Will My Name, Address or Compliance History Be Public on the PRS Database?

Will My Name, Address or Compliance History Be Public on the PRS Database?

This article is for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Landlords should seek independent legal advice for their specific circumstances. It applies to England only.

The short answer

The PRS Database will have a public-facing element, but it will not operate as a fully open register. The government has said that the exact information available to the public will be set out in regulations, and that it does not expect all data held on the database to be publicly accessible. Those regulations have not yet been made, so no landlord can be told today, with certainty, exactly which fields about them will be visible to the world.

What is reasonably clear is the shape of it. Tenants and prospective tenants are expected to be able to check registration status and certain information about property standards. Local councils will have a fuller view, including the ability to cross-reference the database against licensing records. Beyond that, the detail is pending. Given that, the useful thing a landlord can control is whether the information held about them is accurate and current, which is the job LLCR is built for.

Public access is not arriving on day one

One point is often missed in the commentary. The government intends to roll the database out in two stages: first requiring landlords to register on an area-by-area basis, and only making public access available after the registration stage is complete. In other words, registration comes first and the public-facing layer follows.

This matters for two reasons. It means a landlord will not wake up to a public listing the moment their region opens, and it means claims that the database "is publicly searchable" today are simply wrong, because it is not yet live at all. The roadmap puts the rollout from late 2026, with mandatory registration expected in 2027, and the public layer after that. Any article inviting tenants to look up their landlord now is describing something that does not exist.

What tenants are expected to see

The purpose of the public element is to let a tenant check that a landlord and property are registered before signing, and to see certain standards information. The government has described the database as helping tenants make informed decisions, helping landlords demonstrate compliance, and helping councils target enforcement.

Registration status is the obvious candidate for public visibility, since a tenant being able to verify it is the point of the exercise. Some property standards information is also expected to be visible. It is worth remembering that a good deal of this is already public through other channels: every let property must have an EPC, and EPCs are already searchable through the government's Find an energy certificate service. A landlord worried about an EPC becoming visible is worrying about something that is already in the public domain.

The database is also expected to absorb the existing Database of Rogue Landlords for the private sector, bringing banning order and offence records into the same system. Landlords with a clean record have nothing in that category to appear.

What the government has not confirmed

The honest list of unknowns is longer than the list of certainties. It is not confirmed exactly which fields will be public, whether a landlord's name will be searchable in the way a company name is, how a landlord's correspondence address will be treated, or how much compliance history a prospective tenant will see as opposed to a simple registered or not registered indicator. The government has said it is balancing landlord privacy against tenants' need for transparency, and the outcome of that balance will appear in regulations.

Two related points are worth knowing. First, the database is about landlords and properties rather than tenancies, so landlords are not expected to be asked for tenant names, rent figures, or bank details. Second, the draft Private Landlord Redress Schemes (Approval and Designation) Regulations 2026, laid before Parliament in draft, provide that a redress scheme may publish details of members who have been expelled, including name, scheme registration number, unique identifier, and the addresses of properties let by that member. That is a separate scheme from the database, and it applies only to expelled members, but it shows the direction: serious non-compliance is intended to be visible, while ordinary compliant landlords are not the target.

Landlords who let through a company

Landlords who hold property through a limited company sometimes assume incorporation gives them privacy. In practice, a good deal is already public. Company names, registered office addresses, directors, and filed accounts are already searchable on the Companies House register, and directors' details are already published there. A corporate landlord registering on the database will be adding to a picture that is, in part, already visible.

There is a related point on ownership. Registered title at HM Land Registry is already obtainable for a small fee, so the ownership of a specific address is not a secret today either. The database's contribution is not to expose ownership for the first time but to connect landlord, property, and compliance status in one place, which is what makes it useful to councils. Landlords weighing the privacy question are better served by comparing it against what is genuinely already public rather than assuming the database creates exposure from nothing.

Data protection still applies

A national register of landlords is a large amount of personal data, and UK GDPR obligations apply to it in the ordinary way. The Act provides for a database operator to run the system, and for verification, correction, and removal of entries, which means there is a mechanism to correct an entry that is wrong. A landlord who believes their entry contains inaccurate information will have a route to have it corrected rather than having to live with it.

That is a good reason to hold your own accurate records rather than relying on the register to be right. If a landlord's own documentation shows clearly what certificates were held and when, correcting a database error becomes a matter of producing evidence rather than arguing from memory.

What a landlord should actually worry about

For most landlords, the visibility question is less consequential than the accuracy question. Whatever ends up being public, the entry will be built from information the landlord supplies, and the Act requires active entries to be kept up to date. An entry that becomes inaccurate, for example because a certificate has expired, is a compliance problem in its own right, quite apart from who can see it.

This is where LLCR is directly useful. It keeps every certificate, renewal date, and property detail in one organised place, with Smart Document Capture reading the key details from each uploaded document and compliance scoring showing at a glance where a property stands. Expiry alerts and calendar sync mean a certificate is renewed before it lapses, so an entry does not quietly drift out of date. If a council queries something, or an entry needs correcting, the supporting evidence is already assembled rather than scattered across email.

Put simply, a landlord cannot control what the regulations make public, but can control whether the record behind it is complete, current, and accurate. That is the part worth spending effort on now.

This page reflects the position as of July 2026 and will be updated as the government confirms the public access rules through secondary legislation.

LLCR keeps every certificate, renewal date, and property detail in one organised place, so the information behind a landlord's database entry is accurate and current rather than out of date.