You can serve a Section 13 notice yourself using Form 4A from GOV.UK, instruct a solicitor, or run the process through software. Whichever route you take, the notice must be on Form 4A, pass the statutory date tests, and be served in a way you can evidence. The routes differ on cost, error risk, and how much of that checking is done for you.
Serving a Section 13 notice raises two separate questions. The first is legal: how the notice must reach the tenant for the increase to take effect. The second is operational: how your agency produces, checks, and tracks notices across a managed book. This page answers the first briefly, then compares the four realistic routes for the second. For the statutory background, start with the complete guide to rent reviews.
What counts as valid service of a Section 13 notice?
Form 4A's own guidance is direct: you need to be able to evidence that you served the notice on your tenant. If the written tenancy agreement specifies agreed methods of service, use one of those. If it does not, you can hand the notice to the tenant in person, leave it at the tenant's address, or send it by registered post.[2]
The notice itself must be on prescribed Form 4A, which covers the private rented sector in England only and can be completed and signed electronically or by hand.[2][3] Whatever the delivery method, three date tests must all hold: at least two months between service and the start date, at least 52 weeks since the tenancy's first period began or since the last increase took effect, which becomes 53 weeks in any year where 52 would fall more than six days before the anniversary of the reference date, and a start date on the first day of a rent period.[1][2] The form itself is broken down field by field in Form 4A: where to get it and how to complete it.
What must every route get right?
The statutory floor is the same whoever does the work.[1][2]
- The prescribed form. A letter or email is not a valid Section 13 notice, and rent increases by any other means, such as rent review clauses, are not permitted.[2][4]
- The three date tests above, calculated from the tenancy's own dates and payment frequency.[1]
- A defensible figure. The tenant can refer the rent to the First-tier Tribunal any time before the start date, for a £47 fee, and government guidance tells them to bring evidence from similar nearby properties.[5]
- Proof of service, kept where you can find it later.[2]
Miss any of these and the increase does not lawfully take effect. The practical remedy is to serve again with corrected dates, which restarts the two-month clock. A referral carries its own delay: the tenant does not have to pay the new rent until the tribunal has made its decision.[2]
Every route below has to clear this bar. The differences are cost, turnaround, and how much of the checking is done for you.
Option 1: serve it yourself with the GOV.UK form
The strongest case for doing it by hand: Form 4A is the official prescribed form, it is available from GOV.UK at no charge, and you keep complete control of the process.[3] For an agency with a handful of managed tenancies, or one increase a quarter, this is a perfectly workable route.
What you take on is the checking. The 52-week anchor date, the rent-period start, and the two-month lead all have to be worked out by hand for each tenancy, and a diary entry has to tell you when each tenancy's window opens. Evidence for the proposed figure is assembled separately, and proof of service is filed where it can be produced months later. None of this is difficult once; it is repetitive at scale, and each manual step is a chance for the kind of date error that invalidates the notice.[1] A printable pre-service run-through is in the Section 13 checklist.
Option 2: instruct a solicitor
A solicitor brings legal judgment, and that is exactly what some cases need: a tenancy whose status is unclear, a tenant likely to dispute service, an increase that is heading for the tribunal anyway. For a genuinely contested or unusual case, professional advice is the right call, and Form 4A itself points tenants towards legal advice as one of their options.[2]
The trade-off is cost and turnaround, both of which are set per matter by the firm and scale with its capacity, not with your portfolio. Most annual reviews on a managed book are routine: the dates are knowable, the form is standard, and the landlord or their agent can complete and serve it themselves, using the form's dedicated agent section.[2] Paying legal rates for date arithmetic and form-filling across dozens of tenancies rarely stacks up. The sensible pattern is a solicitor for the exceptions, not the routine.
Option 3: your existing lettings software
Your CRM or property management system already holds the tenancy data, and its diary and task tools are genuinely useful for tracking review dates. If it flags a tenancy for review and records that a notice went out, that is real value over a spreadsheet.
What a system without a rent-review module does not do is the statutory work. It tracks dates you enter rather than computing the 52-week, two-month, and rent-period tests from the tenancy data. It does not draft the prescribed form, assemble open-market evidence, or hold a service record built for later scrutiny. The notice itself falls back to option 1, with the added risk of re-keying details between systems. If your agency runs on a CRM, see how MarketRent's CRM connection works for how the two work together.
Option 4: rent review software
Rent review software exists to make the statutory checks the default rather than a discipline. The category, covered in more depth on our rent review software page, does four things generic tools do not: it computes the statutory dates from the tenancy data and blocks dates that fail the tests, it prepares Form 4A itself, it attaches the evidence behind the proposed figure, and it keeps an audit trail from proposal to outcome, including service.
The honest limits: it is only as good as the tenancy data you give it, and it does not replace legal advice on a genuinely contested case. What it changes is the routine. Across a managed book, every notice gets the same date checks, the same form, and the same record, without depending on whoever happened to run the review that week.
Which route fits which agency?
| Route | Strongest for | You still have to |
|---|---|---|
| Form 4A yourself | A small book or occasional increases | Compute dates, draft, evidence, file proof of service |
| Solicitor | Contested, unusual, or high-stakes cases | Instruct per case; manage cost and turnaround |
| Generic lettings software | Reminders and record-keeping | Do the statutory drafting and checks by hand |
| Rent review software | Routine reviews across a managed book | Keep tenancy data accurate; escalate contested cases |
Match the route to the case, not the agency. A ten-property book can run on the GOV.UK form and a checklist. A contested case deserves a solicitor whatever software you run. For the routine annual reviews that make up most of a managed portfolio, the question is whether the statutory checking should depend on a person remembering or a system enforcing.
MarketRent is the operating system for residential rent reviews, built for letting agents in England: it validates the statutory dates, drafts Form 4A from your tenancy data, builds the evidence pack, and documents every step from proposal to outcome. See the process end to end in how to serve a Section 13 notice, or book a demo to walk through it on your own portfolio.
This article is general information for letting agents in England, not legal advice.
Sources
- Housing Act 1988, section 13 (as amended), legislation.gov.uk
- Form 4A: landlord's notice proposing a new rent for assured tenancies in the private rented sector (GOV.UK)
- Assured tenancy forms, GOV.UK
- Guide to the Renters' Rights Act, GOV.UK (MHCLG)
- Apply for an open market rent determination, GOV.UK