Electrical safety in social housing, and the November deadline

The electrical safety rules that private landlords have worked to since 2020 now cover the social rented sector as well. They applied to new social tenancies from 1 December 2025, and since 1 May 2026 they have applied to every existing one. For those older tenancies there is a transitional period, and it closes on 1 November 2026.

That is fourteen weeks away.

What the duty is

The Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) (Amendment) (Extension to the Social Rented Sector) Regulations 2025 ask two things of a registered provider.

First, the fixed electrical installation in every property has to be inspected and tested by a qualified person at least every five years. That means the wiring, the consumer unit, the socket outlets, the light fittings and anything permanently connected, such as a shower or an extractor fan. The output is an Electrical Installation Condition Report.

Second, and this part is specific to social landlords, any electrical equipment the landlord provides as part of the tenancy has to be checked, again at least every five years, to establish whether it is safe for continued use. A cooker, a fridge, a washing machine in a supported scheme. Private landlords have never had that duty in England. Social landlords have it now.

Both have to be done before 1 November for tenancies that were already running on 1 December 2025.

The clocks that follow the report

The inspection is a booking. What comes after it is a set of deadlines, and they run whether or not anyone is watching them.

The report goes to the existing tenant within 28 days of the inspection and test. A new tenant gets it before they occupy. A prospective tenant who asks gets it within 28 days of the request. The local authority, if it asks, gets a copy within 7 days.

Where the report says remedial or further investigative work is needed, that work has to be carried out within 28 days, or sooner if the report specifies a shorter period. Then written confirmation of completion goes to the tenant and to the local authority within a further 28 days. The same 28 day rule applies to equipment found unsafe: repair it or replace it.

So a single property with a C2 coded observation generates an inspection date, a report supply date, a remedial completion date and two confirmation dates, each of which has to be evidenced later from something other than memory.

The scale of it

England had 4.2 million social rented households in 2024, roughly 16% of all households, split 1.6 million local authority and 2.6 million housing association (English Housing Survey 2024 to 2025, headline report, published December 2025).

Very few of those landlords are starting from nothing. Most large providers have been running electrical programmes voluntarily for years, and the five year cycle will already be familiar. What changes is that the cycle is now a statutory duty with named timescales attached, and that the evidence has to exist in a form somebody outside the organisation can be shown.

The properties that will cause trouble between now and November are the predictable ones. The tenancy that transferred between systems. The void that was re-let without the report following it. The address where three access attempts failed and nobody wrote down that they were attempts rather than refusals. None of that is an electrical problem.

What to check before November

Four questions, and the answers are either in your records or they are not.

Which properties have no in-date EICR, and does that list come from one place or from three. Where an inspection has happened, was the report actually supplied to the tenant, and can you show the date it went. Where a report identified work, was that work done inside 28 days and was the confirmation sent to both the tenant and the council. And for landlord supplied equipment, does a check record exist at all, given the duty is new.

If the answer to the first question takes more than an afternoon to produce, that is the finding. The deadline is not really about testing capacity. It is about knowing, at any moment, which door is due.

Where the record lives

Electrical safety sits in the same place as every other recurring statutory duty, which is to say it is a date, an owner, a document and a piece of follow-up work that has to close.

In SAMRISK the inspection is a recurring item on the compliance calendar with the next due date derived from the last one, so a five year cycle chains itself rather than being retyped. The report is a versioned file against the property in documents, so the current EICR is the one the system shows. Remedial actions become maintenance work with dates and owners, and the contractor who carried them out is on the record through contractors and permits. Landlord supplied appliances are items, which is what makes the new equipment check something you can report on rather than something you have to reconstruct.

None of that makes the work smaller. It makes the answer to the question available on the day it is asked, which for a duty built out of 28 day chains is most of the job.

Sources: The Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) (Amendment) (Extension to the Social Rented Sector) Regulations 2025; MHCLG, "Electrical safety standards in the private and social rented sectors: guidance"; MHCLG, English Housing Survey 2024 to 2025 headline report, December 2025.