EICR rules for landlords: the complete 2026 guide

Gas safety gets the attention because the certificate is annual and the renewal is impossible to forget. Electrical safety is the one that catches people out, precisely because five years is long enough for a property to change hands, change managing agent, and change systems between one inspection and the next.

The duty is not soft. A local authority can impose a financial penalty of up to £30,000 per breach, and unlike some obligations there is no grace period for a landlord who simply did not know.

What the regulations require

Every fixed electrical installation in a privately rented home in England must be inspected and tested by a qualified person at intervals of no more than five years. The output is an Electrical Installation Condition Report — an EICR.

“Fixed installation” means the wiring, the consumer unit, the sockets, the switches and the permanently connected equipment. It does not mean the appliances a tenant plugs in. Portable appliance testing of items you supply is good practice and is a different thing from the EICR.

The interval can be shorter. If the report itself recommends a review date earlier than five years, that recommendation becomes your deadline. This is the single most common way a compliant landlord drifts out of compliance: the certificate says three years, the diary says five.

The two 28-day clocks

Both deadlines are 28 days, they run from different events, and they are the ones enforcement teams check first.

A new tenant must receive a copy before they occupy. A prospective tenant who asks must receive one within 28 days of asking.

Reading the codes

An EICR is either satisfactory or unsatisfactory, and the classification codes are what decide which.

C1 — danger present, risk of injury, immediate action required. C2 — potentially dangerous, urgent remedial action required. FI — further investigation required without delay. Any of those three makes the report unsatisfactory and starts the 28-day remedial clock.

C3 — improvement recommended. A C3 does not make a report unsatisfactory and does not trigger the deadline. It is worth doing and it is not a legal obligation, and confusing the two causes both unnecessary spend and unnecessary panic.

Where this goes wrong in practice

The five-year gap swallows the handover. A property moves to a new managing agent in year three. The certificate is in a filing system nobody migrated. Year five passes without an alert because no system was holding the date.

Remedial work is done but never confirmed in writing. The electrician returns, fixes the C2, and tells someone verbally. The regulation requires written confirmation to the tenant. In a dispute the work having been done is not the same as the work being evidenced.

The tenant copy is sent to the wrong tenant. After a change of occupier, the obligation is to the person living there now, before they move in — not to whoever was on the last tenancy.

How this connects to everything else

Electrical safety rarely fails in isolation. The properties where an EICR has lapsed are usually the same properties where the gas certificate is late and the deposit paperwork is thin, because the cause is a gap in the system rather than a decision about electricity.

That is the argument for holding every obligation in one place with one deadline calendar, rather than a certificate folder per requirement. Tekniti materialises each duty as a dated obligation against the property — including the recommended review date from the EICR itself rather than a blanket five years — and keeps the evidence of what was sent to whom, and when, on a tamper-evident trail.