How to Find Your Landlord Certificate Dates When You Have Lost the Paperwork

You know your property needs a Gas Safety record, an EPC, and probably an EICR. What you may not know is when any of them actually expire, because the paperwork is in an email you cannot find, a folder you have not opened in two years, or with the letting agent who managed the property before you took it back.

This is the single most common reason landlords put off getting organised. It feels like a paperwork job. It is not. Every one of these dates can be recovered without the original document, and two of them can be recovered in under a minute from a free public register.

Here is where each date actually lives.

EPC: look it up free on the government register

You do not need your copy of the EPC at all. Every EPC issued in England and Wales is published on the government's public register, searchable by postcode.

Go to gov.uk/find-energy-certificate, choose "Domestic", and enter the property postcode. You will get the certificate, the exact expiry date, and the rating, at no cost.

EPCs last 10 years from the date of issue. The rating matters as much as the date now: the minimum is rising to C, and our guide to the 2030 EPC rules covers what that means for planning.

Gas Safety record: the check date is enough

A landlord gas safety record runs for 12 months from the date of the check, not the date it was issued or paid for. So if you can establish when the engineer last visited, you have your expiry date.

In order of how quickly they usually work:

• Search your email for "gas safety", "CP12", or the engineer's name. Most engineers email the record as a PDF within a day or two of the visit
• Check your bank or card statement for the payment to the engineer or their company, the visit was almost certainly the same day
• Ask the engineer directly. They are required to keep records and can normally re-send a copy
• Ask your tenant. They are legally entitled to a copy and were meant to be given one within 28 days of the check

If you genuinely cannot establish the date, book a new check. It is the only certificate where guessing is not acceptable, because letting with an out-of-date gas record is a criminal offence rather than a civil one. The full picture is in our Gas Safety certificate guide.

EICR: read the next-inspection date, not the issue date

An EICR does not carry an expiry date in the way a gas record does. What it carries is a recommended date for the next inspection, decided by the electrician who carried it out. That date is your deadline.

For rented homes the maximum interval is five years, so if all you can remember is roughly when the electrician came, five years from that visit is a safe working date until you find the report. Your electrician will hold a copy, and so may the tenant.

What the codes on the report mean, and why the first wave of five-year EICRs is expiring right now, is covered in the EICR guide.

Deposit protection: search the scheme, not your inbox

If you protected a deposit, one of the three approved schemes holds the record: the Deposit Protection Service, MyDeposits, or the Tenancy Deposit Scheme. Log in, or use the tenant-facing deposit checker each scheme runs, and you can confirm the deposit is protected and when.

If none of them has a record of it, that is not a filing problem, it is a compliance problem, and our deposit protection guide explains what to do about it.

Alarms and Legionella: there is no certificate to find

Two obligations trip landlords up here because they go looking for a document that was never supposed to exist.

Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms are not certified. What the law requires is that the alarms are present, and that you checked they worked on the day the tenancy began. If you recorded that on the inventory, that is your evidence. See the alarm rules for landlords.

Legionella is the same story, and worse: there is no legal requirement to hold a "legionella certificate" at all, whatever a cold-calling company tells you. What you need is a risk assessment, which most landlords can carry out themselves. The legionella guide sets out what the assessment actually involves.

Working the dates back from a check date

Once you know when something was last done, the deadline follows automatically:

Our certificate renewal calculator does this for you: put in the date of the check and it gives you the expiry and a sensible date to book the next one by.

Do it once, then stop doing it

The reason this job feels heavy is that it is not really a one-off. Recover the dates today and in eleven months you are back in the same email search, looking for the same PDF.

The fix is to put each date somewhere that watches it for you. That is what PropCert does: you add the date once, and it warns you 90 days, 30 days, and 7 days before the deadline, so the next renewal never depends on you remembering. Adding a property and one date takes about a minute, and the free plan covers a single property with full reminders.

If you would rather see the whole picture first, the UK landlord compliance checklist lists every certificate, how long it lasts, and what happens if it lapses. And if you want to know which of your obligations are currently unmet, the 60-second compliance quiz will tell you.