Which alarms must a landlord install, and where?
Two duties set the placement. You must equip a smoke alarm on each storey of the premises that has a room used wholly or partly as living accommodation — so a two-storey house with living space on both floors needs an alarm on each. You must also equip a carbon monoxide alarm in any room used as living accommodation that contains a fixed combustion appliance, other than a gas cooker. That is the wording of regulation 4 of the Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm (England) Regulations 2015, and GOV.UK guidance restates it in plain English. The regulations do not prescribe a particular type of alarm, mains or battery, so the choice of model is yours as long as the coverage is right.
Do I need a CO alarm for a gas boiler or gas fire?
Yes. This is the point landlords most often get wrong. The 2022 amendment widened the carbon monoxide duty so it now covers any fixed combustion appliance — gas, oil or solid fuel — and the only carve-out is a gas cooker. A gas boiler, a gas fire, a gas water heater, a wood burner or an oil-fired appliance all trigger the need for a carbon monoxide alarm in the room. Only the gas cooker is excluded, and people wrongly stretch that exclusion to cover gas appliances generally. Do not. If a living-accommodation room holds a fixed combustion appliance that is not a gas cooker, it needs a carbon monoxide alarm — full stop.
When must the alarms be working, and whose job is the start-of-tenancy check?
The landlord must ensure each required alarm is in proper working order on the day the tenancy begins, where it is a new tenancy. That is your duty, carried out by you or on your behalf, and GOV.UK guidance restates it in the same terms. Note the precision: the duty bites on the first day of a new tenancy, not on every day of an ongoing one, so the natural checkpoint is changeover, when you are already preparing the property. Build the alarm test into your move-in routine and record that you did it, because the working-order check on day one is exactly the kind of thing that is easy to do and easy to fail to prove later.
Is the tenant or the landlord responsible for testing alarms?
The statutory duties sit with the landlord — the start-of-tenancy working-order check and the repair-on-report duty are both yours. A tenant has no legal duty to test alarms or change batteries. This is the trap worth flagging plainly: GOV.UK guidance only advises tenants, as good practice, to test their alarms and arrange replacement batteries during the tenancy, and notes that testing is straightforward to do. Advice is not a duty. So while it is reasonable to encourage tenants to test monthly, you cannot lean on that to discharge your own obligations. If something goes wrong, the law looks at what the landlord did, not at whether the tenant pressed the test button.
What must a landlord do when a tenant reports a faulty alarm?
For a report made on or after 1 October 2022 by the tenant or their nominated representative, if a required alarm is found not to be in proper working order, you must have it repaired or replaced. Both the determination of whether the alarm works and any repair or replacement must be carried out by you or on your behalf as soon as reasonably practicable. There is no fixed number of days here; 'as soon as reasonably practicable' is the standard, which in practice means promptly and without drift. Log the date the tenant reported the fault and the date you acted, because the gap between those two dates is what an authority will look at.
What happens if a landlord does not comply?
Enforcement runs through the local housing authority. Where it is satisfied that a landlord is in breach of a remedial notice, it may require the landlord to pay a penalty charge, and the amount of that charge must not exceed £5,000. The route is a remedial notice first, then a penalty for failing to comply, so the system gives you a chance to put things right before the charge lands. That is no reason to be casual about it: a £5,000 civil penalty per breach is a real cost, and it attaches to something as avoidable as a missing carbon monoxide alarm or an untested smoke alarm at the start of a tenancy.