The Renters' Rights Act 2025: What It Means for Damp & Mould Surveys

The Renters' Rights Act 2025 is the most significant restructure of the private rented sector in three decades. The headlines have focused on the abolition of section 21 evictions and the move to periodic tenancies, but the Act also contains a less-discussed provision that has profound consequences for damp and mould surveyors: it extends Awaab's Law-style obligations to private landlords.

Roughly four and a half million homes in England are privately rented. Until 2025, the statutory damp and mould response framework applied only to social housing. From 2026, it applies to the PRS too. This post explains what changed, when, and what surveyors practising in the PRS need to do differently.

The legal mechanism

Part 4 of the Renters' Rights Act inserts a duty into private residential tenancies equivalent to the Awaab's Law duty for social tenancies. The mechanism is the same — implied terms in the tenancy contract, statutory clocks, ombudsman jurisdiction — but delivered through the new Private Rented Sector Ombudsman rather than the Housing Ombudsman Service.

Commencement is phased. The investigation duty (broadly: respond within 14 days of awareness, written report within a further 48 hours) commenced for all PRS tenancies in April 2026. The works duty (remedial action within reasonable time) follows in October 2026. The emergency tier (24-hour response for life-threatening hazards) commenced immediately at Royal Assent.

Who counts as "the landlord"

This is where the PRS gets fiddly. The Act's drafting puts the primary duty on whoever is named as the landlord on the tenancy agreement. But in practice, day-to-day handling falls on letting and managing agents, who are also caught by the duty as agents acting on the landlord's behalf.

The practical effect is that a tenant's mould complaint to a letting agent triggers the clock, even if the agent doesn't immediately tell the landlord. We are already seeing PRS Ombudsman decisions where agents have been criticised for delaying notification upstream — and the ombudsman has been clear that delay between agent-aware and landlord-aware does not pause the statutory clock.

The surveying market consequences

Before April 2026, a private landlord receiving a damp complaint had wide discretion over how and when to investigate. Many took the path of least friction: ignore until the tenant escalated, or commission a quick visual inspection from a builder.

That option is now gone. Within 14 days the landlord (or agent) must produce a written report. In practice, this means a damp survey by a competent person — and the bar for "competent" is being set at qualified surveyor level by the early ombudsman determinations.

The result: PRS damp survey instructions have roughly tripled in volume since April. The market is short of surveyors who:

• Can turn around an inspection inside the 14-day window
• Produce reports in a format the PRS Ombudsman recognises
• Capture HHSRS scoring (the PRS Ombudsman cross-references HHSRS even though the Act doesn't explicitly require it)
• Maintain the audit trail required if the case is escalated

What changes for surveyors already serving the PRS

Three operational changes are now non-negotiable:

1. Faster turnaround. The 14-day clock includes the surveyor's inspection and report. Most landlords won't instruct on day 1 — they'll instruct on day 7 — which leaves a week for site visit, write-up, and dispatch. On-site reporting becomes a competitive necessity, not a nice-to-have.
2. HHSRS scoring in every report, not just the social-housing ones. The PRS Ombudsman defaults to HHSRS as the common framework for hazard severity. Reports without scoring are treated as incomplete.
3. Health vulnerability questions. The emergency tier (24-hour response) hinges on whether the household contains a vulnerable occupant. The surveyor is often the first person to ask. Skipping the question can drop a report from a 14-day response into a 24-hour breach without anyone realising.

What changes for landlords and agents

The landlord-side change is largely process. Most agents have moved to a single damp-and-mould protocol that mirrors the social-housing regulator's expectations: log the complaint, instruct a surveyor inside 5 working days, report inside 14 days, works inside a further reasonable period, document everything.

The hidden cost is the audit trail. A spreadsheet of complaints will not survive a PRS Ombudsman determination. Agents need a timestamped record of when each complaint was received, when each surveyor was instructed, when each report was issued, and when each remedial work was completed. This is exactly the workflow SurveyMate produces by default.

Where the early case law is heading

The PRS Ombudsman has been operating for less than a year, but early determinations are setting a clear pattern:

• Surveyor competence is being scrutinised. Reports from non-qualified inspectors (general builders, EPC assessors moonlighting) are being cited as evidence of inadequate response, even where the inspection was timely.
• Photographic evidence is essential. Reports without time-stamped photos linking findings to specific locations are being treated as unverified narrative.
• Diagnostic reasoning is required. "The tenant has condensation due to lifestyle" is no longer a sufficient finding without supporting readings and analysis.

The opportunity

For working damp surveyors, the Renters' Rights Act has roughly doubled addressable demand overnight. The constraint on capturing that demand isn't finding leads — it's being able to operate on PRS-Ombudsman-grade timelines. Surveyors still relying on Word templates and email-the-PDF-tomorrow workflows are losing instructions to faster competitors.

See our companion post on Awaab's Law for the social-housing context — the underlying duty is the same, and operationally most surveyors are now serving both sectors with a single workflow.