August 2026
From 30 November 2026, social landlords in England face statutory time limits on investigating and fixing eight categories of housing hazard. Almost everything written about it so far has been aimed at landlords. This is written for the surveyor who is going to be instructed by one.
The short version: you will be attending properties on a clock, reaching a professional view that the landlord will use to determine whether a hazard is significant or an emergency, and producing findings that feed a document the landlord must give the tenant within three working days. Some of that is familiar work. The framework around it is not.
Awaab's Law comes from the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023, following the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak. It works by implying a term into social housing tenancy agreements, which means tenants can enforce it directly as a breach of contract.
It is delivered through the Hazards in Social Housing (Prescribed Requirements) (England) Regulations 2025, as amended by the 2026 Amendment Regulations.
Phase 1 has been live since 27 October 2025, covering all emergency hazards and significant damp and mould hazards. Phase 2 extends the significant hazard requirements to:
Damp and mould remains in scope from Phase 1. A third phase will extend the regulations to the remaining HHSRS hazards apart from overcrowding.
One practical point is worth making explicit at the outset: the clock does not start when you are instructed. The timeframes are triggered when the landlord becomes aware of a potential hazard, or of a material change to one they already know about. Triage is part of that initial determination, not a separate stage that happens before the clock starts. By the time an instruction reaches you, days may already have gone.
Awaab's Law does not require an HHSRS assessment. The guidance is explicit, and it adds that there is no requirement for investigators to be HHSRS qualified.
That surprises people, because the hazard categories come from HHSRS and the vocabulary looks familiar. The reason matters.
HHSRS assesses risk against a notional vulnerable occupant. It is deliberately impersonal, because it supports enforcement decisions under the Housing Act 2004 against a consistent benchmark. Awaab's Law does the opposite. It asks what the risk is to the people who actually live in the property, judged against what the landlord knows, or reasonably ought to know, about their health and circumstances.
So the same defect can be a significant hazard in one property and out of scope in another. Damp in a bedroom occupied by a child with asthma is not the same assessment as the same damp in a hallway occupied by two healthy adults. The guidance works through exactly that comparison, and gives a worked example of a Category 2 hazard under HHSRS that is nonetheless a significant hazard under Awaab's Law because of who lives there.
Nor is Category 1 the trigger. That threshold still governs local authority enforcement under the Housing Act 2004 and Criterion A of the Decent Homes Standard. It is not what Awaab's Law turns on.
If you are instructed to carry out an HHSRS assessment, that is a different piece of work. Be clear which you are being asked for.
The threshold question is whether a reasonable landlord would make the hazard safe within 15 working days, in which case it is a significant hazard, or within 24 hours, in which case it is an emergency. Both are objective tests that the courts can hold landlords to, and a landlord cannot argue their own budget or staffing into the answer.
Two consequences are easy to miss.
Temporary measures count. Cleaning mould and leaving a dehumidifier, providing heaters while a boiler is repaired, restricting access to an unsafe area: all of these are things a reasonable landlord would do to make a hazard safe. That does not discharge the duty to stop the hazard recurring, but it affects whether the hazard falls inside the timescales at all.
And some structural problems fall outside Awaab's Law altogether, not because they are minor but because a reasonable landlord could not make them safe within 15 working days even with temporary measures. Buildings constructed using materials or methods with known inherent weaknesses, large panel system construction being the example given, are dealt with through other mechanisms on longer timescales. That is not a licence to do nothing, and the guidance says so. It just means a different clock applies.
This is the part worth understanding properly, because it determines when you get called and what you are being asked to produce.
A standard investigation must be completed within 10 working days of the landlord becoming aware of a potential significant hazard. It has to confirm whether a significant or emergency hazard exists and, if possible, identify the work needed to make the property safe and stop the hazard recurring.
It can be done remotely. If photographs or video are enough for a competent person to reach a view, that is permitted. Expect to be asked to assess from a tenant's photographs.
A renewed investigation follows where a tenant asks for an in-person inspection after a remote one. For a potential significant hazard, the landlord must complete it within 10 working days of the request, so the investigation clock effectively resets. Different rules apply to emergency hazards, and a renewed investigation is not required where required works have already begun or where a further investigation is needed instead.
An emergency investigation must be completed, and the property made safe, within 24 hours of the landlord becoming aware. If reasonable grounds for believing there is an emergency hazard arise during a standard or renewed investigation, the emergency requirements begin to apply and the investigation must then be completed within the emergency timeframe.
A further investigation is the one to pay attention to. Where the standard, renewed or emergency investigation cannot determine the extent or the underlying cause, a further investigation must follow as soon as reasonably practicable. The guidance's own example: a damp and mould investigation concludes that a structural survey is needed to diagnose the cause of the damp.
That is a building surveyor being instructed, described in the guidance itself. If you want to know where this work is likely to come from, a good deal of it is there.
Note that the landlord must still carry out the safety works identified by the earlier investigation while your further investigation is under way. Your diagnosis is not holding anything up, and nobody is waiting on you to make the property safe.
There is no professional designation attached to any of this, and that is worth understanding rather than glossing over.
The landlord must ensure the investigation is carried out by someone who, in their reasonable opinion, is competent to do so: a person with the skills and experience needed to determine whether the home is affected by a significant or emergency hazard. The only worked example the guidance gives is electrical, where it says a qualified and competent electrician should be used.
For structural collapse, damp, falls and building fabric generally, that may well mean a building surveyor where the nature and complexity of the issue calls for it. But the test is competence in the landlord's reasonable opinion, not membership of a particular body. In practice that means the landlord has to be able to justify their choice of investigator, which is a question you may be asked to help them answer.
Read the structural collapse examples and the work is immediately recognisable: parapets and chimneys, large sections of ceiling plasterwork, rotten floors and balconies at risk of collapse in use, improperly designed or constructed retaining walls, leaning walls and displaced roof tiles, cracking that has appeared suddenly or is worsening. Ordinary building pathology, asked for against a deadline.
Once the landlord becomes aware of a potential hazard, the framework runs on fixed periods:
Day one generally runs from the day after the triggering event. The exception is the 24 hour emergency period, which starts immediately.
Where safety work cannot be completed inside those periods, the landlord must secure suitable alternative accommodation at their own expense.
For a surveyor, two things follow. The landlord's ten working day investigation window is already running when the instruction reaches you, and it shrinks quickly once it has to absorb finding a surveyor, arranging access and receiving a report. And your findings feed a document with a three working day deadline attached.
This is where the work differs most from ordinary defect reporting.
A written summary is required within three working days of the investigation concluding unless all required work, both to make the home safe and to prevent the hazard recurring, has been completed within that period. It is also required where the investigation concludes there is no significant or emergency hazard. So a summary is owed even when you find nothing in scope.
It must state whether a significant or emergency hazard was found and what it is, what action will be taken, and target timeframes for beginning and completing that action. Where no action is required, it must say so and explain why.
MHCLG has published a template. Its sections run: what we found, safety steps taken, staying safe during repairs, follow-up investigations, fixing the problem, stopping the problem coming back, alternative accommodation, and the complaints route.
The guidance is direct about the register. Summaries should be clear and easy for a tenant to understand. They do not need to be lengthy or technical, but they must be accurate.
Two practical points for anyone producing findings that feed one.
Where action is required, the summary has to carry target timeframes for starting and completing it. Those target dates are not themselves legally binding, but they have to come from somewhere, and a report that recommends action without any view on sequencing or duration leaves the landlord filling in the gap on their own.
And landlords are told to ensure their contractors provide the information needed for written summaries in a timely manner, and report any hazards they notice beyond the one they were sent to look at. If you inspect a damp hazard and see a loose banister, that is expected to come back with you.
Anyone doing this work at volume will end up producing two things from one inspection: the technical findings the landlord needs to instruct works, and the plain-English account the tenant receives.
Read the guidance rather than the commentary. There are two documents, the main guidance for social landlords and the hazards annex on triaging. Between them they tell you more about how instructions will be framed than any summary will, and the triaging annex works through scenarios hazard by hazard with the reasoning set out.
Be clear what you are being instructed to do. An Awaab's Law investigation, a further investigation, an HHSRS assessment and a stock condition survey are four different pieces of work, and landlords under time pressure will not always distinguish between them in the instruction.
Work out in advance how you will turn findings around at that pace, and how the plain-English version gets produced. If you already write up your reports in the evening, a second document per inspection on a three working day deadline is worth thinking about before the instructions start arriving.
BuildStack is back-at-desk software for UK building surveyors, turning defect logs and site photographs into inspection reports, schedules of works and priced schedules. Built by a chartered member of the CIOB working in building surveying.