HM Land Registry will stop sending application correspondence as PDF attachments from late August 2026. Requisitions, letters and notices will instead arrive as a secure link inside the email, valid for 200 days. Every conveyancing team in England and Wales is affected, and the change carries a phishing dimension that deserves saying out loud.
What is changing, and when?
From late August 2026, application-related correspondence will be accessed through a secure link in the notification email rather than opened as an attachment. The registry describes the move as a security and simplicity measure, and says it follows updates to Microsoft’s email software.
Three points of detail matter operationally. Emails will be sent from hm.land.registry@notifications.service.gov.uk, and the registry is advising customers to add that address to their safe senders list so correspondence is not interrupted. The delivery platform is GOV.UK Notify, which the registry has already used for some notices for more than a year. And the notification itself is unchanged in substance: firms will still receive an email about a requisition, letter or notice, and only the method of accessing the document is different.
What happens after 200 days?
The link expires. Two hundred days is generous by the standards of most transactional windows, but it is finite, and it introduces a records management question that a PDF attachment never posed. A document sitting in an inbox as an attachment stays there for as long as the mailbox does. A document sitting behind an expiring link does not.
Anything a file needs for the long term has to be downloaded and saved to the matter file at the point of receipt rather than left to be retrieved later. That is already good practice, and in most firms it is already the rule. The difference is that until now, failing to follow it was recoverable.
Volume gives the point some weight. Nearly 20% of registration applications attract a requisition, and the registry has said that rate varies widely between firms, reaching 50% of applications in some cases. A busy conveyancing department is handling this correspondence constantly, not occasionally.
Does this create a phishing risk?
It changes the shape of one. Conveyancers have spent several years being trained to treat unexpected links in emails about property transactions as suspect, for entirely sound reasons, and the sector’s fraud exposure sits precisely at the point where money and title move. A process that now trains the same staff to click links in emails apparently from the registry needs a matching briefing on how to tell a genuine one from a forgery.
The registry’s own guidance on identifying its correspondence, which sets out the email addresses and telephone numbers it uses, was updated on 6 August 2026. Sending that guidance round the team before the change lands is a cheaper intervention than dealing with the alternative.
The practical test is the sender address rather than the link. A firm that has whitelisted hm.land.registry@notifications.service.gov.uk and told its staff that this is the only address the new correspondence comes from has given them something concrete to check, which is more useful than a general instruction to be careful.
What should firms do before late August?
The work is small and the window is short. Add the sender address to the safe senders list, because correspondence that lands in a junk folder is a requisition that goes unanswered, and an unanswered requisition can end in a cancelled application. Tell the post room and anyone who monitors a shared inbox what the new emails look like before they start arriving rather than after. Confirm that whoever handles a file knows to save the document down at the point of access.
The wider direction of travel is the same. The registry has been reducing requisition volumes, reporting more than 100,000 fewer requisition letters issued during 2025-26, and has committed to further automated checks on transfer and charge deeds. Iain Banfield was appointed Chief Executive on 24 July 2026, and the registry’s business plan points at automating simpler work and reducing requisitions through better digital checks.
Every requisition your team handles is about to arrive in a different shape, and the change rewards firms that tell their staff before it happens rather than after. The 200-day window is generous but finite, so anything a file needs for the long term has to be saved down at the point of receipt rather than left sitting in an inbox. And a process that trains conveyancers to click links in registry emails deserves a matching briefing on how to tell a genuine one from a forgery, starting with the sender address.
The full announcement is on GOV.UK: changes to how HM Land Registry sends emails about applications. General guidance on reducing avoidable requisitions, including the registry’s own checklist, sits at HM Land Registry requisitions.
For the wider compliance picture, see our coverage of the 41% jump in conveyancing complaints reaching the Legal Ombudsman, much of which concerns post-completion delay, and the upfront information packs guide for how the front end of the transaction is changing at the same time.