How quickly must a landlord fix a repair, and how do you prove you acted in time?

Ask ten landlords how long they have to fix a repair and you will get ten different answers, most of them stated with great confidence. The honest answer is that Parliament has never written a single number into the law for private tenancies. What exists instead is a standard, a reasonable time, and a slowly growing set of sector timescales that everyone is being pulled towards. Knowing where those lines sit is useful. Being able to show which side of them you were on is what actually protects you.

What does the law actually say about repair timescales?

Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 sits underneath almost every tenancy in England and Wales. It puts the structure and exterior of the property on the landlord, along with the installations for water, gas, electricity, sanitation, heating and hot water, and it requires those repairs to be carried out within a reasonable time. It deliberately says nothing about days, because a leaking roof and a stiff window handle should not carry the same urgency.

Sitting alongside it, the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018 gives tenants a direct route to court where a property is unfit to live in, and it has applied to all periodic tenancies since March 2020. A court can order the work to be done and award compensation. Separately, a council can inspect and serve an improvement notice where it finds a serious hazard. None of these give you a countdown clock. All of them ask the same question after the event, which is what you did and how quickly.

What counts as a reasonable time for different repairs?

Because the law is silent on numbers, the sector has settled on working benchmarks. They are not statutory, but they are what an adjudicator, a council officer or a judge will have in mind, and most agency service standards are built around them.

The practical point is that the category is set by the effect on the tenant, not by the cost of the job. A failed boiler in November is an emergency even though the part is cheap. A cosmetic crack is routine even if the scaffolding is expensive. Judge it by what the tenant is living with.

Does Awaab's Law apply to private landlords?

Not yet, and this is where a lot of confusion sits. Awaab's Law came into force for social housing on 27 October 2025, with a first phase covering damp and mould plus emergency hazards, and a second phase widening the range of hazards it covers is due on 30 November 2026. The Renters Rights Act 2025 gives the government the power to extend the same duties to the private rented sector, but that is a later phase and the detail is still going through consultation, so private landlords are not bound by those timescales today.

Ignoring them would be a mistake all the same. The social sector timescales tell you exactly what the government considers reasonable, and once a benchmark is written down it tends to shape what everyone else is measured against. In the social sector an emergency hazard must be made safe within 24 hours, a significant hazard must be investigated within a set number of working days, the findings must be given to the tenant in writing shortly after, and the safety work must follow within days of that. Whatever the eventual private sector rules look like, the shape will be familiar. A landlord who already runs to those habits will have nothing to change.

When does the repair clock actually start?

This is the part that quietly decides most arguments. The clock starts when you or your agent are put on notice, not when the fault began. That single point cuts both ways. It protects a landlord who genuinely did not know, and it badly exposes one who was told on a Tuesday evening in a message that nobody kept.

The danger is how reports actually arrive. A voicemail on a personal mobile. A remark to a contractor who was there for something else. A text to a property manager who has since left. Each of those is a real notice in law and an invisible one in your records, which means a tenant can date it and you cannot. If the only version of when you were told is the tenant's version, that is the version that stands.

What proof shows you acted in time?

Speed on its own proves nothing a year later. What holds up is an unbroken timeline, and the pieces of it are always the same five.

1. The tenant's report with its date and time, in their own words, in a place that cannot be edited afterwards.
2. Your first response, showing how quickly you acknowledged it and what you told the tenant would happen next.
3. The appointment, including any access attempts that failed, because a delay caused by no access is a defence only if you recorded it.
4. The work itself, with dated photos before and after and a note of who carried it out.
5. The sign off and confirmation to the tenant that the job is closed, which is what stops an old complaint being revived.

Put those in order and you have the whole story of the repair, told in dates. That is the same principle behind every other part of a landlord's record keeping, and we set it out in full in our guide on how to prove your landlord compliance. Doing the work is only half the job. Being able to show what you did, and when, is the half that protects you.

Where do landlords lose the argument?

Almost never on the repair. The failures cluster in the same few places. A job that was done within days but has no record of the day it was reported, so it looks like weeks. Photos on a contractor's phone that nobody ever collected. A tenant who was told the plumber was coming on Thursday, verbally, so the two missed appointments look like landlord delay rather than access problems. A property manager who handled everything perfectly and then moved on with the history sitting in their inbox. In every case the landlord behaved well and simply cannot demonstrate it.

How do you keep the timeline without keeping the admin?

The reason repair records are patchy is that keeping them is a separate chore from doing the work, and separate chores slip. The fix is not more discipline. It is to have the record assemble itself while the job runs, so nobody has to remember anything.

That is the part Lodgic takes off you quietly. Because tenants, contractors and inspectors all use one WhatsApp number, the timeline builds as it happens. The report arrives with its own timestamp and the tenant's own wording. The reply and the appointment sit on the same thread. The contractor opens the job when they arrive, adds photos before and after, and signs it off, so the evidence closes with the job rather than being chased afterwards. Nobody files anything, and months later the whole repair reads back in order, per property, in the time it takes to open it.

This is general information and not legal advice. Timescales and duties change, so check the current position for your property and take advice where a case is serious.