How to reference a tenant yourself: credit checks, affordability and references

Most landlords understand they should reference a tenant before handing over the keys. Fewer understand exactly what a thorough reference involves, where DIY approaches quietly fall short, and why the stakes are higher in 2026 than they have ever been.

Since Section 21 was abolished on 1 May 2026, you can no longer serve a no-fault notice to end a tenancy that isn’t working out. In the private rented sector in England, assured shorthold tenancies have ended and possession now requires proving specific legal grounds under the updated Section 8 process. That process regularly takes several months — and often the best part of a year once court listing times and enforcement are factored in. The burden now sits squarely on getting the right person in at the start.

Here is what you need to check, how to do it properly, and what the DIY approach tends to miss.

The one check that is actually a legal obligation

Before anything else: the Right to Rent check is a statutory requirement under the Immigration Act 2014. It applies to every adult aged 18 or over who will use the property as their only or main home — even if they are not named on the tenancy agreement and even if someone else pays the rent. You must verify each person’s right to reside in England before the tenancy starts and retain a copy of the documents.

Get this wrong and you face a civil penalty of up to £10,000 per person for a first breach, rising to £20,000 per person for a repeat breach within three years. Worse, knowingly renting to — or having reasonable cause to believe you are renting to — someone disqualified by their immigration status is a criminal offence under the Immigration Act 2014 (as amended in 2016), carrying an unlimited fine and up to five years’ imprisonment.

For British and Irish citizens you can use a Home Office-certified Identity Document Validation Technology (IDVT) provider — an option available since October 2022 — which is faster and arguably more reliable than assessing document authenticity by eye. Done correctly, a compliant check gives you a statutory excuse against the civil penalty.

Credit checks: soft versus hard, and what landlords actually see

Tenant credit checks are typically run as a soft search, meaning they do not affect the tenant’s credit score. This matters: if a tenant is shopping around and multiple parties run hard searches, their score can dip, which is in no one’s interest.

A soft search surfaces public-record data: County Court Judgments (CCJs), Individual Voluntary Arrangements (IVAs), bankruptcies and Debt Relief Orders, plus electoral-roll address confirmation. Importantly, landlords do not see the tenant’s actual credit score, and a soft check does not expose detailed account-level payment history with lenders the way a full lender search would.

CCJs are worth scrutinising. According to Registry Trust, 288,538 new consumer and commercial judgments were registered in England and Wales in Q4 2025 — a 9.4% rise year-on-year. A recent, unsatisfied CCJ is a genuine red flag. An older, fully satisfied one needs context rather than an automatic refusal.

One thing a DIY credit check cannot always tell you: whether the address history the tenant supplied is complete, or whether they have quietly omitted addresses where problems occurred.

Affordability: the 30x rule and why it matters more now

The most widely used benchmark in UK lettings is the 30x rule: a tenant’s gross annual income should be at least 30 times the monthly rent. On a £1,200/month property, that means a minimum gross income of £36,000. The same threshold is sometimes expressed as 2.5 times the annual rent — which works out to rent consuming roughly 40% of gross income.

For a guarantor, the bar is typically higher — around 36 times the monthly rent — reflecting the need for a meaningful financial buffer.

These figures have no statutory backing; they are industry convention, not law, and individual landlords and referencing agencies set their own thresholds. But they exist for good reason. Stretching affordability at the referencing stage is one of the most reliable predictors of arrears later.

If a tenant is borderline, the right response is not to waive the check. It is to look at the full picture: savings, debt commitments, employment stability, and whether a creditworthy guarantor is available.

See our pricing page if you want to understand what a full professional reference costs — it is less than most people expect.

Employment and income verification

A three-month payslip stack and a letter from the employer sounds thorough. In practice, it is the part of DIY referencing most easily falsified.

According to data from letting platform Goodlord, payslip fraud accounted for 58% of all detected tenant fraud cases in 2023, and detected fraud rose roughly 140% year-on-year between 2022 and 2023 (from 1.2 to 2.9 cases per 1,000 applications). AI tools can now generate convincing forged payslips in minutes. Common tactics include inflating income, fabricating an employer altogether, or substituting a friend as the “HR contact” who confirms a fictional role.

Professional referencing services use document-intelligence tools that flag inconsistencies in font, formatting and metadata invisible to the naked eye. They also contact employers using independently sourced contact details — not the number the applicant has helpfully provided.

Previous landlord references

A previous landlord reference is one of the most useful signals you can get — and one of the easiest to game if you run it yourself. The tenant can list a friend, family member or sympathetic acquaintance as their “previous landlord.” Without independently verifying that the person you are speaking to actually owns the property, the reference is worthless.

A professional service can cross-reference the named landlord against Land Registry records. Doing that yourself is possible but time-consuming, and it is exactly the step that gets skipped when you are juggling viewings and paperwork.

What you cannot charge tenants for

Under the Tenant Fees Act 2019, you cannot pass the cost of referencing on to the tenant. Referencing, credit checks, administration and contract preparation are all prohibited payments. A first breach carries a financial penalty of up to £5,000; repeat breaches within five years can reach £30,000 and become a criminal offence. The referencing cost is yours to absorb — a reasonable argument for keeping it proportionate.

What DIY referencing typically misses

• Document fraud detection — reviewing payslips and IDs by hand, without specialist tools, leaves obvious attack surfaces.
• Address history verification — a tenant who omits a problematic address will not flag anything on a basic credit search.
• Independent employer and landlord verification — without sourcing contact details independently, you are relying on what the tenant supplied.
• Professional accountability — using a referencing service gives you a documented, third-party process behind your decision; missing something yourself leaves you on your own.

A professional reference through PropertyGoose costs £14 per applicant (or less at volume), runs seven days a week, and covers all of the above. For most landlords, the real question is whether the time and risk of doing it themselves is worth the saving.

A word on consent and data protection

You need the applicant’s explicit consent before running any credit or reference check. Under UK GDPR, the tenant has the right to know what data is collected, why, and who it is shared with. A professional service handles the consent workflow as part of the process. If you run checks yourself using a consumer credit-reference tool, make sure you have a clear, documented consent mechanism — a verbal agreement is not enough.

The bottom line

Tenant referencing is not bureaucracy. It is the primary risk-management tool available to a landlord in a legal environment where removing a problem tenant can take many months. A credit check alone is not a reference. A reference without independent verification is not a reference either.

If you want to run checks yourself, the steps are: Right to Rent verification (mandatory), a soft credit check, an affordability assessment against the 30x rule, employment verification using independently sourced employer contact details, and a previous-landlord reference with a Land Registry cross-check. Do all five, document everything, and you have done it properly.

Or you can have it done for £14. Compare your options and decide what your time is worth.