reason a tenant loses a private rented home in England is already a landlord selling up or moving in, cited in 57% of landlord-initiated endings. Policy that pushes marginal landlords towards the exit produces exactly the outcome it says it wants to prevent.
This post summarises a longer piece. The full report runs to twenty pages, sets out every figure above with its source, and covers the sections not summarised here, including the condition and service scorecards in full, the tax treatment of repairs against improvements, and the comparison with social housing waiting lists.
Download the full report: What have landlords ever done for us? The 2026 data. Figures and charts may be reproduced with attribution to Hello Neighbour, and we are happy to supply the underlying calculations on request.
Government statistics
Our own calculations
This article is general guidance, not legal or tax advice, and reflects the law in force in England at the time of writing.
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