The Regulator of Social Housing has published its annual report for 2025–26, bringing together a year of inspections, concerns about safety work and information about the regulator’s handling of referrals.
By the end of March 2026, 178 large landlords in England had a consumer grade. Of those, 40 had a C3 grade and seven had a C4 grade. The numbers were already public on 4 November and describe the position at the end of March, not the latest position for every landlord.
The grades assess how a landlord delivers standards intended to protect and serve tenants. A C3 means there are serious failings and significant improvement is needed. A C4 reflects very serious failings that require fundamental change. Neither grade means that every home managed by the landlord is unsafe.
The figures also do not describe the whole sector. They cover the large landlords that had received a consumer grade by the reporting date, rather than every social landlord or every home in England. The other grades were C1, for landlords delivering the required outcomes overall, and C2, where some weaknesses required improvement.
Safety work and tenant services
Across its regulatory work, the regulator encountered problems with the timeliness of electrical and gas checks, overdue fire and water remedial actions, and homes without smoke or carbon monoxide detectors. Other concerns included repair backlogs and insufficient evidence from surveys of housing conditions.
These are examples of issues found across cases, not a list of faults attributed to every landlord with a low grade. Some cases also involved inadequate records of complaints and limited opportunities for tenants to influence decisions about their homes.
That distinction matters because a landlord’s grade is an assessment of its services and the evidence available to the regulator. A missed record, an overdue piece of work and a wider failure to track repairs are not interchangeable. Each can affect the regulator’s confidence that risks are being identified and addressed.
The report describes safety and quality, and transparency and accountability to tenants, as the standards most often associated with the issues identified. It also records work with landlords to put problems right. These are longstanding themes: concerns about checks, follow-up work and reliable information had already been highlighted before the annual report was published.
How the inspection programme works
The annual report covers the period from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026, the second year of a four-year programme of planned inspections. By the end of that period, just over 45 per cent of large landlords had received a published judgement following an inspection in the programme.
Inspectors consider information including tenant satisfaction, repairs and other aspects of landlords’ services. For private registered providers, the regulatory assessment can also cover governance and financial viability. Local authority landlords are assessed against consumer standards and the rent standard rather than receiving the same governance and viability grades as private providers.
Landlords are expected to provide evidence that they are meeting the standards. Where the evidence is incomplete or conflicting, further engagement can follow. The regulator can work intensively with landlords that need to improve and may consider enforcement powers when appropriate; a poor grade alone does not mean enforcement has already taken place.
During 2025–26, six landlords received a higher consumer grade after improvement work. Those changes relate to individual assessments in that financial year and do not alter what the March snapshot says about the landlords graded at that point.
Referrals and spending pressures
The annual report also records 217 referrals from landlords and 1,490 other referrals during 2025–26. Landlords are encouraged to raise concerns themselves when they identify a failure or a potential failure to meet the standards, so that issues can be addressed and risks managed.
For landlord referrals, 99 per cent were acknowledged within five working days and 96 per cent received a response within 25 working days. The regulator had changed its approach to handling referrals in the previous year, so the totals should be read alongside that change rather than treated as a direct measure of conditions in individual homes.
The review also sets out the pressure on social landlords to maintain existing homes while providing new ones. Quarterly information from private registered providers put spending on repairs and maintenance over 12 months at £9.5 billion, five per cent higher than in the previous year. That spending figure concerns those providers and should not be read as a total for every council landlord as well.
