Smoke and carbon monoxide alarm rules for landlords

This is the cheapest obligation on the entire compliance list and one of the most frequently breached, which tells you something about how compliance failures actually happen. Nobody decides not to fit a smoke alarm. They just never confirm that one is there and working on the day the tenancy starts.

What is required, and where

Smoke alarms. At least one on every storey of the property used wholly or partly as living accommodation. A loft conversion counts. A basement used as a room counts. A storey used only for storage does not.

Carbon monoxide alarms. In every room used as living accommodation that contains a fixed combustion appliance — a gas boiler, a wood burner, an open fire, an oil heater. Since the 2022 amendment this covers gas appliances too, not only solid fuel. Gas cookers remain the exception.

The rule that catches people: test on day one

Fitting the alarm is not the obligation. The obligation is that every required alarm is checked and found to be in working order on the day the tenancy begins.

Not the week before. Not at the inventory two days earlier. On the first day of the tenancy. This is the part that turns into a dispute, because it is the part nobody evidences.

Once you are told, the clock starts

During the tenancy, routine testing is the tenant’s responsibility. Yours is to repair or replace a faulty alarm once you are told about it, and the standard is to act as soon as reasonably practicable.

There is no fixed number of days attached to that phrase, which makes people relax about it. They should not. In practice a regulator or a court will look at what you did and how quickly, measured from when you were told — which means the date you were told has to exist somewhere other than a colleague’s memory of a phone call.

Enforcement is by the council, and it is quick

A local authority that believes you are in breach serves a remedial notice giving 28 days. Fail to comply and they may arrange the work themselves and impose a penalty of up to £5,000.

£5,000 is a small figure next to a deposit-protection penalty or a licensing fine, and that is exactly why this obligation gets deprioritised. The real cost is different: a fire or a CO incident in a property where the alarm record is missing is not a penalty conversation.

Making it a system rather than a habit

The pattern that works is treating the day-one test as a dated obligation against the tenancy rather than a line on a check-in sheet. It falls due on the tenancy start date, somebody discharges it, and the evidence attaches to the tenancy record where it will still be findable in three years.

That is how Tekniti models it, along with every other statutory duty that hangs off a tenancy start — deposit protection, the prescribed information, Right to Rent, the certificates a tenant must be given before they move in. One list, dated, with the evidence attached.