Local authorities in London alone have now recorded £24.1m in fines against landlords and letting agents.
Licensing offences account for £14.85m of that total, more than half of all fines on the Mayor of London’s Rogue Landlord Database.
Since the launch of the database in 2018, licensing offences have moved from a niche enforcement category to the single biggest driver of penalties in the capital, and the margin continues to widen.
There are now 162 active licensing schemes, with a third of all currently live schemes having launched in the past 12 months alone.
Some 88% of London is covered by some form of property licensing, and 28 of 32 London boroughs now operate discretionary licensing restrictions.
The analysis – by Kamma – shows the average fine issued to a managing agent has risen 14.46% since November 2025, reaching £7,300 per offence. In January 2026,
Haringey fined a landlord and their managing agent a combined £12,500 for operating an unlicensed property in Tottenham, one of a growing number of cases where agents are held jointly liable alongside the landlord.
Waltham Forest leads the capital on total fines (£5.9m from 714 cases), backed by an experienced enforcement team.
Camden has brought more cases than any other borough (964),operating a high-volume model focused on consistent pressure.
Kensington & Chelsea sits in a category of its own on severity, averaging more than £108,000 per case through a smaller number of very large prosecutions targeting the
most serious offenders.
Councils are no longer relying on self-reporting or reactive complaint-handling.
Tower Hamlets provides direct legal support to tenants pursuing Rent Repayment Orders at the First-tier Tribunal, securing over £1.3 million for renters to date. Camden and
Islington run prosecution and tenant RRO support in parallel, turning a single council conviction into compounding consequences for the landlord.
The Renters Rights Act also materially raises the cost of non-compliance.
Maximum civil penalties have increased from £30,000 to £40,000 per offence.
Rent Repayment Orders have doubled, with tenants now able to claim up to 24 months of rent.
Orla Shields, chief executive at Kamma, comments: “The £25 million figure is striking, but the real story is how councils are enforcing.
“Camden and Islington are running a prosecutorial pipeline that turns council convictions into near-automatic Rent Repayment Orders for tenants.
“Tower Hamlets is providing free legal representation.
“With 162 schemes now active and the Renters’ Rights Act in force, the compliance environment has fundamentally changed. For agents in particular, the assumption
that licensing complexity is someone else’s problem is one the fine data clearly no longer supports.”
