Noisy tenant, no Section 21 and what a landlord can do now.

On 1 May 2026 the rules changed. Section 21, the notice that let a landlord end a tenancy without giving a reason, was scrapped under the Renters' Rights Act 2025. With it went the fallback that sat behind almost every difficult tenant situation, which means landlords now have to rethink how they handle those situations from the start rather than rely on a way out at the end. Noise is one of those situations. Picture the tenant who pays on time and looks after the place, but whose neighbours keep complaining. Section 21 was never your first move here. It was the backstop. Because you knew it was there, you had room to talk to the tenant, try mediation and give things time, and if none of that worked you had a way to end the tenancy on a date you could count on. That is why so many notices went out in the weeks before the deadline. If you did not get one in, you are playing by the new rules now. So how do you deal with a noise complaint when Section 21 is no longer there to fall back on?

What can a landlord do about a noisy tenant now that Section 21 has been abolished?

A landlord has four usual moves and one that almost everyone misses. The four are to talk it round, get the tenant to leave, put up with it or sell up. All four manage the problem, and none of them solves it, because each one assumes it cannot be solved. The fifth move is to fix the noise itself, so the complaint stops and the tenant stays.

Here is how the four play out now.

Talk it round. This is the right first move and it usually works, because most people want to be good neighbours. The trouble starts when it does not work the first time. It becomes a run of temporary fixes that do less each time, and every repeated complaint wears the relationship down a little more.

Get them to leave. There are two ways, and both have weakened. Paying the tenant to go only ever worked because they knew that saying no meant being made to leave anyway. Take that away and a settled tenant has little reason to take the money. Eviction is now a court matter that the court does not have to agree to, so it is slow and far from certain.

Put up with it. If you do not live nearby, it can be out of sight and out of mind, and a complaint can be ignored right up until it cannot, usually when the council gets involved. The cost sitting underneath it is the property. A home in an ongoing dispute with the people next door is worth less, whether the noisy party is your tenant or not.

Sell up. You can leave the business, but that same value problem follows you out. A property with a known noise dispute sells for less, so this is the trap closing, not a way out of it.

The fifth move is the one nobody lists. Fix the noise. If a tenant told you the flat was cold, or there was a smell, no one would dream of running through those four before simply putting it right. You would fix it. Noise got treated differently for one reason only. It was thought to be something you could not fix in the building, so it dropped off the list of problems you solve and onto the list of disputes you manage. That is the only reason it sat there. Treat the wall and the noise reaching the neighbour comes down, the complaint has nothing left to feed on, and the tenant keeps paying. And the neighbour gets their quiet back, which is all they were ever after, because almost nobody next door is asking for an eviction. They just want the noise to stop.

How many noise complaints before eviction in the UK?

There is no set number. No law says how many complaints lead to an eviction, and there is no three-strikes rule. A court looks at how strong your evidence is, not how many complaints there are, and then decides whether removing the tenant is fair. One well-recorded case can count for more than a dozen vague ones.

This is the first thing that surprises landlords who go looking for a number. There is no number to find. And the route that did almost all the work has gone. In the last full year before the rules changed, landlords made tens of thousands of no-fault claims and took back more than ten thousand homes that way. Eviction for the behaviour itself is rare and treated as a last resort, used in only a small share of cases and mostly in social housing, where there are whole teams to pursue it. A private landlord acting alone almost never gets there. The route that moved the numbers has been scrapped. The one left for noise barely moves at all.

Can you evict a tenant for noise complaints in the UK?

You can try, but not the way most landlords picture it. Section 8 is the route for every eviction now, and it works through specific grounds. Most people know it for rent arrears, where a big enough debt can force the court's hand. Noise is a different ground, the one for anti-social behaviour, and that one is discretionary. The court does not have to agree, the process takes the best part of a year, and you have to prove the behaviour, usually with neighbours willing to back you up in court. For ordinary noise from a tenant who pays, landlords rarely get there.

Here is the part the advice never mentions. With the old no-fault notice you could tell the tenant it was nothing personal, just the tenancy coming to its end. Going to court over anti-social behaviour is the opposite. You stand up and argue that this person is a nuisance, with the neighbours there to say the same. There is no way to make that feel like nothing personal. It is personal by design, and it tends to wreck whatever goodwill was left. That is how a paying tenant turns into a withheld payment and a changed lock. Months of it, and the only person better off at the end is the solicitor.

Can you soundproof a rental with the tenant living there?

Yes. Shell is a soundproofing wall system made to go in while the tenant still lives there. There is no wet plaster and no need to clear the room. It cuts the airborne noise that comes through a shared wall, the voices, television and music behind most complaints, and it can be taken out again at the end of the tenancy.

Most landlords picture soundproofing as a building site, boards glued on, a plasterer in, a room out of use for a week. That is the old way of doing it, and it is the very thing Shell was built to avoid. It is a wall built in four layers that goes in with a drill and a nail gun, finished with a felt surface so the wall looks like a chosen feature rather than a patch-up. You can see how the layers work on the Shell pages. It brings the noise down without making the wall silent, and I would not pretend otherwise. The drop is independently tested, and the figure comes with your quote rather than as a headline. What you are paying for is a clear result you control, instead of a court result you cannot.

What about noise coming through the floor or ceiling?

That is a different problem. Footsteps and banging from the flat above come through the floor and ceiling, not the shared wall, and a wall system will not fix them. Felted handles floors and ceilings as a separate job, priced by enquiry rather than covered on this page.

It helps to know which noise you have before you spend anything. Voices, television, arguments and music through the wall between two homes are airborne, and that is where the wall system fits. Thumping and footfall from above are impact noise, and that needs a different job. Send the details over and we will tell you which kind you are dealing with.

Does soundproofing a rental pay for itself?

It is money spent on a property that earns, so the real test is what it gives back. The work is fitted, not glued in, so you can take it out again, which means it is not money lost in the wall. Set against the cost of an empty property, a court case or paying a tenant to leave, treating the wall is the cheaper move.

An empty home is the expensive part, and a complaint that drives out a good tenant, or a neighbouring tenant of yours, is exactly how you end up with one. Most noise complaints are not bad people doing bad things. Sometimes life just puts two households who do not quite fit beside each other, and now that tenancies can run for the long term, the job is to make the space work for both. It is the same problem I have spent years on in office design, where you make a space last by letting it change with the people in it. A treated wall does that for a home. You will not get total silence, and a determined problem will not vanish. What you can do is bring the noise down far enough that the complaint settles, on a timescale you set, with an outcome you can measure. If you have a noise complaint you cannot evict your way out of, send us the details and we will come back with a straight answer and a quote.