Deposit protection: the 30-day deadline, and what happens if you miss it

If you take a deposit for a tenancy in England, it has to go into a government-approved tenancy deposit scheme within 30 days of receiving it. Miss that window and the deposit isn't automatically unprotected forever — you can still protect it late — but the 30 days is a hard deadline, and being late carries a real risk rather than a technical one.

What "protecting" a deposit actually means

Protecting a deposit means two things, and both have to happen inside the same 30 days. First, the money goes into one of the government-approved schemes. Second, the tenant is given the scheme's "prescribed information" — which scheme it's with, the scheme's contact details, and how the process works if there's a dispute at the end of the tenancy. Protecting the money without giving the tenant the prescribed information is still a breach, even though it's the step that's easiest to treat as an afterthought once the money itself is dealt with.

There are three government-approved schemes to choose from in England: the Deposit Protection Service, mydeposits, and the Tenancy Deposit Scheme. All three offer the same two ways to protect a deposit, and it's worth knowing which you're using. A custodial option holds the deposit itself for the duration of the tenancy, at no cost to protect it. An insured option lets you keep hold of the money, and you pay the scheme a fee to insure it instead. Either is a valid way to meet the 30-day requirement — the deadline is the same either way.

How much deposit you can even take

There's a cap before protection becomes relevant at all. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 limits a deposit to five weeks' rent, or six weeks' rent where the annual rent is £50,000 or more. That cap applies regardless of what a tenant might be willing to pay, and it's the ceiling the scheme itself will expect the protected amount to sit under. A deposit taken over the cap isn't fixed by protecting it late, or at all — the excess is the problem, not the timing.

What's at risk if you miss the deadline

If a deposit isn't protected within 30 days, or the prescribed information isn't given, a tenant can apply to court. Courts have the power to order compensation on top of requiring the deposit to be protected properly, and the figures involved are not trivial — this is the kind of exposure that's worth checking against the legislation itself rather than taking a rough number from a blog post.

Protecting late is better than not protecting at all, and it does stop the clock running further. What it doesn't do is erase the gap. A scheme's own records, and a landlord's own, will show the date the deposit was received against the date it was actually protected — and that gap is precisely what a court would be looking at if a dispute ever reached one.

Why this is easy to get wrong even when you're careful

The deadline runs from the date you received the deposit, not the date the tenancy starts, not the date you got round to registering it, and not the date the tenant asks whether it's been protected. For a landlord managing this by memory or by a note in a diary, thirty days is a narrow enough window that a busy fortnight is enough to lose track of it — especially on a first let, when protecting a deposit is a one-off task rather than a routine one.

It is also one duty among a dozen that land in the same fortnight, which is the wider version of the same problem — we set the rest of them out in the compliance checklist for letting a property in England.

Where Tenarize helps, and where it doesn't

Tenarize doesn't protect your deposit — no software does that on your behalf, because it has to sit with one of the actual government-approved schemes, chosen and set up by you.

What Tenarize does is track the 30-day deadline against the date the deposit was actually received, flag it as the window closes, and record clearly whether a deposit was protected on time or protected late, rather than folding both outcomes into one tick on a checklist. The deposit cap is enforced on the server rather than suggested in the interface, so a deposit over five or six weeks' rent can't be recorded as taken in the first place. For a tenancy that's ever disputed, the audit trail export gives you a dated record of when the deposit was taken and when it was protected, alongside everything else logged against that tenancy.

Where to check this yourself

• Deposit protection schemes and landlords — GOV.UK's landlord-facing guidance, including the list of approved schemes
• Housing Act 2004, section 214 — what a court can order where a deposit was not protected
• Tenant Fees Act 2019 — the deposit cap, and what else may not be charged
• Renting out a property — where this sits among a landlord's other duties in England

If a deposit on a live tenancy is already past its 30 days, that is a question for advice rather than a blog post. Shelter and Citizens Advice are both free and independent.

Protecting a deposit takes an afternoon at most. Knowing, two years later, exactly when it was received and exactly when it was protected is the part worth having a record of. In Tenarize that record is kept against the tenancy, and comes out of the audit trail with dates on it.

It is £15 a month for one to five properties, with the first month free. The help centre is free to read either way.