Tenant referencing: the six checks to run before you hand over the keys

The last moment you have complete control over who lives in your property is the moment before you say yes. After that, in England, you are in a relationship the law has deliberately made hard to leave.

Six checks belong in that moment: Right to Rent, proof of identity, proof of income or employment, a credit check, a reference from the previous landlord, and guarantor details where the numbers do not work without one. That is the list Tenarize's own vetting checklist uses, and this post is what each one is actually for — including the two that most first-time landlords skip, which are the two that would have told them the most.

Why this is a bigger decision than it was two years ago

Until 1 May 2026, a tenancy that was not working out had an exit. It was not pleasant and it was not quick, but it existed, and it did not require you to prove anything about the tenant. Section 21 is now gone. A tenancy in England is assured periodic from the first day, there is no fixed term running down towards a natural end, and every landlord-initiated route out is a Section 8 notice on a statutory ground, followed by a court.

That is the right outcome for tenants, and it is a genuine change in what vetting is for. Referencing used to be a way of reducing the odds of an inconvenience. It is now the main point in the process at which you can still say no.

The six checks

1. Right to Rent

The legal one, and the only one of the six that is a statutory duty rather than commercial prudence. Every adult aged 18 or over who will occupy the property as their only or main home must be checked — not only the person whose name goes on the agreement, and not only the applicants you assume need it. GOV.UK publishes the landlord's guide to Right to Rent checks, with the acceptable document lists and the code of practice on avoiding discrimination.

Two things matter more than the mechanics. Check everyone, identically — deciding who to check based on a name or an accent exposes you to a discrimination claim from the applicant you singled out and a penalty for the one you waved through. And where someone's right to rent is time-limited, diarise the follow-up, because missing it is how a landlord loses the statutory excuse that protects them from a penalty. We have written about the whole scheme separately in Right to Rent checks: what a landlord in England actually has to do.

2. Proof of identity

A passport or driving licence, checked against the person in front of you. It sounds trivial next to the others and it is not: identity is the check every subsequent check depends on. A credit report on the wrong person is worse than no credit report, because it comes back clean.

3. Proof of income or employment

Payslips, an employer's reference, or an accountant's letter where the applicant is self-employed. The purpose is to judge affordability before you commit rather than after arrears build, and the figure you are looking for is not a pass mark handed down by anybody — it is your own judgement about whether this rent is sustainable for this household, at this point in their life.

Write down what you were told. Not for the file's sake: an income claim that turns out to have been invented matters later, and it only matters if it exists somewhere other than your memory.

4. A credit check

Confirms affordability from a second direction and flags a history of missed payments. Treat what comes back as information rather than a verdict. A thin file is common for someone young, recently arrived, or previously living with family, and it is not the same thing as a bad file — that distinction is exactly what a guarantor exists to resolve.

5. The previous landlord's reference

The check most often skipped, and the best predictor of how this tenancy will go. Nothing else you can obtain tells you whether this person paid on time, looked after the place, and was straightforward to deal with, because nothing else is a report from someone who has already run the experiment.

Two practical notes. Speak to them rather than accepting a letter the applicant hands you, and where you can, ask for the landlord before the current one — a current landlord who wants a tenant gone has an obvious reason to be generous. A reference taken over the phone produces no paperwork, which is fine; what it should produce is a dated note of who you spoke to and what they said.

6. Guarantor details, where you need them

Not a seventh hoop for everybody. A guarantor is the answer where an applicant you otherwise want does not independently meet the affordability judgement you made at check 3 — a student, a first job, a thin credit file. Reference the guarantor as you would reference a tenant, because that is what they are agreeing to be.

What you may not charge for any of this

Referencing costs money, and none of it may be recovered from the tenant. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 makes a charge for referencing, credit checks or administration a prohibited payment. What is permitted is a holding deposit of no more than one week's rent while you carry the checks out, and a tenancy deposit capped at five weeks' rent — six where the annual rent is £50,000 or more.

Those caps are not a detail to get approximately right. Taking a prohibited payment is enforceable against you, and an over-cap deposit is money you are holding unlawfully before the tenancy has even started.

What it costs to leave this as it is

The expensive version of skipping the references is not dramatic. It is ordinary.

You take an applicant who seemed fine, on income you were told about and never evidenced. The first month is late. The third is short. By the time the arrears reach the three months that makes Ground 8 mandatory, you are four or five months in — on £1,200 a month, that is £3,600 unpaid — and Ground 8 still requires four weeks' notice and then a hearing. The discretionary arrears grounds are available earlier, and "discretionary" means the court also asks whether it is reasonable to make the order, which it decides on the evidence you can produce.

If the tenant misrepresented something to get the tenancy, there is a ground for that too — Ground 17, false information given to obtain the tenancy, discretionary, two weeks' notice. It is the one ground on the list that exists because vetting went wrong, and it is the hardest of all of them to run, because it requires you to prove what you were told at the time. A landlord who took an income claim verbally and wrote nothing down cannot prove it. The ground is real; the evidence is not there.

And underneath everything, a court cannot make a possession order on any ground except 7A or 14 while a tenancy deposit duty is still outstanding — the money not in a scheme, or the prescribed information never sent. Deposit protection is not a separate topic from a tenant who does not pay. It is a precondition of doing anything about one.

Two years of a tenancy like that costs more than a decade of good ones earns. That is the honest arithmetic, and it is why the hour spent on the phone to a previous landlord is the highest-return hour in the whole process.

Where Tenarize fits

Tenarize is software for private landlords in England who manage their own properties, and vetting is the first thing it makes you do.

A tenancy moves through five stages — Vetting, Compliance, Awaiting tenant, Active, Ended — and you cannot skip one. The vetting checklist is stage one: the six checks above, each with a description of the duty behind it and where to actually carry it out, each with an optional document upload for the payslip, the report or the scanned ID. Completing the last item advances the tenancy on its own. Nothing about the property's compliance opens up until it is done, which is the order the law expects things to happen in rather than the order a hurried week tends to produce.

The checklist is landlord-only. Your tenant never sees it, and the documents attached to it sit with your other landlord-only documents rather than in their portal.

To be plain about the limits: Tenarize does not run the checks. It does not perform a Right to Rent verification, pull a credit file, or telephone a previous landlord. Any product that claims to do the last of those is selling you something. What it does is make sure all six are recorded before a tenancy can proceed, and that what you found is still there in twelve months when it matters.

Around that:

• Record a Right to Rent follow-up date for a tenant with time-limited status and you are reminded before it falls due, with a link straight to the tenancy to record the re-check.
• The deposit cap is enforced by the product rather than suggested by the interface — five weeks, or six above £50,000 a year — so an over-cap figure cannot be saved in the first place.
• Everything logged against the tenancy comes out as a dated audit trail: a PDF, running from the day you took the tenancy on, that you can put in front of a court without reconstructing anything first.
• If it ever gets as far as a notice, the Section 8 grounds are listed with their statutory minimum notice periods, the earliest valid expiry is worked out from the grounds you cite, and a deposit duty still outstanding on that tenancy raises a warning on the same form. Choosing the ground and serving the notice remain yours.

What actually changes

You stop making the biggest decision in the whole tenancy on an impression formed at a viewing. The six checks happen in the same order every time, for every applicant, which is both better vetting and the thing that protects you from a discrimination complaint — there is no judgement call about who gets checked, because everyone does.

A year later, when something has gone wrong and somebody asks what you knew and when, you open the tenancy and the answer is there, dated, with the documents attached. That is the difference between a case and a recollection.

Most of the time none of this is ever needed, which is rather the point. The hour you spend on references is insurance against the one tenancy in twenty that costs more than the other nineteen made.

Where to check this yourself

• Landlord's guide to Right to Rent checks — GOV.UK, including the acceptable document lists and the code of practice on avoiding discrimination
• Tenant Fees Act 2019 — what may and may not be charged to a tenant, and the holding deposit and deposit caps
• Deposit protection schemes and landlords — GOV.UK, including the approved schemes
• Repossessing your privately rented property after 1 May 2026 — GOV.UK, and the grounds for possession guidance behind it
• Renting out a property — GOV.UK's overview of a landlord's duties in England
• Shelter and Citizens Advice — free, independent advice on a specific situation

If you are setting up your first tenancy, the compliance checklist for letting a property in England is the stage that follows this one, published in full. Tenarize is £15 a month for one to five properties, and the first month is free. The help centre is free to read either way.