Your listings are now a compliance surface. Here's the 2026 map.

For most of the web's history, a property listing was marketing. Since April 2025 it is also a regulated document, and the rules tightened again this year. This is a plain-English map of what changed and where your website sits in it. It is not legal advice, and we say that as people who build the websites rather than interpret the law.

The DMCC Act: material information, with teeth

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force for these purposes on 6 April 2025. It replaced the old consumer protection regulations that governed property listings, and it moved enforcement to the Competition and Markets Authority with substantially sharper teeth: breaches of the rules around material information can now be a criminal matter, and the CMA can issue fines of up to £300,000 or 10% of global turnover.

Awkwardly, the detailed guidance agents leaned on was withdrawn in May 2025 when National Trading Standards handed over to the CMA, and sector-specific replacement guidance has been slow to arrive. The working position across the industry is that the substance of the old Parts A, B and C still describes what "material information" means: price or rent and how it is calculated, tenure, council tax band, utilities, and the property-specific matters a buyer or tenant would need to know.

Where the website comes in: the listing page is where material information either appears or does not. A site where those fields are typed in freehand, when someone remembers, is a site where a listing can go out half-finished. A site where the listing template carries the fields as structure, and a listing cannot publish without them, removes the failure mode entirely.

The Renters' Rights Act: in force since May 2026

The Renters' Rights Act 2025 began phasing in on 1 May 2026, so this is live law, not a deadline to plan for. Most of it concerns tenancy law rather than websites, but two parts land directly on your public-facing pages.

First, rent bidding: it is unlawful to invite or accept offers above the advertised rent. That makes the advertised rent on your website a figure with legal weight, which means it needs to be current, accurate and consistent with what you tell applicants elsewhere.

Second, the Act's information duties, including the tenant information sheet and, later in 2026, the private rented sector database, mean landlords and agents will be handling more structured compliance information per property than before. Websites that already treat property data as structured fields will absorb that easily. Websites where every page is hand-typed will not.

The quieter ones: cookies and accessibility

Two more, briefly. PECR, the rule set behind cookie banners, gained UK GDPR-level penalties in February 2026, with a ceiling of £17.5m or 4% of turnover, and the ICO has been writing to sites in volume since 2023. A banner with no genuine "reject" option is the most common failure. And the Equality Act has always applied to websites: unreadable grey text and forms that cannot be used from a keyboard are a legal exposure as well as bad manners.

The practical takeaway

You do not need to become a lawyer. You need your listing pages to be structured, so the required information is a field rather than a memory; your advertised rents to be accurate and easy to keep current; your consent banner to be real; and your pages to be readable and usable by everyone. That is buildable, and it is cheaper to build in than to bolt on.

We build property sites with the compliance fields structured in from the start. Request a quote if yours predates all of this.

Status notes, correct as of August 2026: DMCC Act in force since 6 April 2025. Renters' Rights Act 2025 phasing since 1 May 2026; the tenant Information Sheet deadline of 31 May 2026 has passed. PECR penalty alignment from February 2026. Commercial MEES tightening (EPC C by 2027/28, B by 2030) remains a government proposal at consultation stage, not yet law.