Across 667 comparable published cases decided under the old rules, the First-tier Tribunal set the rent below the landlord's notice figure 75% of the time (MarketRent analysis). Decisions also landed a median of 89 days after the proposed start date (n=1,017), and under the Renters' Rights Act an increase decided late is income lost for good.

Since 1 May 2026, every rent increase on a private assured tenancy in England runs through a Section 13 notice on Form 4A, and your tenant can refer the proposed figure to the First-tier Tribunal before the new rent starts.[1] The new regime is too young to have produced a meaningful body of decisions. The old one is not. So we read the published record to see how proposed rents actually fared, and what that says about the evidence behind your figures today.

What does the published record show?

Under the old rules, the tribunal set the rent below the figure on the landlord's notice in 75% of cases, across 667 comparable cases. It confirmed the figure as asked in 17% of cases and set it higher in 8%.[2]

Those numbers come from MarketRent analysis of the published First-tier Tribunal record: 667 comparable market-rent cases involving private landlords, all decided under the pre-Act regime.[2] Three caveats travel with them. Published decisions are only a subset of all applications, because withdrawn and settled cases never publish. The headline excludes social and intermediate-rent landlords, whose below-market notices behave differently. And the extraction carries a small error rate, around 2 to 3 percent, checked by manual audit.[2]

Outcome split across 667 comparable pre-Act tribunal rent decisions, 75% set below the landlord's notice figure, 17% confirmed as asked, 8% set higher

Two readings of that 75% are wrong. It does not mean tenants "won" three times out of four. A determination below the notice figure is not a rent freeze: the tribunal's job is to find the open market rent, wherever that sits.[3] And it does not predict outcomes under the new Act. The lesson is simpler. When a proposed figure was tested against market evidence, three times out of four it did not hold.

One outcome has disappeared. For notices served since 1 May 2026, the tribunal cannot set a rent above the landlord's proposed figure, so the 8% of old cases that went higher cannot happen now.[4]

Delay is the hidden cost

In the published record, the median wait from application to decision was 124 days, from the 604 decisions that state an application date.[2] Measured against the landlord's own timetable, decisions landed a median of 89 days after the proposed start date on the notice, across 1,017 decisions.[2]

Under the old rules that limbo was often recoverable, because the tribunal could backdate an increase, and old-regime decisions in the corpus do exactly that.[2] No longer. Where the decision comes after the proposed start date, the determined rent takes effect from the first rent period on or after the decision, and the tenant keeps paying the existing rent until then.[4][1] Every rent period in between is charged at the old rent, for good.

Referring a figure is cheap for tenants: £47, with the application received before the new rent's start date.[5] Tribunal exposure already ranks near the top of what letting agents tell us about rent reviews. Assume more figures will be tested, and treat the wait itself as the cost.

A busier tribunal, measured carefully

The tribunal's workload was rising before the Act arrived. Across the whole Residential Property jurisdiction in England, all case types and not rent reviews alone, the open caseload more than doubled in four years, from 5,028 cases at 31 March 2022 to 11,069 at 31 March 2026.[6]

Handle that figure with care. It covers the chamber's full jurisdiction, not just rent cases, which have historically been a small share of published output.[2] And part of the jump in early 2025/26 reflects a Ministry of Justice case-management system change that amalgamated records, rather than new demand.[6] The honest reading is directional: the chamber now carries far more open cases than it did four years ago.

What does this mean for your evidence?

The statutory benchmark has not changed. The tribunal determines the rent at which the property might reasonably be expected to be let in the open market by a willing landlord.[3] Government guidance tells challenging tenants to gather "evidence from similar nearby properties (similar size, features and location) to show how much they were rented for".[5] That is the evidence a challenged figure will meet.

The discipline follows directly:

  • Propose figures you can evidence. Recent comparable lets carry the argument; index data gives context. Our Free Rent Indexation Tool gives you an indexed reference point from published ONS data: a starting position, not a valuation.
  • Record your reasoning at the time. If a figure is referred, the evidence behind it should already exist, not be reconstructed months later.
  • Serve correctly and keep proof of service. Form 4A itself invites tenants to refer a notice with a defect, such as short notice.[1]
  • Treat delay as the real risk. You cannot control the queue; you can control whether the figure entering it is defensible.

This is the thinking behind MarketRent's evidence pack, which brings comparables, indexation context, and documented reasoning together for every review. For the statutory process end to end, see our complete guide to rent reviews under the Renters' Rights Act; for the challenge mechanics, what happens if a tenant challenges at tribunal.

How we built these numbers

The corpus is the tribunal's own published record: decisions of the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber, Residential Property) in England, published on GOV.UK.[2] We indexed 5,437 published decisions in the Rents category and fully extracted 1,077 market-rent decisions, mainly decided between mid-2024 and June 2026. Volumes are reconciled against the Ministry of Justice's Tribunal Statistics Quarterly, because published decisions undercount total applications.[6]

Every statistic above carries the number of cases it is measured on. A manual audit of a 5% sample puts the residual extraction error at around 2 to 3 percent of values, and the headline outcome stats cover private landlords in like-for-like cases only.[2]

One rule matters more than the rest. We flag each case by the date of the notice, not the date of the decision, and only 4 of the 1,077 extracted decisions arise from notices served under the new Act. That is far too few to support any claim about post-Act outcomes, so this article makes none. The MoJ quarterly covering the Act's opening months is the first release that will show how tribunals are treating the new regime.[2][6] We will publish an update when the data can carry it.

This article is general information for letting agents in England, not legal advice.

Sources

  1. Form 4A, landlord's notice proposing a new rent for private rented sector tenancies (GOV.UK, version 05.26)
  2. MarketRent analysis of published First-tier Tribunal decisions, July 2026 (decisions corpus on GOV.UK)
  3. Housing Act 1988, section 14, as amended (determination of rent by tribunal)
  4. Renters' Rights Act 2025, section 7 (challenging amount or increase of rent)
  5. Apply for an open market rent determination (GOV.UK guidance)
  6. Ministry of Justice, Tribunal Statistics Quarterly, January to March 2026