If you let a property in England or Wales with a gas appliance in it, your duties come from the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, and regulation 36 is the one that matters. It is not long, and the obligations it creates are precise. What follows is what it requires in plain terms, along with the alarm rules that sit alongside it in England.
This is a description of the regulations, not legal advice, and the alarm rules in particular differ between England, Wales and Scotland. Where you are unsure about your own situation, the guidance published by the Health and Safety Executive is the authority, not a plumber's website.
The annual check
Every gas appliance and flue in the property that the landlord is responsible for must be checked for safety at intervals of no more than twelve months, by an engineer on the Gas Safe Register. That check is not the same thing as a service, although the two are often done together and it usually makes sense to do so. The check establishes that the appliance is safe now; a service cleans and maintains it so that it stays that way.
The engineer's registration is checkable and worth checking. Every Gas Safe registered engineer carries an ID card with a licence number and the categories of work they are qualified for, and the register can be searched publicly. An engineer who is registered for cookers is not thereby registered for boilers, and the card says which.
The two-month window most landlords do not know about
Since April 2018 the check can be carried out up to two months before the twelve-month deadline while keeping the original anniversary date. This works like an MOT: if your certificate expires on 30 November and you have the check done on 5 October, the next one is still due by 30 November the following year, not by 5 October. You do not lose the time.
That matters practically because it removes the reason landlords leave it to the last week. Access to a tenanted property is the hardest part of this whole process, and having a two-month window to arrange it in — rather than a deadline — is the difference between a booked appointment and a scramble.
- Check at intervals of no more than 12 months
- It may be done up to 2 months early without moving the anniversary date
- The engineer must be Gas Safe registered for the appliance type
- A check is not a service, though doing both together is usually sensible
The record: 28 days, and two years
A record of the check must be given to the existing tenant within 28 days of it being carried out. For a new tenant, the record must be provided before they move in. The landlord must keep a copy of each record for two years.
The document people call a CP12 or a gas safety certificate is that record. There is nothing magical about the name — CP12 was originally a form number — and what matters is that it contains the required detail: the date, the address, the engineer's name and registration number, a description of each appliance and its location, the defects found and the action taken, and confirmation of the checks carried out on each appliance and flue.
What the duty covers, and what it does not
The duty covers gas appliances and flues that the landlord owns and has provided. It does not extend to an appliance the tenant owns and brought with them — but the landlord remains responsible for the installation pipework serving it and for any flue that serves it. In practice, that means a tenant's own gas cooker is the tenant's appliance, while the pipe and bayonet fitting it plugs into are the landlord's.
Alongside gas safety, the alarm rules in England were amended with effect from October 2022. A smoke alarm is required on each storey used as living accommodation, and a carbon monoxide alarm is required in any room used as living accommodation that contains a fixed combustion appliance — which includes a gas boiler or a gas fire, but excludes a gas cooker. Landlords must repair or replace an alarm once told it is faulty. Wales and Scotland have their own separate requirements.
Access, which is the real problem
The most common reason a check runs late is not cost or availability. It is that nobody can get into the property. A landlord is expected to take reasonable steps to gain access and to be able to demonstrate them — written requests to the tenant, repeated attempts, records of what was tried. Turning up unannounced is not one of those steps, and forcing entry is not either.
The practical answer is to work around the tenant rather than the diary. Most working tenants can offer an evening or a Saturday far more easily than a Tuesday morning, and an engineer who will attend at those times converts a chase into a booking. That is one of the reasons we work evenings and weekends. A certificate is planned work, though, and nobody is issuing one at two in the morning — a firm that promises it is telling you something about how it treats its own people.