Tenancies created from 1 March 2026 are Tenancies of Minimum Duration: a six-year term rolling into further six-year cycles. Tenancies created before that date stay on Part 4 — so an agency book runs both at once. Under TMD the available termination grounds depend on the landlord's size: a large landlord (4+ tenancies) is restricted to tenant breach of obligations, while a small landlord (fewer than 4) keeps the traditional grounds. Every tenancy carries four dated milestones derived from its commencement date, including a market-rent reset at the cycle boundary that, if missed, closes for another six years. Free 14-day trial, no card required.
There is a conversation coming that most agencies haven't had yet. A landlord client will ring in 2032 and ask why their rent wasn't brought to market at the cycle boundary. The honest answer — that the date was six years out and nobody was tracking it — is not one you want to give, and the reason you'd be giving it is that the decision to track it or not is being made right now, quietly, on every tenancy you sign.
That's the peculiar difficulty of the Tenancy of Minimum Duration framework. The rules themselves are not complicated. The timescale is, and timescale is an operational problem rather than a legal one.
Three things that changed for agencies — not one
Reform coverage tends to compress TMD into a single sentence: new tenancies last six years. That's true and it's the least useful part of it. Three separate things changed, and each one lands differently on an agency than on a landlord.
Taken one at a time they look like details. Taken together they change what a tenancy record has to be able to answer.
Your book now runs two regimes, and they look identical
The TMD framework applies to tenancies created from 1 March 2026. Tenancies created before that date are not brought into it — they continue under the existing Part 4 rules.
For a landlord with one tenancy this is a non-issue: they know when their tenant moved in. For an agency it's a live hazard, because both kinds of tenancy sit on the same screen, are handled by the same negotiators, appear in the same client reports, and differ by nothing except a date that nobody reads unless prompted.
A pre-March-2026 tenancy and a post-March-2026 tenancy are visually indistinguishable and legally different. That gap is where mistakes live.
The practical requirement is unglamorous: your book has to be filterable by commencement date, and any negotiator about to act on a tenancy should be able to establish which framework it answers to before they do anything else. Not because the answer is hard, but because nobody thinks to ask a question they don't know exists.
The grounds depend on the client, not the property
This is the genuinely new operational fact, and the one worth reorganising a process around.
Under TMD, which termination grounds a landlord may rely on during a cycle depends on how many tenancies that landlord has:
| Small landlord (fewer than 4 tenancies) | Large landlord (4 or more tenancies) | |
|---|---|---|
| Breach of tenant obligations | Available | Available |
| Intention to sell | Available | Not available |
| Landlord or family member occupation | Available | Not available |
| Substantial refurbishment | Available | Not available |
| Change of use | Available | Not available |
Read that as an agency rather than as a landlord and the implication is sharp. The same property, let on the same terms, has different termination options depending on whose property it is. A negotiator can know a tenancy perfectly and still not know which grounds are open to them, because the answer lives with the client.
The count isn't your book — it's theirs
The threshold counts the landlord's tenancies, which can include property you don't manage and may never have heard of. A client who gives you two units may still be a large landlord because of six more held through another agent. You cannot infer this from your own portfolio, and getting it wrong in the optimistic direction is how a notice gets served on a ground the client was never entitled to use.
The fix is procedural, not technical: landlord size becomes a question on your client onboarding form, recorded against the client and reviewed periodically — because a client who buys a fourth property changes category without telling you.
The four dates every tenancy now carries
Each tenancy carries the same set of milestones, and every one of them is arithmetic on a single field: the commencement date.
Commencement
The date the whole cycle is derived from. Also the anchor for the 30-day RTB registration deadline and annual renewal.
Security of tenure
The tenant acquires security of tenure. From here, ending the tenancy requires a stated statutory ground.
Further rights in view
Six months before the boundary — the point at which the end of the cycle should already be a live client conversation.
Cycle boundary
The reset point, where the market-rent reset window sits. Immediately after it, the next six-year cycle begins.
That last sentence is the one to take away. There is no independent check on a commencement date. Nothing downstream will notice it's wrong, because everything downstream is calculated from it. A tenancy typed in during a migration with a start date a month out will produce a plausible-looking, entirely incorrect set of dates for six years.
See where every tenancy sits in its cycle
Book a demo and we'll load a slice of your managed book — then show you the milestones, the registration deadlines and the rent-review windows date-ordered across the whole portfolio, scoped by branch. It's usually the first time an agency sees its own lifecycle position in one place.
No card required · Concierge import from spreadsheets or Letman
The reset window that closes for another six years
The compliance side of TMD gets the attention. The commercial side is where an agency's clients will actually feel it.
The market-rent reset sits at the cycle boundary. During a cycle, rent moves under the national rent cap; at the boundary, there's an opportunity to bring the rent to market. Miss it and the answer isn't "next month" — it's another six years.
Three things make this uniquely easy to miss, and they compound:
- It's the longest-dated event in lettings. Certificate expiries are annual. Registrations are annual. This is once every six years, which is longer than most negotiators stay in a job and considerably longer than most spreadsheets survive.
- Nothing prompts it. A tenant doesn't ask. A landlord doesn't know the date. There is no inbound event — the only trigger is a system holding a date, or nobody.
- Its absence is invisible. A missed reset produces no error, no complaint and no red flag. The tenancy simply continues at the old rent, looking exactly like a tenancy where the decision was made deliberately.
That last point is why this is worth building a process around rather than trusting to attention. Almost every other failure in lettings announces itself. This one is silent, and it's silent for six years.
Get your portfolio's cycle position mapped
Book a demo and we'll walk your book by commencement date — which tenancies are pre- and post-March 2026, where each sits in its cycle, and which milestones fall inside your next two reporting periods.
Why a spreadsheet genuinely can't hold this
This isn't the usual software-vendor claim that spreadsheets are bad. Spreadsheets are excellent at plenty of lettings work. TMD tracking fails on four specific properties at once:
| Property of the problem | Why a sheet breaks on it |
|---|---|
| The dates are long | A reminder five and a half years out survives no reorganisation, no staff change and no file rename. Nobody opens the 2032 tab. |
| They're per tenancy | Several hundred tenancies means several hundred independent clocks, each on its own schedule. There is no batch to work. |
| They're derived, not entered | Correcting one commencement date must silently move four other dates with it. In a sheet, it moves whichever ones somebody remembers to fix. |
| They interact with client data | The available grounds depend on a landlord-size classification held against the client, not the tenancy — two different sheets that have to agree. |
Any one of these is survivable. Together they don't produce occasional errors — they produce a system whose errors are undetectable until years later. That's a different category of risk from ordinary admin slippage.
Where the agency's exposure actually sits
Worth being precise, because "compliance risk" is doing a lot of vague work in most discussions of this. For an agency, mismanaging a cycle lands in three specific places, and none of them is a regulatory fine.
- An invalid notice is your work product. A notice of termination served on a ground the client wasn't entitled to use doesn't end the tenancy. It was drafted and signed by your agency, so the conversation that follows is not about tenancy law — it's about what the client is paying you for. Our guide to serving notices of termination at agency scale covers the mechanics.
- A missed reset is a quantified loss with a date on it. Unlike most compliance failures, this one is trivially calculable after the fact: the gap between the rent that was and the rent that could have been, times six years. It is the easiest kind of loss for a client to be angry about, because they can work out the number themselves.
- "Where is this tenancy in its cycle?" is a service question. When a client asks, the expected answer is a screen, not a promise to check. Portfolio visibility isn't a nice-to-have you add later — for a managed book, it's a substantial part of the thing being bought.
There's a fourth, quieter one: staff turnover. A negotiator who leaves takes their mental model of the book with them. The dates that matter here outlast careers, which means they have to live somewhere other than in a person.
How TenantSync CRM tracks the cycle
The approach is deliberately narrow: derive everything from the commencement date, calculate it live, and put it on a dashboard scoped the way the agency is actually organised.
1. Milestones derived from the start date
Each tenancy's security-of-tenure milestone is calculated as the commencement date plus six months, and the further-rights milestone as the commencement date plus five years and six months — six months ahead of the cycle boundary, which is deliberately when the conversation should start rather than when it's already too late.
2. Position computed live, never stored
A tenancy's current position — not yet, rights accrued, or further rights — is worked out from today's date each time it's read, rather than written down somewhere by a nightly job. That sounds like an implementation detail, and it's the difference between a dashboard you trust and one you spot-check. Correct a commencement date and every downstream date corrects itself immediately, with no stale status left behind.
3. On the same dashboard as everything else dated
Cycle milestones sit alongside RTB registration, annual renewal, rent review and certificate expiries as tracked compliance items — colour-coded compliant, upcoming and overdue, and scoped to your agency and each branch, so a branch manager sees their own portfolio and the agency sees everything. That matters because the tenancy lifecycle isn't a separate discipline from bulk RTB compliance — it's the same commencement date driving both.
4. Reminders that surface the long dates
A daily run checks active tenancies against their milestones and surfaces any falling in a window from 30 days before to 7 days after the date. Two design choices keep it usable at scale: reminders are grouped into a per-landlord summary rather than one email per tenancy, and a cooldown prevents the same tenancy's milestone being re-notified repeatedly while it sits inside the window. Notifications also reach the mobile apps, and the reminder type can be switched off per owner where a client doesn't want them.
The commencement date is the audit that matters
Everything above rests on one field being right. If you're migrating a book off spreadsheets or Letman, audit commencement dates against your source records before anything else — it's the one import error that propagates into every date you'll rely on for the next six years, and the one nothing downstream will catch.
What it doesn't do
| It doesn't | What that means for you |
|---|---|
| Classify your clients as small or large landlords | The threshold counts the client's tenancies, including any held outside your book. No system of yours can see those. Establish it with the client, record it, and review it — TenantSync tracks the tenancy's dates, not the client's total holdings. |
| Decide which ground you may rely on | Framework, landlord size and ground remain a legal judgement made by your agency on the facts. The app validates the notice's dates and structure once you've decided. |
| Serve notices or file them with the RTB | It builds and validates the notice from the tenancy record. Serving on the tenant and giving the RTB its same-day copy are your actions. |
| Replace legal advice on a contested termination | The framework changed on 1 March 2026 and continues to be clarified. On anything contested or high-value, confirm with the RTB or take advice. |
The operating procedure
What this looks like written down, in the order the steps actually need to happen:
- Segment the book by commencement date — before 1 March 2026, and from it. Every negotiator should be able to tell which side a tenancy falls on without asking anyone.
- Add landlord size to client onboarding, ask the question directly, record the answer against the client, and re-confirm it at review — a client who buys a fourth property changes category silently.
- Audit commencement dates against source records. This is the single highest-value data task your agency has, and it gets harder every month you leave it.
- Put the milestones on one dashboard, scoped per branch, alongside registration deadlines and certificate expiries.
- Make the grounds check a required step before any notice is drafted: framework first, then client classification, then the grounds that combination leaves.
- Put the reset window into the client reporting cycle ahead of time — it's a commercial conversation, not an administrative task.
- Start your free 14-day trial or book a demo to see the cycle position across your own book.
None of this is difficult. All of it is the kind of thing that doesn't get done, because the consequence of not doing it arrives long after the decision not to.
Free reference for your negotiators
TenantSync publishes a free Part 4 tenancy guide covering security of tenure, the TMD framework and the grounds available to small and large landlords — no login required. It's a useful thing to put in front of a new negotiator before they touch a termination.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Tenancy of Minimum Duration in Ireland?
The Tenancy of Minimum Duration is the framework introduced as part of the rental sector reforms that took effect on 1 March 2026. Tenancies created from that date run for a minimum six-year term and then roll into further six-year cycles, during which a landlord may only end the tenancy on a permitted ground. It replaces the older Part 4 structure for new tenancies. The critical detail for anyone managing a portfolio is that it applies by commencement date: tenancies created before 1 March 2026 are not brought into the TMD framework and continue under the existing Part 4 rules. This is general guidance, not legal advice — confirm the current position with the RTB at rtb.ie.
How is Tenancy of Minimum Duration different from a Part 4 tenancy?
Part 4 built security of tenure from the tenant's occupation: after six months of continuous occupation the tenant acquired Part 4 rights, and further rights accrued as the tenancy ran on in cycles. The Tenancy of Minimum Duration starts from a different place — the tenancy itself has a minimum six-year duration that renews in further six-year cycles, and the grounds on which a landlord can end it during a cycle are restricted. The most consequential difference in practice is that under TMD the available grounds depend on the size of the landlord, which was never a factor under Part 4. For an agency, that means the question is no longer only how long has this tenant been here, but which framework applies and whose landlord this is.
Which termination grounds can a large landlord use under TMD?
For tenancies created on or after 1 March 2026, a large landlord — one with four or more tenancies — is restricted to a single ground: breach of tenant obligations. Sale of the property, occupation by the landlord or a family member, substantial refurbishment and change of use are not available to a large landlord during the tenancy. A small landlord, meaning one with fewer than four tenancies, retains access to the traditional grounds. Because the threshold counts the client's tenancies rather than the units you manage for them, a landlord client may be a large landlord because of property held elsewhere — which is why the classification has to come from the client and be recorded, not inferred from your own book.
What are the key dates in a six-year tenancy cycle?
Four, and all of them are arithmetic on the commencement date. At six months the tenant acquires security of tenure, which is also the point after which ending the tenancy requires a stated statutory ground. At five years and six months the further-rights milestone comes into view, six months ahead of the cycle boundary. At six years the cycle boundary itself falls, which is where the market-rent reset window sits. Immediately after it, the next six-year cycle begins. The same commencement date also drives the 30-day RTB registration deadline and annual renewal, so one field on the tenancy record is doing several jobs at once.
Why is the six-year cycle hard for a letting agency to track?
Because it fails on every property a spreadsheet has. The dates are long — a reset five and a half years out is beyond any diary anyone actually keeps. They are per tenancy rather than per client or per property, so an agency signing several hundred tenancies is creating several hundred independent clocks. They are derived rather than entered, so a corrected commencement date has to silently move four other dates with it. And they interact with a landlord-size classification that lives with the client, not the tenancy. Any one of those is manageable by hand; together they guarantee that something is missed, and the miss surfaces years later when nobody remembers the decision.
What is the agency's exposure if a tenancy cycle is mismanaged?
It falls in three distinct places. A notice of termination served on a ground the client was not entitled to use is invalid, and the notice was the agency's signed work product — so the conversation with the client is about the service they paid for, not about tenancy law. A missed market-rent reset means the client's rent stays where it is for another six years, which is a quantifiable loss with a date attached to it. And a client asking where a tenancy sits in its cycle expects an answer from a system rather than a promise to check, because that visibility is a substantial part of what an agency is retained for. None of these are regulatory penalties; all of them are client-relationship events.
How does TenantSync track the six-year cycle?
From the tenancy commencement date, and derived live rather than stored. Each tenancy's Part 4 milestone is calculated as the start date plus six months and the further-rights milestone as the start date plus five years and six months, and the tenancy's current position is worked out from today's date each time it is read — so correcting a start date immediately corrects everything downstream, and no stored status can drift out of date. Those milestones appear as compliance items on the same dashboard as RTB registration, annual renewal, rent review and certificate expiries, colour-coded compliant, upcoming or overdue and scoped to your agency and to each branch. A daily run surfaces tenancies approaching a milestone and sends the responsible party a summary rather than one email per tenancy.
Does TenantSync decide whether my client is a small or large landlord?
No, and it is important not to assume otherwise. The small and large landlord thresholds count the landlord's tenancies, which can include tenancies held outside your managed book and managed by someone else entirely — information no system of yours has access to. TenantSync tracks each tenancy's dates, milestones and cycle position; the classification of the client has to be established with the client and recorded by your agency as part of taking them on. Treat it as a question on your client onboarding form and a field you keep current, not something to infer from the number of units you happen to manage for them.
Do tenancies that started before March 2026 fall under TMD?
No. Tenancies created before 1 March 2026 are not affected by the Tenancy of Minimum Duration framework and continue under the existing Part 4 rules. This is the detail most likely to cause an error inside an agency, because the two kinds of tenancy sit next to each other on the same screen, are managed by the same negotiators, and look identical apart from a date. Any agency operating through this transition should be able to filter its book by commencement date and know, for any given tenancy, which framework it answers to before anyone drafts a notice.
Can I still end a tenancy in its first six months under TMD?
The first six months remain the point at which security of tenure accrues, and a termination in that window has historically not required a stated reason, on 90 days' notice. Because the rules changed on 1 March 2026 and continue to be clarified, treat this as the one part of the framework to confirm case by case rather than apply from memory — and confirm it with the RTB at rtb.ie or take legal advice before serving. Whatever the ground, the mechanics of the notice itself did not get easier: the notice period still scales with tenancy length, the statutory reason must still be stated where the tenancy has security of tenure, and a copy still has to reach the RTB the same day the tenant is served.
Sources & further reading
- How a landlord can end a tenancy from 1 March 2026, Residential Tenancies Board
- Security of tenure, Citizens Information
- Residential Tenancies Act 2004 (Revised), Law Reform Commission
- Part 4 tenancy guide, TenantSync — free, no login required
The March 2026 reforms are recent and continue to be clarified. Confirm the current position for any specific tenancy with the RTB at rtb.ie, and take legal advice on a contested termination. Product behaviour described here reflects TenantSync at the time of writing — see the pricing page for what each plan includes.