What the 2026 licensing changes mean for Midlands HMO landlords

Licensing itself has not been rewritten this year, but enforcement has visibly hardened. Councils across the West Midlands are auditing renewals far more closely than they did three years ago, and applications that would once have gone through on trust now come back with information requests.

The three areas where we see renewals stall are room measurements, communal amenity ratios and fire strategy evidence. Each is solvable, but only if the evidence is assembled before the application goes in rather than after a request lands.

Room sizes remain the single most common issue. The statutory floor is 6.51 square metres for one person over ten, and 10.22 square metres for two, but usable floor area excludes anything under 1.5 metres of head height. Sloped-ceiling attic rooms that were licensed historically are increasingly being refused.

Amenity ratios follow local standards rather than a national one. As a rule of thumb, plan for one bathroom per four occupants and a kitchen sized to the number of sharers, with adequate worktop, storage and cooking points per person rather than a single family-sized kitchen serving six.

Fire strategy is where a good application separates itself. A current fire risk assessment, interlinked grade D LD2 alarm certification, emergency lighting sign-off where required, and thirty-minute fire doors with intumescent strips and cold smoke seals should all be documented and dated.

Our practical advice: start renewals ninety days out, re-measure every room rather than trusting the original floorplan, and keep a single dated compliance folder per property. Every property we manage runs on exactly that system, which is why our licence approval rate has stayed at 100 per cent.