A recent Landlord Today piece asked a question worth sitting with: Do landlords really spend only four days a month on rental red tape? According to Pegasus Insight’s Landlord Trends Q4 2025 data, the average landlord spends around 31 hours a month managing their properties, which roughly equates to 4 working days. For landlords with 11 or more properties, that figure climbs to 78 hours, or about 10 working days a month.
If you’re self-managing, your first reaction to “only four days” is probably a quiet laugh. Which is exactly why this data is worth paying attention to.
The ‘passive income’ myth still has legs, and that’s a problem
What the Pegasus research really lays bare is the gap between what people outside the industry assume landlording involves and what it actually looks like day to day. Pegasus founder Mark Long used the phrase “sweat equity” to describe the workload — and it’s apt. This isn’t collecting rent and occasionally fielding a call about a dripping tap. It’s compliance checks, chasing contractors, tracking payments, filing documents, and a long tail of small things that each take fifteen minutes but somehow eat a whole evening.
The problem with the passive income myth isn’t just that it’s annoying — it’s that landlords who believe their own version of it tend to make one of two costly mistakes: they put off building proper systems until something goes wrong, or they hand things over to an agent and assume the burden disappears. It doesn’t.
Using an agent doesn’t actually cut the hours
This was probably the most striking detail in the reporting. Even though 57% of properties involve some form of letting agent service, landlords using agents reported broadly similar time commitments to those self-managing entirely. That’s not a small footnote — it fundamentally changes how you should think about what an agent does and doesn’t solve.
In practice, the landlord is still the one responsible for compliance decisions, repair approvals, financial sign-off, and all the judgment calls that agents can’t make on your behalf. The agent handles tasks; the landlord remains accountable. So, the useful question isn’t whether to use an agent. It’s: what exactly are you keeping in-house, and do you have a clear system for it? Because without that, the admin doesn’t go away — it just becomes harder to track.
Why do some landlords spend far more time than others?
The data shows the heaviest time burden falls on landlords with HMO properties, buy-to-let mortgages, and larger portfolios. That makes obvious sense when you think about what those situations actually involve: licensing requirements, multiple tenancy threads running at once, more contractors, more communication, more decisions. A landlord with one long-settled tenant in a straightforward flat is doing a genuinely different job from someone managing six rooms across two properties with different renewal dates.
It’s worth saying out loud because the advice that gets thrown at landlords often ignores this. “Just self-manage” and “just get an agent” are both too blunt. The right setup depends on the complexity of what you’re running, not on some general principle.
It’s not just the time — costs bite too
The Pegasus figures also found that landlords estimate running and maintenance costs at around 23–24% of gross rental income. So, the pressure isn’t just on hours — it’s on both sides of the ledger at once. Time spent, cash going out, and often no back-office or admin support to absorb either.
That context matters when the public conversation about landlords treats rental income as if it were mostly profit. For many self-managing landlords, it’s income from running a small operation with real operational costs, real compliance risk, and no one else to catch the things that fall through the cracks.
2026 is probably going to make this harder, not easier
The Renters’ Rights Act changes coming into effect this year point toward more structured processes across the board — rent increases through the statutory route, changes to tenancy structure, and stronger compliance expectations. More documentation. More process. Less room to leave things informal and sort them out later.
If 31 hours a month is the current average, it’s reasonable to expect that number to drift upward for landlords who don’t adapt their admin setup. The compliance load isn’t going to shrink.
Where the time actually goes
Most landlords don’t lose hours to one big monthly task. They lose them to repeat friction: hunting for the gas certificate, re-checking a tenancy date, scrolling back through WhatsApp to find what was agreed with a contractor, and reconstructing a rent ledger from bank statements because nothing was tracked in real time. Decision fatigue is compounded by scattered information.
That’s why some landlords feel constantly on the back foot despite not having anything especially complicated going on. The work isn’t overwhelming — it’s just never quite organised. And the fix is rarely about working more hours. It’s about removing the repetitive thinking.
Five things that actually reduce the admin load
None of these are revolutionary. But in practice, most landlords are only doing some of them, some of the time.
A consistent folder structure for each property.
One folder, same layout every time: tenancy agreement, deposit, safety certificates, inspection records, rent ledger, repairs log, notices, tenant correspondence. It sounds obvious, but hunting for documents is one of the biggest time drains landlords don’t think to measure.
Batching admin into a weekly block.
Rather than letting tasks drip into every day, set aside 60–90 minutes once a week and work through a consistent list. Rent checks one week, repairs follow-ups the next, compliance calendar the week after. It’s not glamorous, but it’s much less exhausting than constant context-switching.
Templates for the messages you send repeatedly.
Inspection bookings, rent reminders, repair confirmations, contractor chases — most landlords write these from scratch every time. Templates save time and keep your tone consistent, which matters more than it sounds when things get tense.
A live rent ledger.
Not because it’s exciting, admin, but because it’s the thing you’ll desperately need if arrears start, a tenant disputes a payment, or you need to take formal action. Building it retrospectively from bank statements is miserable. Keeping it current takes minutes a month.
A clear boundary between what the agent handles and what you handle.
If you use an agent, write down what’s theirs and what’s yours. Tenant-find and inspections with them; compliance file and financial tracking with you; all final approvals confirmed by email. Vague handoffs are where things get missed.
The mindset shift that actually helps
The most useful reframe from the Pegasus data is this: landlord admin isn’t a side effect of owning property. It is the work. The property is the asset. The compliance, communication, and paperwork are the operating system that keeps it running.
Once that lands properly, two things tend to follow. You stop feeling like admin is a sign that something’s gone wrong — it’s just part of the job. And you start thinking about how to make it more repeatable, rather than just getting through it each month and starting again from scratch.
So, is four days a month realistic?
For plenty of landlords, yes. The Pegasus Q4 2025 data shows an average of 31 hours, with significantly higher workloads for larger portfolios. And as the reporting makes clear, using an agent doesn’t automatically reduce that — it just shifts which tasks you’re doing.
The more useful question isn’t how many hours you’re spending. It’s whether those hours are organised or chaotic. The same workload can feel manageable if it’s structured, or exhausting if it isn’t — and the difference usually comes down to fairly small changes in how the admin is set up.
If you’re regularly finishing evenings chasing paperwork you know you’ve already dealt with somewhere, or quietly worrying you’ve missed a compliance date, that’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s usually a sign that the setup has outgrown itself. And that’s fixable.
