5 Compliance Documents Every Landlord Needs Before Renting Out a Property

Before you hand over a single key, there are five documents every UK landlord needs sorted. Miss one, and you could be looking at fines, a delayed tenancy, or worse — an unenforceable eviction down the line.

1. Gas Safety Certificate

Required if there's any gas appliance on site. No certificate, no legal letting.

2. EICR (Electrical Installation Condition Report)

Confirms the wiring is safe. A legal requirement for every private tenancy in England since 2020.

3. Energy Performance Certificate (EPC)

Rates the property's energy efficiency and must be shown to prospective tenants before they commit to renting.

4. Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms

Smoke alarms on every floor, carbon monoxide alarms in rooms with solid fuel appliances (and increasingly recommended for gas appliances too). Both need testing at the start of every tenancy.

5. Tenancy deposit protection and "How to Rent" guide

Deposits must go into a government-approved scheme within 30 days, and tenants must be given the latest "How to Rent" guide when the tenancy starts.

Why landlords get caught out

None of these five is difficult in isolation. The trouble is timing — juggling five different documents with five different renewal cycles, especially if you're managing this alongside a day job or more than one property.

This is the exact problem KeepCert was designed to solve. Instead of five different reminders scattered across emails, calendars, and memory, everything lives in one simple tracker that tells you what's due, what's missing, and what needs sorting before your next tenancy starts.