Rent Increase Notice Checklist

Read the document to make sure it meets your needs and that you’ve provided all of the necessary information about the rent increase. Ask a lawyer for advice if you have any questions.

Either the landlord or the landlord's agent should sign the Notice. 

If the landlord is a company or a partnership, the landlord’s signatory should sign the Notice on its behalf. 

The Notice can be signed either:

• online, using RocketSign, or

• on paper, by printing off a copy of the Notice and signing and dating it by hand

You must correctly serve (ie deliver) your Rent Increase Notice, or it won’t be valid. 

The correct way of serving the Notice will depend on what the tenancy agreement says. Check your tenancy agreement for any such rules about service of notices – these must be followed. For example, the tenancy agreement may state that formal communications about the tenancy can be sent by email or that they must be delivered on paper by tracked post. 

If the tenancy agreement doesn’t specify how notices such as this one should be served, the safest way to send a Rent Increase Notice is generally:

• by post, in which case you should use a tracked postage service, ensure the delivery address is correct, and ensure the Notice is sent with enough time for it to arrive by the intended date, or

• by hand, by posting the Notice into the mailbox of the rented property. This can give you the security of knowing when the Notice gets to the tenant and removes the risk of the Notice getting lost or delayed in the post

Always make sure to send your Rent Increase Notice early enough to give the tenant enough notice of their rent increase. For a rent increase to be valid:

• you must give at least two months’ notice of the proposed rent increase 

• the new rent must take effect at the beginning of a tenancy period (eg if the rent is paid monthly on the 1st, the new rent must become effective on the 1st)

Make sure that you take into account any postage or other delivery times – the notice period will be considered to have started once your tenant has received the Notice.

A copy of your Rent Increase Notice will be stored automatically in your Rocket Lawyer account ‘Dashboard’.

You should also download and securely store a copy of your Rent Increase Notice for your records, along with copies of any documents you send to the tenant with the Notice. 

You should also securely store any proof of service, for example: 

• Royal Mail receipts

• statements from witnesses who watched you hand deliver the Notice

• emails or text messages from a tenant acknowledging that they’ve received the notice