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Joint tenancy or room-by-room? Student landlords need to look again
12:01 AM, 5th October 2026, 3 weeks ago
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Five students rent a house together. Four are happy, the rent is being paid and they want to stay. The fifth decides to leave and gives notice.
Under a joint periodic tenancy, that notice can end the tenancy for all five.
That isn’t a new principle of landlord and tenant law. One joint tenant has long been able to end a periodic joint tenancy without the agreement of the others. What has changed is its importance to student landlords now that assured student tenancies are periodic rather than fixed term. Current guidance confirms that a valid notice from one joint tenant ends the periodic tenancy for all of them.
Under the old student model, a group might sign a 12-month fixed term. If one student wanted to leave after six months, moving out did not by itself end their liability. In practice, that gave the group a strong incentive to find an acceptable replacement.
Now one student can give notice and bring the whole joint tenancy to an end.
So, should student landlords abandon joint tenancies and let each room separately? There is an obvious attraction.
If five students have five individual tenancies and one gives notice, the other four tenancies continue. The landlord has one room to fill rather than having to deal with the end of the tenancy for the entire house.
But that does not make room-by-room letting an automatic answer.
A joint tenancy is administratively simple. There is one agreement covering the household and the students have chosen the people they want to live with.
Individual tenancies mean managing each letting separately. If someone leaves halfway through the academic year, the landlord may have to find a replacement prepared to move into an established household of strangers.
There is also the question of the mortgage and insurance.
Before changing the way a property is let, landlords should check that the proposed arrangement remains within the terms of their mortgage and insurance and whether either provider needs to be told about the change. It is better to establish that before altering the letting model than assume that five individual agreements will be treated in exactly the same way as one joint agreement.
Joint tenancies still have advantages. Separate agreements remove one particular risk, but bring a different management model with them.
The real change is that landlords can no longer choose between the two simply because “that’s how I’ve always let my student houses”.
For anyone planning their 2027 student lets, the question is now a practical one: which risk would you rather manage?
The risk that one student’s notice ends the joint tenancy, or the additional work and complications that come with letting room by room?
That decision needs to be made property by property, not by changing every tenancy agreement in the portfolio because one option initially looks safer.
Peter Littlewood has worked with landlords for many years through iHowz Landlord Association and now delivers landlord and agent training through B-Informed, including on the Renters’ Rights Act, student lettings and HMO management.
10 comments on this article
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Member Since February 2025 - Comments: 90
9:02 AM, 5th October 2026, About 3 weeks ago
Presumably one major consideration is the rent deposit(s) and whether, in order to claim on them, you need to establish which tenant caused the damage.
Member Since January 2015 - Comments: 1634 - Articles: 1
10:33 AM, 5th October 2026, About 3 weeks ago
Reply to the comment left by Kate Gould at 05/10/2026 – 09:02
Hence joint tenancy as no need to apportion or find a person to blame.
Draw back to joint tenancy if landlord decides to accept 1tenant terminates for all is that mid way through a term not so easy to re-rent the whole property.
APT for the bedroom and a licence for the communal areas, with a clause in the APT that damage in the communal area will be apportioned equally between the Licensees irrespective as to who caused the damage would be deemed reasonable. Deposits taken per person.
Added advantage the landlord can replace a vacating student with another student without reference to the remaining tenants BUT would have to be a student and not a non-student otherwise ALL the occupants become liable for council tax.
Member Since December 2021 - Comments: 24
12:08 PM, 5th October 2026, About 3 weeks ago
Don’t forget fire safety and guarantors – moving from a joint tenancy to individual tenancies CHANGES the fire safety characteristics of the property – individual lets require locks on bedroom doors = i.e. for a 2 storey property, you are talking about fire doors on each bedroom (and door frames) + smoke alarm detectors in each bedroom, etc…
For the guarantors – they are not just guaranteeing that tenant’s rent, they are also guaranteeing the whole property condition – so going to individual tenancies per room may make the shared area + whole house no longer covered by the guarantee…
Member Since February 2025 - Comments: 90
12:50 PM, 5th October 2026, About 3 weeks ago
Reply to the comment left by Si BB at 05/10/2026 – 12:08
Any residence with three or more occupiers in two or more different households falls within the HMO regulations regardless of whether it’s one joint tenancy or individual tenancies of each room. So the fire and safety requirements apply even if an HMO licence isn’t required.
Member Since December 2021 - Comments: 24
1:46 PM, 5th October 2026, About 3 weeks ago
Reply to the comment left by Kate Gould at 05/10/2026 – 12:50
Fire safety is a function of property configuration – fire safety varies and depends on how the house is configured and *used*.
– So a 3 storey shared tenancy HMO with 3-4 people has different minimum standards vs a mandatory licencing HMO with 5-6 people in it.
Essentially we only have LACORS here + feedback over time.
If you want to have FD60s + new frames for a 3 story HMO for 3-4 people on a shared tenancy, yes you can (and we have), but it’s above minimum standards…
Member Since October 2020 - Comments: 1399
3:51 PM, 5th October 2026, About 3 weeks ago
I suspect that the PRS student housing market will wither on the vine as one by one the landlords drop out because of this issue. A student giving notice because they’ve dropped out can be practically impossible to replace once the term has begun. When landlords start losing significant revenue due to these voids they will start to look again at the family market.
Member Since May 2014 - Comments: 220
5:52 PM, 5th October 2026, About 3 weeks ago
Only the weak and negative people will drop out, leaving a leaner market for the rest of us
Member Since December 2021 - Comments: 24
6:39 PM, 5th October 2026, About 3 weeks ago
So far this year, I am aware of a few 2 bed flats and 1 x 6 bed Student HMO impacted by all the students pulling out. So the issue is real and happening.
I expect rents for next year to immediately rise to cover this risk going forward.
For those with small portfolios (i.e. 1-4 houses), this kind of event is a massive income hit for the year – these will be the ones likely to sell up.
Can we predict this? No – all it takes is 1-2 students to fail their year and pull out. Also, if the house has a problem, i.e. a roof leak over the summer which is only picked up when students return, you could easily see the tenancy close early.
It’s going to be interesting on who will stay in this game…
Some locations are very tight in terms of availability (i.e. Bristol and York for example) – so these locations I suspect will have lower risk of turnover…
Member Since January 2025 - Comments: 76
12:01 AM, 6th October 2026, About 3 weeks ago
Reply to the comment left by Kate Gould at 05/10/2026 – 12:50
Unless the owner is one of the occupiers or the owners next of kin is one of the occupiers, they do not count towards the three people
Member Since January 2015 - Comments: 1634 - Articles: 1
2:26 PM, 10th October 2026, About 2 weeks ago
Reply to the comment left by Neilt at 05/10/2026 – 17:52
Are you referring to students or PRS landlords?
If referring to Landlords being weak & negative might well be those being stronger, better informed and can read the student/university market and getting out.
If referring to students, too many are being pushed for University courses they are not capable of, hence the dumming down of many courses including LLB, if dropping out at least they know it’s not for them, or they’ve not had a good enough secondary education to be able to cope or are good enough but cannot afford it – none of those are them being negative.
Leaving a leaner market? Maybe not as Universities have decreasing numbers of foreign students, who pay more than home students to fund staffing costs; some Universities are closing campuses eg University of Essex at Southend on Sea; some universities are developing more student halls (personally I think all Uni students should be in Halls of Residence – sorry); many students are now looking for Uni’s nearer to home and are commuting to save costs (in the old days if your parental home was in London and went to London Universities/Music Colleges/Drama Schools et Al, then you didn’t get GLC funding for even London Halls of Residence and were expected to live “at home”).
Think you might find the student PRS will also shrink, shrink in numbers if student renters and properties.