Agreement Failed (or Hangs In Progress)

While building the agreement, you can see progress in the tenancies list on the right. It starts with an orange "in progress" indicator and will change to a green "completed" when ready for download.

The progress indicator may occasionally show a red "failed" notification or hang "in progress".

There are several options to try to resolve this. The issue is often related to an uploaded attachment.

Possible causes of the failed status when creating a tenancy in Tenancy Builder include:

• assured shorthold is still selected after editing or duplicating an older tenancy
• the tenancy start date is set before 1 May 2026
• a PDF attachment is corrupt, password protected, or not flattened

Failed messages

If the agreement fails after editing or duplicating an older tenancy

If you see a failed message after saving and building a tenancy, it may be because you have edited or duplicated an existing tenancy that still has the tenancy type set as assured shorthold. Since the Renters' Rights Act changes in England from 1 May 2026, the required tenancy is now an assured periodic tenancy.

The simplest fix is usually to create a new tenancy rather than duplicating the older one. If you edit or duplicate it, change the Tenancy Type field to assured periodic tenancy, then Save and Build again.

Check the tenancy start date

The agreement can also fail if the tenancy start date is before 1 May 2026. The new assured periodic tenancy agreements are designed for the Renters' Rights Act rules that started on that date, so use the correct start date or a different template for any earlier tenancy.

Remove attachments

Another cause of the failed status is an uploaded attachment, and it might be corrupt, password-protected, or otherwise unusable.

Edit the agreement and remove all the attachment files by clicking "remove file" in each box.

Then, go to the last page, select "Save and Build", and submit. This will rebuild it without the attachments.

If this works now, we can be confident that one of the uploaded attachments caused the failure.

Next, you could start by adding the attachments one by one. To do this, go to Edit, upload one file, save and build, then repeat the process. If it fails on any attachment, you'll know that's the problem, so replace it with a working attachment.

In progress

Refresh the page

On success, the system should refresh the browser and display a green completed message on the tenancies list. The browser may not have refreshed automatically, so try a manual page refresh first. If you received an email saying the download is ready, that would typically indicate everything worked properly.

All cases (failed or in progress)

Check the status page

Please check our status page, which we update if we know of an issue.

Build a Minimal Test Agreement

To check whether the problem is limited to the original tenancy, create a minimal test agreement:

1. From the tenancies list, click "add new". If you see a pop-up, click Dismiss.
2. Choose the tenancy type and deposit option, select a landlord and letting unit, and complete every required field. Do not add a profile, and leave optional fields empty.
3. Continue through each page, completing any required fields, then go to the final page.
4. Select Save and Build from the dropdown and click Save and Build.
5. When complete, click the green Completed to double-check that the PDF opens.
6. You can now try to edit the agreement where you saw the error initially. If that still has a problem, go to the next step below.
7. Edit the test agreement you just built and add the remaining details.

If the test agreement builds successfully, the problem is likely to be with the original record rather than the Builder as a whole. Sometimes it can be as simple as a system blip, which can be difficult to trace unless it repeats.

Try in a private window

Another option is to open Tenancy Builder in a private window (called Incognito in Chrome) to ensure the latest version of the Builder loads directly, rather than from your browser's memory (cache).

Edit the agreement in progress, go to the last page, and save and build.

Note: The above step about private windows (or incognito) is essential because most issues of this type are due to the browser loading from memory (cache) instead of the website after we update the Builder.

If that works, you must clear your browser cache to revert to a standard window.

Other reasons

The failure could be caused by a 3rd party service being down in the cloud where the agreement is being built. This happens occasionally and would cause the failure indicator to display or hang 'in progress'. In this case, try the build again in about 10 minutes. When we know a 3rd party service is down, we update our status page.

If none of the above works, please contact us by submitting a support ticket.