Call her Priya. She is 32, works in aged care, and has shared a two-bedroom unit in Parramatta with a flatmate since 2021. Each time her fixed-term lease rolled onto a new term, the rent went up — and in one especially tight stretch, twice in the same year, once at renewal and again three months later, after her agent said the landlord wanted to "align with the market." She never lodged a repair request for a hot-water system that took six weeks to fix, because a friend in a similar building had raised one and received a 90-day, no-reason termination notice a fortnight later. Priya cannot prove the two events were connected. That was the point of the old law: a landlord did not have to give a reason to end a tenancy, so no renter could ever be certain that asking for anything — a repair, a receipt, a rent freeze — was safe.
Priya is a composite, not a named tenant, built from the pattern tenant advocates and NSW Fair Trading's own casework have described for years: a market tight enough, and a law permissive enough, that fear of an unexplained termination notice shaped what people felt safe to ask for.
What the government did
Chris Minns' Labor government took office on 25 March 2023 promising renters a fairer deal, inheriting a rental market already tight enough that tenant advocates were calling it a crisis: vacancy rates near record lows and rents that had risen sharply through the post-pandemic recovery. In 2023 the government created the state's first Rental Commissioner role, a dedicated advocate inside government for tenancy-law reform that had stalled for years under the previous Coalition government.
That reform arrived as the Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2024, which passed the NSW Parliament and received assent in October 2024, before commencing in stages through 2025 (approx.). It changed three things a renter like Priya deals with directly. First, it ended "no-grounds" terminations: a landlord ending a periodic (rolling) tenancy, or declining to renew a fixed-term lease, now has to cite one of a prescribed list of reasonable grounds — selling the property, moving in themselves or a family member, demolition or significant renovation, a change of use, or the tenant's own non-compliance — rather than simply giving notice with no reason at all. Second, it closed what had been a loophole letting some fixed-term leases carry more frequent rent rises than periodic leases; the once-every-12-months cap now applies to every residential tenancy agreement in the state. Third, it banned agents and landlords from soliciting rent bids above the advertised price, and set in motion a portable bonds scheme meant to let a moving tenant transfer an existing bond to a new tenancy rather than finding a second bond before the first is refunded.
These reforms sit alongside a separate NSW housing agenda: the $6.6 billion Building Homes for NSW fund announced in the 2023-24 Budget, and planning changes opening up low- and mid-rise housing and higher density near transport. The government has consistently pitched that agenda as the supply side of its housing response, distinct from the tenancy-law changes covered here — a distinction that matters for the critique below.
The strongest case
Ending a source of chronic insecurity, at close to zero net Budget cost
The case for the reform is straightforward and, on the numbers, hard to dismiss. Renting in New South Wales is no longer a brief way-station for the young: Australian Bureau of Statistics census data shows the private rental population has aged and grown to include more families and long-term tenants than a generation ago, even as home ownership has become harder to reach, with around three in ten NSW households now renting (approx., ABS Census). A tenancy law still built around a landlord's unconditional right to end a lease with no explanation was written for a market where renting was assumed to be short and occasional, not the years-long arrangement it now is for a large share of tenants. Under the old system, a tenant who complained about mould, asked for a repair or queried a rent rise had no way of knowing whether a later 90-day notice was retaliation or coincidence — a chilling effect that undermined every other protection in the Residential Tenancies Act, since none of them can be exercised safely if raising them might end the tenancy. NSW was also a comparatively late mover: several other states had already narrowed or ended no-grounds terminations before this reform passed. And unlike a rent freeze or a subsidy, closing this loophole cost the Budget almost nothing to legislate. Judged purely as a fairness measure — matching the law to how people actually rent today — it is difficult to construct a serious argument against it.
The evidence
NSW Fair Trading's Rental Bond Board, which records every bond lodged in the state through Rental Bonds Online, is the most direct primary record of where rents have actually landed, and its published rent data shows median rents for new tenancies climbing sharply through the post-pandemic years and staying near record highs into 2025 (approx., NSW Fair Trading rental bond data). Commercial data providers tell a consistent story from a different angle: CoreLogic's rental indices put cumulative growth in Greater Sydney rents at somewhere in the order of a third since early 2020 (approx.), while vacancy-rate trackers such as SQM Research have recorded Sydney sitting well under the roughly 3% vacancy rate economists generally treat as a "balanced" rental market for most of the period since 2022, easing only slightly by 2025 (approx.).
Rental stress compounds the picture. Renter households paying more than 30% of income in rent — the standard threshold used in Commonwealth and state housing research — make up a large and, on the evidence available, growing share of low- and middle-income tenants in Greater Sydney (approx., drawing on ABS income and housing data). None of this shows the 2024 reform failing on its own terms: it was never designed as an affordability lever, and Fair Trading's public reporting since commencement has focused on compliance and awareness rather than published statistics for how many no-grounds notices have or have not been issued since the ban took effect. What the data does show is that the scarcity the reform operates inside — too few dwellings for the number of households wanting to rent one — was already acute before the law changed and remains acute since.
The critique
Landlords and their industry bodies make a case that deserves to be stated on its own terms, not waved away as self-interest. The Real Estate Institute of NSW and the Property Investment Professionals of Australia (PIPA) have both argued that stacking tenancy regulation on top of tax changes raises the cost of holding a NSW rental property at the worst possible moment. The 2023-24 Budget paused indexation of the land tax threshold for two years, quietly pulling more investment properties above the tax-free line each year even without any rise in value (NSW Budget Papers, 2023-24). Industry investor-sentiment surveys have since reported a rising share of landlords citing regulatory change and holding costs as reasons to consider selling (approx., PIPA Annual Investor Sentiment Survey). Investor-owned dwellings make up a substantial share of the state's rental stock — commonly estimated at roughly a quarter to a third (approx., ABS and taxation data) — so even a modest net shift from investor to owner-occupier ownership removes homes from the rental pool one at a time, showing up as fewer listings rather than one dramatic event.
That concern is real, but it answers a different question to the one the reform was built to solve. The Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2024 changes the terms on which an existing rental property is let; it does not change whether a new one gets built, or whether an existing one stays a rental rather than being sold to an owner-occupier. Sydney's vacancy rate was already near record lows in 2022, two years before this Act existed, which is strong evidence the crunch has causes that sit outside tenancy law entirely — construction costs, interest rates, planning approval timeframes and population growth. Grattan Institute research on housing supply has repeatedly pointed to the same structural drivers, independent of any single state's tenancy settings. ABS building activity data shows NSW dwelling approvals running well short of the state's roughly 75,000-a-year implied target under the National Housing Accord (approx.), a gap the government itself attributes to construction costs and approval timeframes, not to renter protections.
A law can tell a landlord why they may end a tenancy. No law yet tells New South Wales how to build enough homes that the question rarely has to be asked.
Does it fix supply?
By the government's own account, the tenancy reforms were never meant to fix supply; that job sits with Building Homes for NSW and the planning changes, judged on their own record elsewhere. Taken on those terms, criticising the eviction and rent-increase reforms for failing to move the vacancy rate is not quite fair, because moving the vacancy rate was never their job. But that distinction cuts against the government too. If security of tenure and a capped rent increase are the extent of what tenancy law can deliver, the reform leaves the single biggest driver of renter hardship in NSW almost untouched: there are still not enough homes for the number of people trying to rent one, so a landlord who wants to raise rent to whatever the market will bear, once a year, with proper notice, remains free to do so, and a tenant with nowhere realistic to move to has little practical leverage to refuse. Better grounds for eviction do not, by themselves, put more listings on the market. Whether NSW's rental crunch actually eases will be decided by whether the Building Homes for NSW pipeline and the planning reforms close the Housing Accord gap faster than population growth widens it — a test this particular Act was never built to pass or fail.
The risk to the future
Better protections for a shrinking pool of available homes
New South Wales keeps growing on the back of overseas migration, and every renter needs a home whether or not enough are being built. If landlord sell-offs at the margin outpace the rate at which Building Homes for NSW and the planning reforms add new stock, the state could end up with a rental market that is fairer in principle — clearer eviction rules, one rent rise a year, an easier bond transfer — but no less brutal in practice, because a near-record-low vacancy rate still means several applicants for every listing and a landlord who can set the price regardless of how reasonable the process around it now looks. The reforms give a tenant like Priya more certainty about why she might lose a home; they do not, by themselves, give her — or the many NSW households competing for the same shrinking pool of listings — meaningfully more chance of finding one. Unless the Housing Accord's implied target of roughly 75,000 new NSW homes a year is met or beaten, and unless landlord attrition among existing rental stock is offset rather than accelerated by tax and regulatory settings, the practical experience of renting in NSW risks staying close to what the reform was designed to fix: a seller's market with better manners.