Right to Rent checks: what a landlord in England actually has to do

Before you let a property in England, you have to check that every adult who will live there has the right to rent in the UK. Not only the person whose name goes on the agreement, and not only the applicants you think might need checking — that second point is where most of the difficulty lies, and it is where this post spends its time.

Right to Rent is an England-only scheme, introduced by the Immigration Act 2014. If your property is in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, none of this applies to you.

Who you check

Every person aged 18 or over who will occupy the property as their only or main home. Age is the test, and occupation is the test. Neither the tenancy agreement nor the rent has anything to do with it, which catches people out in three common situations:

• An adult who is not on the agreement. A partner moving in with your tenant, an adult child, a friend taking a room — if they live there as their main home and they are 18 or over, they need checking.
• Someone who pays no rent. Contributing nothing does not exempt anybody. The question is whether they occupy.
• A lodger in your own home. Taking in a lodger makes you a landlord for this purpose.

You do not check anyone under 18, and you are not expected to police who moves in after the tenancy starts without your knowledge. What you are responsible for is the people you knew about, before they moved in.

Check every applicant, the same way, every time

This is the most important paragraph in the post, and it is the one that protects you rather than the applicant.

You cannot decide who to check based on how someone looks, the accent they have, the name on the application, or whether you assume they are British. The Home Office code of practice on avoiding discrimination is explicit about it, and a landlord who checks selectively is exposed twice over: to a discrimination claim from the applicant they singled out, and to a penalty for the applicant they waved through on an assumption.

Checking everyone identically is also administratively easier. There is no judgement call to make, no awkward conversation about why this applicant and not that one, and nothing to reconstruct later about why you did what you did.

A British citizen with a British passport is checked in exactly the same way as anyone else. The check is quick when the answer is straightforward — that is not a reason to skip it.

When to do it

Before the tenancy starts, and before the person takes up occupation.

A check carried out afterwards does not do the job. The protection described below attaches to a check made before the person moved in — doing it late leaves you having done the work without getting the benefit of it.

In practice this means Right to Rent belongs in your vetting stage, alongside references and affordability, rather than in the pile of things you sort out around move-in day.

What the check actually involves

There are three routes, and which one applies depends on the person rather than on your preference:

1. A share code. Most people with digital immigration status prove it by giving you a share code, which you enter on the Home Office online service along with their date of birth. You check that the photograph matches the person.
2. Original documents. Where someone holds a physical document — a British or Irish passport being the common case — you see the original, in their presence. A video call works provided you are looking at the original document and the person at the same time.
3. An Identity Service Provider. Certified providers can carry out digital identity verification for British and Irish citizens using a valid passport, if you would rather not handle documents yourself.

Whichever route applies, you keep a clear, dated copy of what you saw, for the tenancy and for a period after it ends. GOV.UK sets out the retention period and the acceptable document lists in full — those lists change, which is exactly why this post does not reproduce them.

The statutory excuse, which is the point of all of it

If you carry out a compliant check before the tenancy begins and keep the evidence, you have a statutory excuse against a civil penalty — even if it later turns out that the person did not in fact have the right to rent.

That is worth reading twice, because it reframes the whole exercise. The check is not there to make you an immigration officer, and you are not expected to detect a good forgery. It is there so that a landlord who did the right thing at the right time is protected from the consequences of an answer they had no way of knowing.

The excuse is only as good as the record. A check you carried out correctly but cannot evidence is, in practical terms, a check you cannot rely on.

Follow-up checks

Where someone's right to rent is time-limited, the excuse is time-limited with it. You are expected to carry out a follow-up check before it expires, and missing the date is the ordinary way a compliant landlord stops being compliant without anything visible happening.

Nobody is going to remind you. The date sits somewhere in a file, months or years away, attached to a tenancy that by then is running quietly and giving you no reason to open it.

If a check goes wrong

Renting to someone disqualified from renting, without a statutory excuse, exposes you to a civil penalty. Where a landlord knew, or had reasonable cause to believe, that the person had no right to rent, it stops being a penalty matter and becomes a criminal offence carrying an unlimited fine or up to five years' imprisonment. The penalty amounts are set by the Home Office and have been revised more than once — the landlord's guide to Right to Rent checks on GOV.UK carries the current figures, and is the document to work from rather than any summary of it, including this one.

How Tenarize handles this

Right to Rent is the first item on the vetting checklist, before references and affordability, because it is the one with a deadline attached to the start of the tenancy. The item explains the duty and points you at where to carry the check out, and offers an optional upload for the evidence you keep.

Where a tenant's status is time-limited, you record the follow-up date on the tenancy and a reminder arrives before it falls due, with a link straight to the tenancy to record the re-check.

What Tenarize does not do is the check itself. That is still a GOV.UK verification or a share code, carried out by you — we hold the record and the date, not the decision.

Where to check this yourself

Everything above is a summary. The official guidance is free, it is more detailed than this, and it is the version that counts:

• Landlord's guide to Right to Rent checks — the full guidance, including the acceptable document lists, the code of practice on avoiding discrimination, and the current penalties
• Renting out a property — where Right to Rent sits among a landlord's other duties in England

If a specific case is not clearly covered by the guidance — an unusual document, a household you are unsure about — that is a question for advice rather than for a blog post. Shelter and Citizens Advice are both free and independent.

The part of this that software helps with is not the check. It is the date you have to remember two years from now, and the evidence you will want to produce if anyone asks. Tenarize puts Right to Rent first on the vetting checklist, holds the evidence against the tenancy, and reminds you before a follow-up falls due.

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