Prescribed information: the document landlords forget (and the 3x penalty)

You protected the deposit. You sent the tenancy agreement. You handed over the keys. Job done — right?

Not quite. There is one more legal document you are required to serve on your tenant within 30 days of receiving their deposit, and it is the one most landlords either forget entirely or serve in a form that does not actually comply. It is called prescribed information, and getting it wrong can cost you between one and three times the deposit amount — on top of having to return the deposit. On an average English rental, a five-week deposit sits at roughly £1,650 (five weeks of the £1,438 average monthly rent recorded by the ONS in April 2026). That means a potential court-ordered penalty of up to about £4,950, plus repayment of the deposit itself.

If you are also wondering what this means under the Renters’ Rights Act — which took effect on 1 May 2026 — read on. The rules have tightened.

What prescribed information actually is

When you take a tenancy deposit in England or Wales, the Housing Act 2004 (sections 213–215) imposes two separate obligations. The first is to protect the deposit in an authorised scheme (TDS, DPS or mydeposits) within 30 days. The second — equally mandatory, and just as time-limited — is to serve prescribed information on the tenant within that same 30-day window.

Prescribed information is not the deposit protection confirmation certificate alone, though that is part of it. Under the Housing (Tenancy Deposits) (Prescribed Information) Order 2007, the complete document must include:

• The amount of the deposit
• The address of the rented property
• Your name, address and contact details (or your agent’s)
• The tenant’s name and contact details
• The details of anyone who paid the deposit on the tenant’s behalf (a parent, employer or local authority — this “relevant person” obligation catches many landlords out)
• The name, address and contact details of the authorised deposit scheme
• The scheme’s tenant information leaflet
• The procedures for repaying the deposit at the end of the tenancy, what happens if either party is uncontactable, and how disputes will be resolved
• A signed certificate from you (or your agent) confirming the information is accurate

The tenant should then be given the opportunity to sign confirming the details are correct — though the obligation to produce and serve the document sits firmly with you.

Why landlords get it wrong

The most common failure is simply not serving the document at all. The protection confirmation that arrives from TDS or DPS by email is not prescribed information — it is evidence that you protected the deposit. Prescribed information is a separate document, which the schemes provide as a template, but which you must then complete, sign, and actively deliver to the tenant.

Beyond that, these are the mistakes that come up repeatedly in case law:

Forgetting relevant persons. If a parent guaranteed the deposit, or a local authority paid it on the tenant’s behalf, they are each entitled to their own copy of the prescribed information. Serving only the named tenant leaves you non-compliant for every additional relevant person.

Missing the leaflet. The scheme’s tenant information leaflet must be attached or clearly provided. Omitting it makes the prescribed information incomplete.

Unsigned certificates. The landlord or agent certificate must be signed. The Court of Appeal in Lowe v The Governors of Sutton’s Hospital in Charterhouse [2025] EWCA Civ 857 held that a signed covering letter accompanying an unsigned certificate could be “substantially to the same effect” in the circumstances of that case — but it is a narrow ruling on specific facts, not a general get-out, and it is now under appeal to the Supreme Court (hearing listed for November 2026). Do not rely on it.

Assuming the agent handled it. If you use a managing agent, check explicitly who is responsible for serving prescribed information. If it is not served, you can still be liable as the landlord.

The penalty: one to three times the deposit

Under section 214 of the Housing Act 2004, if you fail to protect the deposit, fail to serve prescribed information, or both, the county court must order you to pay the tenant a sum of between one and three times the deposit amount. The penalty itself is mandatory once a breach is established; the court has discretion only on where in that range to pitch it. Shelter’s analysis of the case law treats the landlord’s “blameworthiness” as the most relevant factor a court may weigh (Okadigbo v Chan [2014]) — though it is not the only factor, and courts are not bound to treat it as decisive in every case.

Professional or experienced landlords are presumed to know the rules, so a landlord on their third rental property who still did not serve the prescribed information is unlikely to attract much sympathy. Intentional non-compliance, or trying to fix the position only after a claim is filed (Khuja v Chowdhury [2015]), tends to push the multiplier higher.

Note also that penalties can stack across tenancies — in Szorad v Kohli [2023] the court awarded separate penalties when a deposit was left unprotected both at the start of a fixed term and again when it rolled into a periodic tenancy, confirming that getting the position right on renewal requires care.

Separate from the penalty, until May 2026 a landlord who had not served prescribed information could not serve a valid Section 21 notice. That route to no-fault possession is now abolished under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 (from 1 May 2026), but the possession risk has not disappeared — it has shifted. Courts will now decline to make a possession order at all if deposit protection compliance is not in place, on every ground except the anti-social behaviour grounds. Prescribed information sits squarely within that compliance requirement.

What the Renters’ Rights Act changes

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 27 October 2025. It extends the deposit provisions from assured shorthold tenancies to all assured tenancies — which, from 1 May 2026, is effectively the only tenancy type available in England. The 30-day rule and prescribed information requirement continue as before, but the compliance gatekeeper function has been strengthened: a court will not order possession unless the deposit requirements are met (the main exception being anti-social behaviour grounds). You can usually cure the problem by complying late, before the order is made, but you should still expect a penalty for the late breach.

For tenancies that converted from fixed-term ASTs to periodic assured tenancies on 1 May 2026, landlords who had correctly served prescribed information previously do not need to re-serve it. Separately, however, landlords of existing written tenancies had to provide every named tenant with the government’s Renters’ Rights Act Information Sheet 2026 by 31 May 2026 — supplied as the exact, unaltered PDF from gov.uk — with fines of up to £7,000 for non-compliance.

If you are uncertain whether your existing tenancy files are compliant with both the deposit rules and the new information sheet requirement, now is the time to check.

Proof of service: the part everyone skips

Even if you serve prescribed information perfectly, you still need to be able to prove you served it, and within the 30-day window. Landlords have lost cases not because they failed to serve the document, but because they could not demonstrate they had done so in time.

Best practice is to obtain a written acknowledgement from the tenant. Email can be sufficient where the tenant has agreed to receive documents electronically, which a well-drafted tenancy agreement will capture. Keep a timestamped record: the date, the method of delivery, and a copy of exactly what was sent.

This is where automated tooling earns its keep. When PropertyGoose registers a deposit on your behalf, it generates the prescribed information document and creates a timestamped proof-of-service record as part of the same workflow — so there is nothing to forget and nothing to reconstruct from memory if a claim arises. You can see how that fits into the broader referencing and tenancy lifecycle.

A checklist before you move on

Before a new tenancy starts, confirm:

• Deposit protected within 30 days of receipt
• Prescribed information document completed in full (all mandatory fields, no blank sections)
• Scheme tenant information leaflet attached
• All relevant persons identified and served separately
• Landlord/agent certificate signed
• Tenant given the opportunity to confirm the details
• Proof of service retained (timestamped email or signed acknowledgement)

Getting this right once is not difficult. The trap is rushing through it at the start of a tenancy and assuming the schemes handle it. They do not — the obligation is yours.

If you want to take this off the list entirely, see how PropertyGoose handles tenancy compliance, or compare what full-service referencing actually includes.

Written by Craig Ryder.