Scope: England, private rented sector. Wales runs a separate regime under the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016 — see section 173 notices in Wales. Social landlords use the unsuffixed forms, not these. Verified against legislation.gov.uk and gov.uk on 11 August 2026.
If you serve a section 8 notice on a privately rented assured tenancy in England today, it must be on Form 3A. The form you used before 1 May 2026 no longer exists for this purpose.
This is not a redesign. It is a new prescribed form under a new instrument, and prescribed means what it says: get the document wrong and the notice can fail before anyone reaches the merits of your case.
What actually changed
The Assured Tenancies (Private Rented Sector) (Prescribed Forms and Transitional Provisions) (England) Regulations 2026 — SI 2026/354 — came into force on 1 May 2026. Regulation 3 prescribes the forms for private assured tenancies. Regulation 4 revokes what came before. Regulation 5 handles the changeover.
The instrument creates a parallel series for the private rented sector, distinguished by an "A" suffix:
| Private rented sector | What it does |
|---|
| Form 3A | Notice seeking possession — the section 8 notice |
| Form 1A | Notice proposing different terms for a succession tenancy |
| Form 2A | Application referring Form 1A to the tribunal |
| Form 4A | Landlord's notice proposing a new rent |
| Form 5A / 9A | Agricultural occupancy rent and tenancy notices |
The unsuffixed forms — Form 3, Form 4, Form 6A and the rest — still exist, but they are the social housing series. Picking Form 3 instead of Form 3A is the easiest mistake on this page to make and one of the hardest to argue your way out of.
Form 6A is gone, and not by accident
The gov.uk collection is explicit that Form 6A — the section 21 "no fault" notice — is not available for privately rented properties. That is the abolition of section 21 expressed as a missing document. There is no private-sector equivalent because there is no private-sector no-fault route.
Every possession claim now runs through a ground, and every ground runs through Form 3A.
The transitional rule, stated precisely
Regulation 5 saves the old Assured Tenancies and Agricultural Occupancies (Forms) Regulations 2015 — but the saving turns on when the notice was given, not on when the tenancy started.
- Notice given before 1 May 2026 — the old prescribed form governs, and it stays valid through the proceedings it relates to.
- Notice given on or after 1 May 2026 — Form 3A, regardless of how old the tenancy is.
A tenancy granted in 2019 gets a Form 3A today. The date on the notice is the only date that matters, which is worth knowing before you reach for a template saved on your own computer last year.
The mistakes that invalidate a notice
1. Changing the wording
The guidance is unusually blunt about this, and it is worth quoting exactly:
"Use the prescribed forms to ensure the notice or referral to the tribunal is valid. Do not change the wording of these forms unless the form says you can. If you change the wording, the form may not be valid."
This catches well-meaning edits. Deleting a paragraph that seems irrelevant to your case, tidying the layout, retyping the form into your own letterhead — each is a change to prescribed wording. Some fields invite you to complete them; the rest are not yours to touch.
2. Not using the separate legal wording for your grounds
Form 3A does not print the grounds in full. gov.uk publishes a distinct document, Form 3A: Legal wording for possession grounds, and the full legal wording for each ground you rely on goes into question 4.2.
Paraphrasing a ground in your own words there is the second common failure. The ground has a statutory formulation and question 4.2 expects it. Which grounds are available, and what notice each carries, is in the section 8 grounds table.
3. Reaching for a stale copy
Download the form from gov.uk each time you serve one rather than reusing a saved PDF. Prescribed forms are reissued, and a copy that was correct when you filed it away carries no warning that it has been superseded — the same trap as serving an out-of-date How to Rent guide.
4. Treating the guidance as the form
Three companion documents sit alongside Form 3A: guidance for landlords on completing it, the legal wording for grounds, and a guidance document for tenants. None of them is the notice. Only the form itself is served.
Where the official documents live
All of it is on gov.uk under Assured tenancy forms for privately rented properties from 1 May 2026, linked in the sources below. Use that page rather than a copy hosted anywhere else, including ours — we deliberately do not mirror the PDF, because a mirrored prescribed form is a stale prescribed form waiting to happen.
What this sits alongside
The form is the last step of a sequence, not the first. Before a notice is worth serving, the tenancy needs to be one you can actually take possession of: the periodic tenancy by default, the written statement, deposit protection, and the certificates. A notice served while a deposit is unprotected invites a counterclaim worth more than the arrears.
Check your tenancy agreement free — it reads your agreement against the current regime and flags the clauses that stopped working on 1 May 2026.