Documents needed to sell a house in the UK: the certificates a buyer's solicitor asks for

Every regulated job done on a house produces a certificate, and a buyer's solicitor will ask for each one by name. The documents needed to sell a house are therefore not a mystery; the difficulty is that they were issued by eight different bodies over twenty years and nobody kept them together. This guide covers England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own systems.

The documents needed to sell a house, in one list

Here is what a buyer's solicitor expects, grouped by who produces it. The first two items are your conveyancer's job. Everything after that is evidence only you, or the body that issued it, can supply.

1. 1
   Proof of identity and proof of titlePhoto ID and proof of address for anti-money-laundering checks, and official copies of the title register and title plan from HM Land Registry, ordered by your conveyancer.Conveyancer · HM Land Registry
2. 2
   The property information and fittings formsThe Law Society's TA6 property information form and TA10 fittings and contents form; TA7 as well for a leasehold, with the lease and the management pack.Seller, via the conveyancer
3. 3
   Energy Performance Certificate (EPC)Required before the property is marketed; valid for ten years; free to find and download from the national register.Accredited energy assessor
4. 4
   Building regulations completion certificatesFor extensions, loft conversions, structural openings, re-roofing and other controlled work.Local authority Building Control or a registered building control approver
5. 5
   Gas Safe Building Regulations Compliance CertificateFor a new boiler or gas appliance, issued after the registered engineer notifies the installation.Gas Safe Register
6. 6
   Electrical certificatesAn Electrical Installation Certificate for a rewire, new circuits or a consumer unit; a Minor Works certificate for smaller jobs; a condition report (EICR) where nothing else exists.NICEIC, NAPIT or other scheme contractor
7. 7
   FENSA certificateFor replacement external windows, doors, roof windows and roof lights installed since 1 April 2002 (or a certificate from an equivalent scheme, or Building Control sign-off).FENSA, via the installer
8. 8
   HETAS certificate of complianceFor a wood-burning or solid-fuel stove, with the manual, the latest chimney sweeping certificate and the servicing record.HETAS, via the installer
9. 9
   Planning decisions and lawful development certificatesThe decision notice for any permission, or a lawful development certificate where work was done under permitted development or is now immune from enforcement.Local planning authority
10. 10
    Guarantees, warranties and service recordsInsurance-backed guarantees on windows, damp-proofing or timber treatment, a new-build warranty, boiler service records, appliance manuals.Installer, insurer or warranty provider

If you are asking what documents do I need to sell my house UK, the answer is every item above that applies to your home: no certificate for work never done, one for every job that was.

Title and identity: what your conveyancer handles

Two of the documents needed to sell a house never pass through your hands. Your conveyancer verifies your identity under the anti-money-laundering rules and orders official copies of the register and title plan from HM Land Registry; an online copy of either costs £7 (gov.uk, fees from 9 Dec 2024). Property Vault reads HM Land Registry open data. HM Land Registry is the register of title; we never touch it.

You complete the Law Society's property information form. The current form is the TA6 (6th edition), which conveyancers in the Conveyancing Quality Scheme must use for transactions instructed on or after 30 March 2026 (The Law Society). It asks you to declare alterations and produce the certificates for them: every "yes" on the form is a document the buyer's side will expect to see.

The Energy Performance Certificate

An EPC rates the home from A to G and is the one document the law requires before marketing: gov.uk's guidance states that you must order an EPC for potential buyers before you market your property, and that a certificate is valid for ten years (gov.uk). The find an energy certificate service lets you check for an existing one and download it for free; a new one is needed only if none is on the register, it has expired, or works since have changed the rating.

Building regulations completion certificates

Structural and thermal works on a house are controlled under the Building Regulations. Either a building control body checks the work and issues a completion certificate at the end, or the installer belongs to a competent person scheme and self-certifies it (gov.uk). A completion certificate is what the solicitor wants for an extension, a loft conversion, a removed load-bearing wall or a new roof covering. It says the work was inspected and signed off, not that it is good; a survey does that.

Building regulations certificate lost: the three routes

First, ask the council. If the work was notified and signed off, the building control team holds the record and will usually reissue a copy of the completion certificate for a fee.

Second, if the work was never notified at all, the owner can apply for a regularisation certificate under regulation 18 of the Building Regulations 2010. It applies to work carried out on or after 11 November 1985; the council may require the work to be opened up for inspection, tested or sampled, and may tell you what further work is needed before it will certify. A regularisation certificate is evidence, but not conclusive evidence, that the requirements were met (legislation.gov.uk). Work before that date cannot be regularised.

Third, where neither is possible, the buyer's solicitor will usually propose an indemnity policy, explained below. One change makes this question sharper than it used to be: since 1 October 2023 a local authority can require non-compliant work to be removed or altered for ten years after completion, not twelve months (Building Safety Act 2022, s.39; brought into force by SI 2023/993). A missing certificate for a 2020 extension is now a live question.

Gas safety: the Building Regulations Compliance Certificate

When a Gas Safe registered engineer installs a boiler or other gas appliance in England or Wales, the engineer notifies the work and Gas Safe Register issues a Building Regulations Compliance Certificate to the homeowner. That certificate, not the annual service receipt, is the document needed to sell a house with a replaced boiler. A landlord's gas safety record is a letting requirement and is not asked for on a sale.

Gas safety certificate replacement

Gas Safe Register issues duplicate certificates, to the owner or their solicitor, for installations notified by a registered engineer, and lets you check by house number and postcode whether an installation was notified before you order; replacements are available for installations completed after 1 April 2009, when Gas Safe Register took over the register, while earlier notifications went through CORGI (Gas Safe Register). If the address is not found, the installation was not notified: go back to the business that did the work.

Electrical certificate for a house sale: EIC, Minor Works and EICR

Part P of the Building Regulations has applied to domestic electrical work in England and Wales since 1 January 2005. Notifiable work, which includes a new circuit, a replacement consumer unit and work in a bathroom, must either be certified by a contractor registered with a scheme such as NICEIC or NAPIT, who issues an Electrical Installation Certificate (EIC) and a Building Regulations Certificate of Compliance, or be notified to and inspected by Building Control (Approved Document P, 2013 edition). Smaller jobs get a Minor Electrical Installation Works Certificate.

Copies come from the contractor: NICEIC's guidance is to contact the business that undertook the work for a copy of the installation certificate, and duplicate Building Regulations Certificates of Compliance can be bought through its notification-check service (NICEIC help hub). No law requires a seller to produce an Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR), but it is the one electrical document that can be produced after the fact, so it is the usual answer to a buyer, surveyor or lender asking about a rewire with no paperwork.

FENSA certificate for windows and doors

Replacement external windows and doors have been controlled work since 1 April 2002. FENSA is the largest competent person scheme for it: a registered installer notifies the job and FENSA issues the certificate, which passes from owner to owner with the house. The scheme covers replacement windows, doors, roof windows and roof lights in a home; it does not cover conservatories, porches, extensions, new builds or repairs, so those need Building Control sign-off instead (FENSA).

A lost FENSA certificate is the easiest one on this list to replace. FENSA's find and order your FENSA certificate service searches by address and issues a replacement for a fee. If the search finds nothing, FENSA lists the usual reasons: the address was entered differently, the installer was not FENSA registered at the time, the job included work outside the scheme, or the installer never notified it. Windows fitted before 2002 have no certificate and need none; other schemes issue their own certificates for the same work, so check the name on the installer's paperwork.

HETAS certificate for a stove

A wood-burning or solid-fuel appliance installed by a HETAS registered installer comes with a HETAS certificate of compliance, which, in HETAS's words, demonstrates that the installation complies with the relevant Building Regulations and, in England and Wales, also notifies the local authority. Copies can be ordered through HETAS's online search by entering the property's postcode, for a fee, and arrive by email (HETAS, Moving home). HETAS also asks sellers to leave the appliance's instruction manual, the latest chimney sweeping certificate and the servicing record for the buyer, since the home insurer may want them too.

Planning permission and the ten-year rule

Planning and building regulations are separate regimes, run by separate council teams. For any extension or change of use the solicitor wants the planning decision notice and evidence the conditions were discharged; for work done under permitted development, a lawful development certificate is the clean answer. The time limit for enforcement in England changed on 25 April 2024: section 115 of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 raised the period for building operations and for a change of use to a single dwelling from four years to ten, for breaches after that date (legislation.gov.uk). Breaches of listed building control have no time limit at all.

Guarantees, warranties and the paperwork nobody asks for until they do

The last group is not statutory, but it is where value leaks. An insurance-backed guarantee on the windows, the damp-proof course or the timber treatment transfers to the buyer only if the paper exists. A new-build warranty follows the house. Boiler service records, appliance manuals and the solar panel export agreement are not documents needed to sell a house in law; each is a question the buyer will ask after exchange if it is not answered before.

Indemnity insurance for building regs: what it does and does not do

When a certificate cannot be found or replaced, the buyer's solicitor will usually ask for a legal indemnity policy. It is a one-off premium, paid at completion and normally by the seller, that covers the buyer and their lender against the cost of enforcement action by the local authority over the unapproved work: the cost of altering or reinstating it on the council's order, and the loss in value that order causes. Two limits matter. It does not certify the work and does not cover a defect in it: if the extension is badly built, the policy pays nothing. And insurers will not issue one once the council has been approached about the work (HomeOwners Alliance), which is why a seller must choose between regularisation and indemnity rather than start one before deciding against the other.

Why the paperwork goes missing

Each certificate above is issued once, to the person who paid for the work, and then forgotten by the system that issued it. The schemes and the council keep their own records under their own lookup keys; none tells the next owner what exists. England and Wales tried to fix this from the seller's side once. Home Information Packs were suspended on 21 May 2010 (gov.uk, 20 May 2010). Buyers' solicitors and lenders would not rely on seller-commissioned packs and re-ordered them. A record only works in the form the buyer's solicitor accepts.

The pressure now comes from the marketing side. Since 6 April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act has replaced the 2008 consumer protection regulations, and leaving material information out of a listing is treated as an unfair commercial practice in itself (Propertymark, 9 May 2025); National Trading Standards withdrew its material information guidance with effect from 8 May 2025, but the duty to disclose did not go with it (Today's Conveyancer, May 2025). An agent who must state what works a house has had needs the certificates before the listing goes live, not after the offer; that is the gap the estate agent material information page is built for.

Keep every document in one place, graded by who issued it

Property Vault is building the record this list describes, homes first. Every home gets one Vault ID, a permanent identifier in the form PV-GB-{AREA}-{6 digits}, created against a UPRN or a stated reason. Behind it sits the Verified History: a timeline of works with per-stage evidence requirements, every document hashed on upload and given an integrity receipt, originals kept and corrections stored as new versions. The certificates in this article are what it is built to hold.

Over the top sits the Vault Score: a verification score - whether the documents exist, who issued them and that they are unaltered since issue; never a valuation, a credit input or a judgement of the work. It is computed by a rules engine whose method and weights are published: Building Control 1.0, registered professional 0.9, firm 0.7, owner-provided 0.4; owner-only evidence is capped at 65; listed-but-unverified professionals apply ×0.8. A completion certificate from the council counts for more than a builder's invoice, and the score says so.

The status, plainly. Property Vault runs a Homes pilot at propertyvault.world/homes, a digital property logbook with a real verification engine, sealed documents and scoped sharing; one demonstration record is public. Owners share a Vault through scoped, time-limited links; owner, agent-buyer, insurer-surveyor and solicitor scopes are live, and every open is logged. Seeding home Vaults from open data and ingesting scheme certificates by lookup or data agreement are launching. The Sale-Ready Passport for agents and conveyancers, which puts the works-and-certificates answers in the shape the TA6 already uses, is launching in Yorkshire as part of Property Vault Pro. Integrity anchoring runs as a rehearsal on the XRPL testnet: Merkle roots of keyed commitments are written to the test network, which can be reset, and listed on the public anchor page; mainnet anchoring is on the roadmap, subject to approvals. Property Vault never holds keys, client money or physical goods, and never issues a certificate: the bodies above do that, and the Vault records who did, so the documents needed to sell a house are in one place before the buyer's solicitor asks.

For what a home's record holds beyond a sale, read the property history report page; for a filing system for the years between sales, the guides cover what documents to keep; and for why no vehicle-style check exists for a home, read Is there an HPI check for a house?