Commercial lease key dates: how to never miss a break clause

Track four dates for every commercial lease: expiry, break date, break-notice deadline and rent review. Work backwards from each one — serve break notices by the lease’s notice period (commonly 6–12 months), start renewal planning 12–18 months before expiry, and keep every date in one tracker that someone actually checks weekly.

That is the whole discipline. The rest of this guide is how to do it properly: what each date means, the reminder schedule that gives you room to act, a free Excel tracker whose columns mirror the fields our own system uses, and a straight answer on what tracking software costs — with real prices, because almost nobody in this market publishes theirs.

We build and run a lease and portfolio database that a UK commercial-property firm uses every day, so this is written from the working end of the problem, not from a template. General information, not legal advice — notice rules turn on the words of your lease, so confirm dates with your solicitor before acting.

How far ahead should you plan a commercial lease renewal?

Further than feels natural. The professional rhythm looks like this:

Most missed opportunities in lease management are not dramatic failures. They are dates that arrived before anyone had done the thinking, so the default happened instead of the decision.

What happens when a commercial lease expires?

It depends on whether the tenancy is inside or outside the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954.

Inside the Act (the default for business tenancies): the tenancy does not simply end at the expiry date. The tenant has security of tenure — the tenancy continues on the same terms until it is ended in one of the ways the Act allows, usually a landlord’s section 25 notice or a tenant’s section 26 request, each served not less than 6 nor more than 12 months before the date they specify.

Outside the Act (“contracted out”): the tenancy ends at the expiry date. A tenant who stays without a new lease has very little protection, and a landlord who does nothing may find an awkward undocumented arrangement has formed. Either way, somebody needed the date in a tracker a year earlier.

What is a break clause, and what does missing one cost?

A break clause lets one party (sometimes both) end the lease early on a fixed date or after a fixed period, provided notice is served in time and any conditions are met. Typical notice periods are 6 to 12 months, and typical conditions are things like rent paid up to date and vacant possession on the break date.

Courts enforce break conditions strictly. Serve the notice a day late, or serve it correctly but fail a condition, and the break is lost — the lease runs on to the next break or to expiry. For a tenant paying £40,000 a year on a lease with five years left after a missed break, that single missed date is a six-figure commitment. For a landlord, a missed break can mean losing the chance to re-gear or redevelop at the moment the plan needed it.

This is why the break date itself is the wrong thing to track. The date that matters is the break-notice deadline: the break date minus the notice period, with margin on top for how the notice must be served. Our tracker calculates it for you.

When should a section 25 or section 26 notice be served?

Between 12 and 6 months before the termination date it specifies. A landlord’s section 25 notice either proposes a new tenancy or opposes one on the Act’s grounds; a tenant’s section 26 request proposes a new tenancy on the tenant’s terms. Serving early in the window keeps control of the timetable; leaving it late hands the initiative to the other side. If your renewal plan starts at 18 months and solicitors are instructed by 9, the window is never a scramble.

What should a commercial lease tracker include?

One row per lease. These columns — they mirror the lease fields our own database tracks in production:

• Property and unit — where the lease bites
• Tenant company and contact — who you deal with, not just the covenant name
• Lease start and expiry
• Break date, break notice period, and the calculated break-notice deadline
• Rent review date — reviews commonly run five-yearly, and the lease’s review machinery often has its own time steps worth diarising
• Annual rent — so the money at stake is visible next to the date
• Next event and days to it — calculated, so the sheet sorts itself into a priority list
• Notes — the human context: negotiations underway, disputes, dilapidations position

Download the free tracker template (Excel) — the formulas for the break-notice deadline, next event and days-remaining are already in, with dates turning amber inside 180 days and red inside 90. No sign-up, no email gate.

How do you track lease dates in Excel across a whole portfolio?

The template above works, and for a handful of leases it is genuinely enough — we would rather say that plainly than pretend everyone needs software. Three rules make a spreadsheet tracker survive contact with reality:

• One owner. A named person checks it weekly. A date nobody looks at is the same as no tracker.
• One copy. The moment there are two versions — one on a laptop, one in an inbox — you no longer have a tracker, you have two opinions.
• Dates plus money. Keep the rent on the same row as the dates, so a glance shows which deadline is worth £8,000 and which is worth £80,000.

Spreadsheets start to crack when the portfolio grows past what one person holds in their head: more than a couple of dozen leases, more than one person editing, contact history scattered across inboxes, or reporting that means rebuilding the same pivot table every month. The failure mode is never the formula — it is versioning, access and the fact that a spreadsheet cannot chase anyone.

When should you move to lease tracking software, and what does it cost?

Move when the spreadsheet stops being trusted — when people double-check it against their own notes, when a stale copy causes a near-miss, or when nobody is sure who updated what. That loss of trust is the real signal, and it usually arrives well before a missed break does.

What it costs is the question this market refuses to answer in public: the large lease-management platforms quote on application, per demo. We publish our prices, so here they are as a reference point:

The reminder mechanics in our system are simple and deliberately boring: every lease event coming up — expiries, break options, rent reviews — surfaces with reminders well before the deadline lands, so the next deadline is the first thing anyone signing in sees. No one has to remember to check a spreadsheet, because the system does the remembering. The same software is in daily use at a UK commercial-property firm, and you are live within a minute of checkout.

If you are weighing up spreadsheet versus system for your own portfolio, book a short call — we will tell you honestly if the free template is all you need, because it sometimes is. We also build bespoke databases where an off-the-shelf shape does not fit.