Awaab's Law Timescales Explained: All Five Statutory Deadlines
The five statutory deadlines at the heart of Awaab's Law — and exactly what each one requires.
Awaab's Law (SI 2025/1042) creates five distinct statutory timeframes for registered social housing providers in England. Missing any of them carries significant enforcement risk. This guide explains each deadline in plain English — when the clock starts, what it requires, and what happens if it is missed.
Day 0: The date of awareness
Every Awaab's Law clock starts from Day 0 — the date the landlord becomes aware of a hazard. This is not the date of the formal complaint, the date the inspection is booked, or the date the works contractor arrives. It is the date the landlord first has knowledge that a damp, mould, or hazard issue may exist.
Day 0 awareness can be triggered by a phone call to the repairs team, a written complaint, an email from the tenant, a note on an inspection report, or a contractor flagging an issue during another visit. The definition is deliberately broad. Landlords who attempt to argue that awareness only began when a formal repair request was logged — rather than when the issue was first mentioned — will face scrutiny from the Ombudsman.
Practical implication: every frontline team member who might receive a tenant report — repairs desk, estate manager, housing officer, contact centre — needs to understand that Day 0 begins when they receive that information, and it must be recorded immediately.
The 24-hour emergency deadline
Where a hazard poses an imminent and significant risk to the health or safety of a resident, the landlord must investigate the hazard and complete any required safety works within 24 hours of becoming aware. This clock runs in hours, not working days, so it runs through weekends and bank holidays.
The threshold for the emergency clock is "imminent risk" — not every hazard, and not every instance of damp or mould. The emergency standard applies to hazards where the risk to life or serious harm is immediate: a broken boiler in winter with a vulnerable household, severe mould in a room used by an infant, structural instability, gas or electrical faults.
The 24-hour deadline requires the landlord both to investigate the hazard and to complete any necessary safety works within the window — not merely to book an appointment, send an acknowledgement letter, or commission a survey. The home must be made safe within 24 hours, not simply have a remediation response underway.
For out-of-hours emergencies, this requires an active out-of-hours service. The 24-hour clock does not pause for weekends or evenings.
The 10 working day deadline — investigation
For significant damp and mould hazards that do not meet the emergency threshold, the landlord has 10 working days, beginning the day after the hazard is reported, to complete a full investigation. This is the investigation deadline only — the written summary, the safety-works completion deadline, and the backstop on further preventative works are separate stages that follow.
Working days exclude weekends and UK bank holidays. Day 1 is the first working day after Day 0. So if a report is received on a Friday, Day 1 is the following Monday.
The investigation must be substantive — a genuine assessment of the cause and extent of the hazard, not a superficial walk-through. It should be documented, ideally with moisture meter readings, photographs, and identification of the probable root cause (condensation, penetrating damp, rising damp, structural defect, ventilation failure).
Once the investigation has concluded, the next obligation is the written summary required by Regulation 9 (covered below). The written summary must set out the findings, what action is required (or why none is), the target timescale for any further action, and how the tenant can contact the landlord. It is a statutory communication — a verbal assurance or an informal message is not sufficient.
Under Regulation 9 of SI 2025/1042, a written summary of the investigation must be provided to the tenant within 3 working days of the investigation being completed. This is a separate obligation that follows the 10-working-day investigation deadline.
The 12-week backstop on additional preventative works
Where additional preventative works are needed to stop the hazard from coming back — for example, structural repairs or improved ventilation — those works must begin within 12 weeks of the investigation at the latest. The safety-works deadline (5 working days) covers making the home safe; the 12-week backstop applies separately to further preventative works that go beyond making safe.
The 12-week backstop is the point by which preventative works must have started — not deferred indefinitely. Minor works that could reasonably have been started sooner should not be deferred to the end of the 12-week window.
Where complex preventative works cannot reasonably begin within 12 weeks — for example, major structural work requiring planning permission, or specialist treatment requiring dry conditions — the landlord must document the reason and keep the tenant informed in writing. Delays cannot be assumed or imposed unilaterally.
The 5 working day safety works completion deadline
After the 10-working-day investigation concludes, the landlord must make the home safe within 5 working days. This is the safety-works completion deadline — works must be finished, not merely started, within this window. If the home cannot be made safe in time, the landlord must offer suitable alternative accommodation until it can be.
What happens if you miss a deadline
The Housing Ombudsman investigates complaints where deadlines have been missed and can make findings of service failure, maladministration, or severe maladministration. These findings are published, named, and scrutinised by the Regulator of Social Housing.
Compensation orders against social landlords are made by the Housing Ombudsman under its published Compensation Guidance. The framework includes loss-of-use percentages where rooms are substantially impaired, specific compensation orders for service failures such as loss of heating or missed appointments, and case-level lump-sum awards for the impact of maladministration.
The RSH uses Ombudsman data as part of its Consumer Standards assessments. A pattern of deadline failures can trigger formal engagement, a regulatory notice, or in severe cases an in-depth assessment.
Using the deadline calculator
Our free Awaab's Law Deadline Calculator takes the date of a tenant report and calculates every statutory deadline as an exact calendar date, automatically excluding weekends and UK bank holidays. It covers both emergency and significant hazard classifications.