Q. I’m getting confused about section 21 notices. I have a tenant on a periodic tenancy – do I have to end the notice on a rent payment day and how long is the notice period for?

A. Assuming you are based in England, the notice period, as at the time of writing, is four months. You do not need to end the notice on any particular day. In the past for periodic tenancies, we had to end the notice on the last day of a ‘period of the tenancy’ but that rule was ended (for England) by the Deregulation Act 2015.

You can actually end the notice on any day you like so long as the correct notice period is given. Be careful about allowing sufficient time for service, particularly if you are serving notices by post. Note that in England you must use the prescribed form 6A which you can find on the gov.uk website by doing a search on “gov.uk assured tenancy forms”.  

If you are in Wales, by the way, there is no prescribed form, and the notice period is currently six months.

Q. We have a clause in our tenancy agreement that requires the tenant to give not less than one months’ notice if they wish to leave. Our tenant has now left at the end of his fixed term without giving us any notice at all. We have told him that he is liable to pay one month’s rent in lieu and he has said that is against the law and he is not going to pay it. Is he right?