Guarantors for rent: who needs one, who can be one, and what they're liable for

Asking a tenant to provide a rent guarantor is one of the most common tools a landlord or letting agent reaches for when a reference doesn’t quite stack up. Done properly, it’s a sensible risk-management step. Done carelessly — wrong income threshold, missing clauses, or illegal charges — it gives you false security at best and a legal headache at worst.

Here’s a clear-eyed guide to how guarantors work in England, why the income test is higher than most people expect, and what changed for guarantor agreements when the Renters’ Rights Act came into force on 1 May 2026.

When should you ask for a guarantor?

A guarantor is someone who agrees to pay rent, and potentially cover property damage costs, if the tenant fails to do so. The practical trigger for requesting one is a gap between the tenant’s own reference and the risk level you’re comfortable accepting.

The most common scenarios:

• Students and first-time renters with no rental history and limited income
• Applicants on benefits or seasonal/irregular income
• International movers who lack UK credit history
• Tenants who fall short on affordability — typically the 30x annual-income-to-monthly-rent benchmark used by referencing agencies

None of this is discriminatory provided you apply the same criteria consistently. You can require a guarantor for any of these reasons as a condition of proceeding — but you cannot charge the tenant or the guarantor for the additional checks. Under the Tenant Fees Act 2019, referencing fees, credit check fees and administration charges are prohibited payments whether levied on the tenant, the guarantor, or anyone acting on their behalf. A first breach carries a financial penalty of up to £5,000; a repeat breach within five years becomes a criminal offence punishable by an unlimited fine.

The income test: why 36x and not 30x?

Most referencing agencies require tenants to earn at least 30 times the monthly rent as annual gross income — so a tenant renting at £1,200/month needs to earn roughly £36,000/year. Guarantors are held to a higher standard: 36 times the monthly rent, which for that same tenancy means £43,200/year gross. These multipliers are industry referencing conventions, not legal requirements, but they are the de facto standard most agents and referencing providers apply.

The logic is straightforward. A guarantor is taking on a contingent liability — they only get called upon if the tenant defaults. That means their own financial commitments aren’t reduced by the rent: they still have their own housing costs, bills and outgoings. The higher multiplier exists to ensure that if they are called upon, they can genuinely absorb the liability without going under themselves.

For joint tenancies, think carefully about scope. A guarantor’s deed typically covers the liability of one named tenant unless it explicitly states joint and several liability. If you have four joint tenants and each brings a separate guarantor, each guarantor should understand whether they’re on the hook for one quarter of the rent or the whole. The deed should say so unambiguously.

At PropertyGoose, we reference guarantors to the same standard as tenants — credit check, income verification, employment reference, and fraud check — because a guarantor who doesn’t pass scrutiny provides no real protection at all.

Who qualifies as a guarantor?

The essentials:

• UK resident. Overseas guarantors are almost universally rejected — not out of prejudice, but because enforcing a County Court Judgment against someone based abroad is impractical and expensive. Landlords need to be able to pursue a guarantor through the English courts; that is far easier when the guarantor is based here.
• Financially stable. Meeting the 36x income benchmark with verifiable income — payslips, SA302 self-assessment returns, accountant’s reference.
• Good credit history. No CCJs, no active insolvency or IVA, no patterns of missed payments. The check is typically a soft search (no impact on their credit score) but it will surface problems.
• Adult. Guarantors must be over 18. There’s no upper age limit in law, but a guarantor in their 80s on a pension may struggle to meet the income test.

Common choices include parents, other close family members, or — for students — the university itself (a small number of institutions run formal guarantor schemes). Commercial guarantor services such as Housing Hand or Homeppl exist for cases where no personal guarantor is available, typically charging the tenant a fee directly.

What the Renters’ Rights Act changed

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which took full effect on 1 May 2026, made two changes that matter for guarantors:

1. All tenancies are now periodic. The old fixed-term assured shorthold model is gone; every assured tenancy is now an assured periodic tenancy. If your guarantor deed was drafted to cover “the fixed term and any statutory periodic tenancy that follows,” you may be fine — but a deed that read “the initial fixed term only” leaves you exposed. New deeds need to expressly cover the periodic tenancy for as long as it continues in any form.

2. Guarantor liability ends on the tenant’s death. For private assured tenancy guarantee agreements signed on or after 1 May 2026, a guarantor’s liability for rent terminates when the tenant dies. For joint tenancies, this release applies only where the deceased tenant and the guarantor were related — or where every joint tenant has died. (The guarantor and the tenant’s estate remain liable for any arrears that built up before the death.) This is a statutory provision, not something you can contract out of.

A related consequence of the reforms: landlords can no longer collect several months’ rent up front to offset a weak reference. The Act restricts rent in advance to a maximum of one month. Guarantors therefore carry more weight than before, making a properly executed and legally current deed more important than ever.

What the deed itself should cover

A guarantor agreement (sometimes called a deed of guarantee) is best executed as a deed — in writing, signed and witnessed — and obtained before, not after, the tenancy commences. (A guarantee that isn’t a deed can still be enforceable if proper consideration is given, but executing it as a witnessed deed signed up front removes the argument.) Key clauses to include or check:

• Scope of liability — rent arrears only, or also damage above the deposit? Be explicit.
• Duration — “for as long as the assured periodic tenancy continues” post-May 2026
• Notice requirements — how and when you will notify the guarantor before pursuing them
• Joint tenancy liability — does it cover one tenant’s share or the whole rent?
• Death clause — must now reflect the statutory position under the RRA

A deed that doesn’t reflect the current legal landscape — particularly around periodic tenancies — may fail to bind the guarantor when you need it most. Standard templates from before May 2026 are likely to need updating.

For agents: a word on charging

It bears repeating: you cannot charge tenants or guarantors for referencing. Some agents have tried to recover guarantor administration costs by dressing them up as a permitted fee. That doesn’t work: guarantor referencing, credit checks and admin are prohibited payments, full stop. The only payments the Tenant Fees Act permits are a capped deposit, rent (max one month in advance), a holding deposit, and a narrow set of defined charges — default fees for lost keys or late rent, and a capped fee (up to £50) for a variation, assignment or novation made at the tenant’s request. Guarantor processing sits outside all of those categories.

Running a full guarantor reference — credit, income, employment, fraud — costs agents nothing extra with PropertyGoose. It’s included in your referencing workflow at the same flat rate, regardless of whether the subject is a tenant or a guarantor. See our pricing if you want the numbers.

The practical bottom line

A guarantor is only as good as the deed backing them up and the reference behind them. The three things that most often go wrong: the income test is set too low (30x rather than 36x); the deed is not updated to cover periodic tenancies; or the guarantee is obtained informally — a verbal agreement or an unsigned letter — and is therefore unenforceable.

Get the referencing right, use a current deed, and make sure your guarantor actually meets the income threshold. If you’d like to see how PropertyGoose handles guarantor checks as part of a full tenancy workflow, compare us with other providers or book a demo to see it in practice.