From 23 June 2026, councils across England are using a revised Housing Health and Safety Rating System to judge whether a rented home is safe. The changes don’t lower or raise the standard a property must meet, but they do change how hazards are identified, scored and enforced, and they arrive alongside a new civil penalty that can cost a landlord up to £7,000 for a single serious hazard.
For anyone managing a residential property, this combination of clearer rules and sharper enforcement is worth understanding properly.
What HHSRS does
The Housing Health and Safety Rating System is the risk assessment tool local authorities use to decide whether a home is safe and healthy to live in. It has applied to all residential property in England since 2006, under Part 1 of the Housing Act 2004. A council officer inspects a property, identifies any hazards arising from a deficiency in the building, and scores the risk to the occupier most likely to be harmed by it. Because the assessment is tied to the property rather than the people living in it, an empty home can still be inspected and scored.
The 2026 amendment simplifies this system. The number of prescribed hazards has been reduced from 29 to 21, grouped under four headings:
- Protection against accidents
- Physiological requirements
- Protection against infection
- Psychological requirements
Damp and mould, excess cold, excess heat, electrical hazards, and falls all remain individually assessed hazards within that list, alongside fire and explosion risk, which has been given a broader definition covering smoke, fumes, explosions and fire-related structural collapse.
Simpler scoring, same threshold
Under the old system, hazards were scored across ten bands running from A to J, a structure most landlords and tenants found hard to interpret. That’s now been reduced to three bands: High, Medium and Low. A score of 1,000 or more still counts as a Category 1 hazard, now labelled High, and councils have a legal duty to take enforcement action when one is found. Anything scoring below that threshold falls into Category 2, now split into Medium and Low, where enforcement is discretionary rather than mandatory. The dividing line between the two categories hasn’t moved. Only the labelling has.
The four classes of harm used to describe the likely outcome of a hazard have also been renamed, moving from Roman numerals to descriptive terms: Extreme, Severe, Serious and Moderate. A hazard likely to cause death or permanent injury sits at the Extreme end; one likely to cause a broken finger or a bad cold sits at Moderate. The change is about clarity rather than substance.
Baseline indicators: a new reference point
One of the most practical additions is a set of baseline indicators published alongside the revised guidance. These aren’t mandatory standards and they don’t replace an assessor’s judgement, but they give a concrete benchmark for common issues. Where a property falls short of a relevant baseline indicator, that counts as a deficiency and feeds into the hazard score.
The £7,000 penalty, and where it applies
Alongside the HHSRS changes, the Renters’ Rights Act inserted a new power into the Housing Act 2004 allowing councils to issue a civil penalty of up to £7,000 where a Category 1 hazard has been found. This came into force on 22 June 2026, a day ahead of the HHSRS amendments themselves.
This isn’t simply a fine for having a hazard. A council must first have taken formal enforcement action, such as an improvement notice or a prohibition order, and must reasonably conclude that it was practicable for the landlord or managing agent to have removed the hazard and they failed to do so. Factors the council will weigh include:
- how long the hazard had been known about;
- whether repairs could have been carried out without disproportionate cost or disruption, and
- whether the tenant had actually given access for the work.
Category 2 hazards don’t attract this penalty at all. And where a single underlying fault, a broken boiler is the standard example, causes more than one Category 1 hazard, councils have discretion to treat it as one penalty rather than several.
What this means for day-to-day management
None of this changes what a well-run property should already look like. The duties on landlords haven’t shifted; what’s changed is the clarity of the system councils use to check compliance, and the financial consequence of falling short on a serious hazard. For property managers, the sensible response is to fold the new baseline indicators into routine inspections, particularly around heating, damp, stairs and window restrictors, and to keep clear records of when a repair was reported and when it was resolved. If a council does inspect a property, that evidence of prompt, documented action is what stands between a hazard awareness notice and a five-figure enforcement bill.
Dependable works with landlords and managing agents across the region to keep properties compliant, safe and well-maintained, from routine servicing through to emergency repairs. If you’d like a professional view on how the updated HHSRS applies to your portfolio, get in touch with the team.
