Right to Rent Checks: What to Verify Before a Tenancy Starts

Under the Immigration Act 2014, landlords and agents in England must check that every adult tenant has the legal right to rent before a tenancy starts. It applies to every new tenancy regardless of nationality; British and Irish citizens still need checking, just against simpler documents.

Letting through an agent does not remove the landlord’s ultimate liability, though it usually shifts the day-to-day check to the agent as part of referencing. Get it wrong and the penalties are among the steepest in housing law.

Who needs checking

Every adult, 18 or over, who will live in the property as their main home, whether or not they are named on the agreement. That includes adult children, partners, and other disclosed occupants, not just the lead tenant.

The two routes

For British and Irish citizens and others with valid physical documents, the check is manual: inspect originals (a passport, or a combination from the Home Office list) in the tenant’s presence, take a copy, and record the date. For most non-British and non-Irish nationals with digital status, biometric residence permit holders, settled or pre-settled status, visa holders, it runs through the Home Office online service: the tenant generates a share code, valid 90 days, and you enter it with their date of birth for a real-time result and any status expiry.

The follow-up check that gets missed

Where a tenant holds a time-limited right to rent, a follow-up is expected before that expiry, or 12 months after the initial check, whichever is later. This is the step that slips, precisely because it falls long after move-in when the original paperwork has been filed away.

What to keep on file

For every tenant: the type of check (manual or online), the date, a copy of the documents or the online confirmation, and, for time-limited status, the date the next check falls due. The record must survive the tenancy and a period after, because it is your defence if a check is ever challenged.

What a missed or botched check costs

The Home Office operates a tiered civil penalty. Per occupier without the right to rent, a first breach can bring up to £10,000, rising to £20,000 for repeat breaches; the per-lodger figures are lower, up to £5,000 first and £10,000 repeat. Separately, a criminal offence applies to landlords who knowingly, or with reasonable cause to believe, let to someone disqualified by their status, carrying an unlimited fine and up to five years’ imprisonment in the most serious cases. A properly conducted and documented check gives a statutory excuse against the civil penalty, even if the document later proves fraudulent, provided the prescribed process was followed.

Why it bites harder for agents

An agency running checks at volume needs a process consistent across every client and branch, not dependent on which staff member picked up the application. A missed follow-up on a time-limited visa, buried in one branch’s paper file, is exactly the gap that surfaces months later as a liability nobody remembers creating. Our letting agents solution covers that multi-branch consistency.