Bristol rents kept climbing through the first half of 2026, even as the biggest shake-up of tenancy law in a generation came into force around them: the average private rent in the city reached £1,883 a month in June 2026, up 7.4% on the £1,753 recorded a year earlier, according to the Office for National Statistics.
That single fact tells you something the headlines about the Renters’ Rights Act often miss: the new rules were designed to rebalance power between landlords and tenants, not to cool the market on their own, and in a city as supply-constrained as Bristol, they haven’t.
Below, we look at what’s actually changed in the law, what the data says has happened to rents and demand since, and what both sides of a Bristol tenancy need to know now.
What the Renters’ Rights Act actually changed on 1 May 2026
The Renters’ Rights Act received Royal Assent on 27 October 2025, and its first phase, covering tenancy reform, took effect on 1 May 2026. From that date, Section 21 “no-fault” evictions no longer exist in England, and every assured shorthold tenancy became a periodic tenancy with no fixed end date.
Landlords can still end a tenancy, but only by citing one of the specific grounds under Section 8, such as selling the property, moving in themselves, or serious rent arrears, and most grounds now require four months’ notice rather than two.
Rent can only be increased once a year, using a formal Section 13 notice with at least two months’ notice, and a tenant who thinks the new rent is above the local market rate can challenge it at the First-tier Tribunal, which cannot set the rent any higher than the landlord originally asked for.
Landlords must also publish an asking rent and cannot accept, or invite, offers above it, which is the practical end of the bidding wars that became common in undersupplied cities like Bristol.
Tenants gained a stronger right to request a pet, which a landlord must not refuse unreasonably, and the Decent Homes Standard is being extended into the private rented sector for the first time.
Breaches carry civil penalties of up to £40,000, and a new private rented sector database and a mandatory Landlord Ombudsman are both due to follow in later phases.
What’s happening to Bristol rents right now
The ONS Price Index of Private Rents puts Bristol’s average rent at £1,883 a month for June 2026, against £1,753 for the same month in 2025, a rise of 7.4%. That’s a faster increase than the South West as a whole managed over the same period, and it puts Bristol well above the England average.
Breaking that down by property type, ONS data shows a typical one-bedroom home in Bristol renting for around £1,230 a month, a two-bedroom for around £1,550, and a three-bedroom for around £1,760, though any individual street or postcode can sit well outside those averages.
It’s worth being honest about the limits of any single figure here: different agencies and portals report slightly different averages depending on their own listings data and the mix of property types they cover, so treat the ONS number as the most reliable city-wide benchmark rather than the last word on what a specific property will achieve.
Why demand still outpaces supply in Bristol
None of this is happening in isolation from the rest of the city’s housing market:
- Bristol has two large universities, a steady pipeline of professional tenants working in and around the city, and a housing stock that has not expanded quickly enough to keep pace with demand.
- High mortgage costs for first-time buyers push more people into renting for longer, which adds further pressure to a private rented sector that was already tight before the Renters’ Rights Act arrived.
Against that backdrop, a law change that makes it harder to remove a tenant, or slower to reset rent to market level, was always more likely to show up as continued rent growth than as a sudden fall in prices.
Are landlords leaving the Bristol market?
This is the question behind a lot of the coverage, and the honest answer is that the national picture is clearer than the Bristol-specific one. The National Residential Landlords Association’s Landlord Eye survey found that 24% of landlords nationally were preparing to exit the market, with the Renters’ Rights Act cited as the single biggest driver of falling confidence.
Single-property landlords are notably more likely to go than portfolio landlords: in the NRLA’s data, 9% of single-property landlords said they didn’t expect to still be landlords once the reforms took effect, against 1% of landlords with multiple properties, and 38% said they were unlikely to still be letting by the end of 2026.
One portfolio landlord based in the South West, quoted in the same NRLA research, pointed specifically to the loss of Section 21 as the reason for their own loss of confidence in the sector.
What we don’t have is a reliable, Bristol-specific figure for how many landlords have actually sold up rather than simply said they’re considering it, and it’s worth being sceptical of any local blog that quotes one with confidence. What the rent and demand data above does suggest is that any exodus, if it’s happening, hasn’t yet been large enough to loosen supply in the city.
What the new rules mean if you’re renting in Bristol
If you’re a tenant, the most immediate practical change is that your rent can now only go up once every twelve months, on formal notice, and you have a route to challenge an increase you think is unfair.
You can no longer be gazumped by a rival tenant offering more than the advertised rent, since the landlord isn’t allowed to accept it. And if you have a pet, your landlord now needs a reasonable reason to say no, rather than being able to simply refuse as a blanket policy.
What the new rules mean if you’re letting a property in Bristol
For landlords, the practical shift is less about losing control of a property and more about the process taking longer and needing to be right first time. Ending a tenancy now means building a case around a specific, evidenced ground rather than simply serving notice, and getting the paperwork wrong risks a much larger fine than it used to.
That’s pushed a number of Bristol landlords, especially those who self-manage a single property alongside a full-time job, to weigh up whether professional property management in Bristol is worth the cost against the time and legal exposure of getting a Section 8 notice or a rent review wrong.
Where Bristol’s rental market settles next
The market data suggests Bristol’s rents are still being driven far more by the gap between supply and demand than by the Renters’ Rights Act itself, and the sentiment data suggests any landlord exodus is, so far, more of a stated worry than a confirmed trend.
Both of those things can change as the Act’s later phases, including the tenant database and the Landlord Ombudsman, come into force over the next couple of years, so it’s worth treating 2026 as the start of the adjustment rather than the end of it.
Easier Management is a member of the National Residential Landlords Association, registered with the ICO, and signed up to the Property Redress Scheme and the Deposit Protection Service, and manages long-term, holiday let and serviced accommodation property across Bristol and the surrounding region.
If you’d like a second opinion on what any of this means for a specific property, get in touch today.
