It is one of the easiest compliance failures to make and one of the most expensive to be caught for: letting a property without a valid Energy Performance Certificate. The rule is not new — it has applied to all rented homes in England and Wales since 2008 — but enforcement is now visibly tighter, and the rise of routine cross-checking against the national EPC register means an unrecorded property is increasingly hard to hide.
If you've inherited a portfolio, taken on a property after a long tenancy, or just haven't checked recently, the chances that at least one of your EPCs has expired without you noticing are surprisingly high. EPCs last exactly ten years from the date of lodgement, which means a wave of certificates issued during the 2014-2017 boom is now actively expiring.
The rules in plain English
- You must commission an EPC before marketing a property to let.
- You must give a copy to the tenant on or before the day they move in.
- The certificate must be in date (less than 10 years old) for the duration of the let.
- From January 2028, the rating must also be C or higher.
Note the order. The current letting-without-an-EPC rules and the new minimum-rating rules are two separate compliance obligations. You can fail one without failing the other.
What the fines actually look like
Trading Standards departments, sitting under each local authority, are responsible for enforcing the rules. The headline penalty for letting without a valid EPC is up to £5,000 per breach, but the structure is more nuanced than the headline suggests:
- The penalty is calculated as 12.5% of the property's rateable value, with a minimum of £500 and a maximum of £5,000.
- Each breach is a separate property — a portfolio-wide lapse can stack into very significant numbers.
- Penalty notices are publicly published on a national register. Many landlords are more worried about the reputational impact with future lenders than the cash fine itself.
How enforcement actually finds you
The myth that no one is checking has been wrong for several years now. The most common triggers for a Trading Standards visit are:
- Tenant complaints — typically over an unrelated issue (mould, repairs, deposit) where the tenant or their solicitor finds no EPC on the register.
- Selective licensing checks — many councils now require an EPC as part of the licensing application, and cross-reference against the national register.
- Lender / refinancing audits — buy-to-let lenders pull EPC data automatically as part of underwriting; an expired or missing EPC is increasingly visible and increasingly fatal to a remortgage application.
- Routine sweeps — some local authorities (notably in London and the North West) run periodic sweeps of advertised lettings against the EPC register and issue penalty notices proactively.
How to fix it: the 7-day plan
The good news is that the remediation path is simple, fast and cheap relative to the fine. If you discover an EPC has expired or never existed:
- Stop marketing. If the property is actively listed without a valid EPC, take it down or pause it until the assessment is booked. Marketing is a separate breach point.
- Book a Domestic Energy Assessor. A residential EPC assessment costs £60-£120 depending on region and is usually available within 5-10 working days. The assessor visits the property for around 45 minutes.
- Lodge the certificate. The new EPC is uploaded to the national register (epc.opendatacommunities.org) — this is what regulators check.
- Re-issue to the tenant. Send a copy of the new certificate to the existing tenant by email and keep proof of delivery for your records.
- Diary the expiry. Add the 10-year expiry date to whatever calendar / property management system you actually use.
What to do if you've already received a penalty notice
Penalty notices have a formal appeal route — you have 28 days from the date of the notice to challenge it on procedural grounds. The most common (and most successful) appeal argument is that you took reasonable steps to comply once you became aware of the breach, which is one of several reasons to remediate immediately rather than wait.
Specialist property compliance solicitors will typically run an appeal for £400-£800, which is usually only worthwhile if the underlying penalty is substantial or if the publication of the breach would itself be damaging.
The 2028 angle
From the deadline, simply having a valid EPC is not enough — the rating itself has to be C or higher. So the worst position to be in is one that's already common: an expired EPC on a property that, if reassessed today, would come back as a D. Renew the EPC, find out the rating, and make a plan. The earlier you do that, the cheaper the path through 2028 becomes.