On Friday 28 August, HMRC published its Property Rental Income Statistics for 2026, covering the 2024-25 tax year. It counted 2.88m unincorporated landlords, 2.85m of them individuals (plus 30,000 partnerships), declaring £58.99bn of property income between them. It is the most complete ledger of the private rented sector this country possesses, and it has a hole in it precisely where the professional end of the market used to be.

The release admits as much, in the scope note nobody reads. The statistics cover Self-Assessment returns only. Incorporated landlords file Corporation Tax returns and are excluded, along with overseas entities and anyone under the reporting threshold. Every landlord who has moved into a limited company since Section 24 was announced has walked out of this dataset and into one that nobody publishes an annual headline from. So, when you next read that the sector is emptying out, ask which register is being counted.

The count that went the wrong way
Start with the number that embarrasses a decade of commentary. On the figures HMRC published a year ago, the individual landlord headcount is UP by roughly 20,000. Not down. Up, in the year that was supposed to complete the exodus, after ten years of intentions surveys promising it.

Surveys, after all, measure mood. Intentions. Tax returns measure completions - they measure action - and the two have been telling different stories since 2016. We start from the premise that no-one volunteers to pay tax on phantom property income.

The regional split is the market in miniature: 17% of landlords are based in London and account for 28% of the income, while the North East is the smallest English region at 2%. The South has the capital values - even if they have gone the wrong way in recent years. The North has the returns. Plenty of us have built businesses on the second half of that sentence - I certainly have.