Right to Rent checks: a landlord's guide to getting them right

As of June 2026. This article is general information, not legal advice.

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Every landlord letting in England has a legal obligation to check that their tenants have the right to live — and therefore rent — in the UK. Get it wrong and the civil penalties start at £10,000 per occupier. Get it right, and you have a complete statutory defence even if a tenant later turns out to have lied to you.

The rules have shifted meaningfully over the past few years: civil penalties tripled in February 2024, physical Biometric Residence Permits (BRPs) stopped being valid standalone evidence of right to rent from April 2022, the BRP-to-eVisa transition largely completed over the winter of 2024–25, and a framework of certified digital identity providers now lets you verify British and Irish nationals remotely. This guide covers the current state of play, what you actually need to do, and how integrating identity verification into your referencing flow stops it becoming a recurring administrative headache.

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What is Right to Rent — and does it apply to you?

Right to Rent is an England-only requirement, introduced by the Immigration Act 2014 and administered by the Home Office. It does not apply in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.

If you let residential accommodation in England — whether as a private landlord, a letting agent, or a live-in landlord taking lodgers — you must check that every adult aged 18 or over who will occupy the property as their only or main home has the right to rent in the UK. That means all adults, not just the named tenants on the agreement. A permitted occupier or a partner who will live there full-time needs to be checked too.

The check must be completed before the tenancy starts.

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Three ways to carry out a check

1. Manual document check

You examine original documents in person. (The temporary COVID-adjusted process, which allowed checks over video call using scans, ended on 30 September 2022 — it did not become permanent. The permanent remote route is via a certified provider, covered below.) The government splits acceptable documents into two lists:

List A (unlimited right to rent — no follow-up needed):

• A valid UK or Irish passport
• A full UK, Channel Islands, Isle of Man or Irish birth or adoption certificate, combined with an official document showing the holder’s National Insurance number
• A Certificate of Naturalisation or Registration as a British citizen, combined with a second acceptable document (such as a birth certificate or NI evidence)

(Several List A items must be presented in a combination of two documents — a single naturalisation certificate or birth certificate on its own is not enough. Check the official document lists for the full set of accepted combinations.)

List B (time-limited right to rent — follow-up checks required):

• Documents showing limited leave to remain — visas, entry clearance vignettes and similar

You must see originals, check they relate to the person in front of you, make copies, date them, and keep those records.

2. Home Office online service (share codes)

For anyone whose status is recorded digitally by UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) — including EU nationals with settled or pre-settled status, and anyone with an eVisa following the phase-out of physical BRP cards — the correct route is the Home Office online checking service. Since 6 April 2022, holders of a BRP, Biometric Residence Card or Frontier Worker Permit can only evidence their right to rent online; presenting the physical card is no longer accepted.

The tenant logs into their UKVI account, generates a share code (valid for 90 days), and gives it to you along with their date of birth. You then go to gov.uk/view-right-to-rent, enter both details, and the service returns a clear result showing their status and any time limit. Take a screenshot or print the result, note the date, and file it.

For these groups, the online service is the only compliant method. Accepting a photocopy of a physical BRP card does not give you a statutory excuse.

3. Certified Identity Service Providers (IDSPs) — for British and Irish citizens

Since April 2022, landlords can use a certified Identity Service Provider (IDSP) to verify British and Irish passport-holders remotely using Identity Document Validation Technology (IDVT). The applicant photographs their passport and records a brief liveness check, and the IDSP returns a digital identity certificate. This is useful when a tenant is relocating before they can attend in person.

The government is tightening this route: under reforms expected to take effect during 2026, a provider must be certified on the government’s Digital Verification Services (DVS) register against the applicable rules for an IDVT check to generate a valid statutory excuse. Check the current register before selecting a provider.

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Follow-up checks — and when you can stop doing them

If a tenant had an unlimited right to rent at the start of the tenancy — a British or Irish citizen, someone with EU settled status, or someone with indefinite leave to remain — you never need to repeat the check. Do it once before the tenancy starts, file the records, done.

If a tenant had a time-limited right to rent, you get a time-limited statutory excuse. Under the Home Office guidance, that excuse lasts the longest of: 12 months from the date of the check, the expiry of the person’s permission to be in the UK, or the expiry of the Home Office document evidencing their status. You must carry out a follow-up check before that statutory excuse expires. In practice, diarise the relevant date at the point of the initial check — let it lapse and you lose your excuse for the period afterwards.

One important update from June 2024: landlords are no longer required to carry out follow-up checks on holders of pre-settled status. Only the initial check before the tenancy commences is needed for that group.

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The penalty regime — and why it matters

As of 13 February 2024, civil penalties for non-compliance are:

Scenario	First breach	Repeat breach
Per occupier (tenant)	£10,000	£20,000
Per lodger	£5,000	£10,000

These are per-person figures. A house with four tenants where checks were never done means £40,000 exposure on a first breach. Before this change, the starting penalties were £1,000 per occupier and £80 per lodger — the February 2024 increase was a roughly tenfold rise at the lower end.

Separately, knowingly renting to someone who does not have the right to rent is a criminal offence, carrying an unlimited fine and up to five years’ imprisonment.

The good news: a correctly completed check gives you a statutory excuse — a complete defence against a civil penalty even if the tenant later loses their right to be in the UK, provided the check was done properly before the tenancy started and you had no reasonable cause to believe the person lacked the right to rent.

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Record keeping

Keep copies of all documents (or screenshots of online check results) for the duration of the tenancy plus at least one year afterwards. After that you may securely destroy them, though retaining them for longer alongside your other tenancy records is common practice. Date every copy at the point of the check; undated records are far harder to defend.

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The common mistakes that cost landlords their statutory excuse

1. Checking only named tenants. Every adult occupier counts. A partner who moves in six months later needs checking too.
2. Accepting a physical BRP card. Since April 2022, BRP, BRC and Frontier Worker Permit holders can only evidence right to rent through the online share code service.
3. Missing the follow-up on time-limited status. Let the statutory excuse lapse and you lose your defence for the period afterwards — diarise the relevant date.
4. Not dating copies. Without a date, you cannot prove the check happened before the tenancy started.
5. Using a provider not on the DVS register. As the 2026 reforms take effect, only DVS-registered providers will generate a valid excuse for IDVT checks.

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How PropertyGoose builds this into your referencing flow

Right to Rent shouldn’t be a separate step you remember to do after referencing comes back. At PropertyGoose, identity verification is part of the referencing process itself — applicants complete identity checks within the same workflow you use to order a full reference, so you get a Right to Rent result alongside the credit check, income verification and landlord references in a single report.

That means no chasing two separate systems, no risk of starting a tenancy before the immigration check is done, and a clear audit trail if you ever need to demonstrate your statutory excuse. It also keeps the 48-hour referencing turnaround meaningful in practice — identity verification runs in parallel, so it doesn’t slow the process down.

If you’re comparing services, our pricing page shows what full tenant referencing costs (from £14 per reference), and the comparison tool puts that alongside the alternatives. For agents who want to see how the workflow fits across the full tenancy lifecycle, book a demo.

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This article is general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Immigration law and penalty levels can change; always verify current requirements against the official Home Office guidance — the Landlord’s guide to right to rent checks on gov.uk — before acting.

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Author: Craig Ryder