A guarantor can be asked for. It cannot be asked only of you.

Yes. There is no law against it, and any page telling you otherwise is wrong — including, we suspect, the one you were reading before this. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 restricts guarantors in exactly one respect, dealt with further down, and it is not a ban. A landlord may lawfully make a suitable guarantor a condition of granting you the tenancy, and a great many do. The restriction is not on asking. It is on asking selectively. Section 34 of the Act prohibits applying a provision, criterion or practice in order to make benefit claimants less likely to get a tenancy, and the government’s own worked example in Annex B of its rental discrimination guidance is about precisely this: a landlord whose rent guarantee insurer wanted either a higher income or a guarantor from claimants was found to have discriminated, because “whilst a landlord may require a guarantor from all prospective tenants to ensure a sustainable tenancy, in this case it is only in practice being required of benefits recipients”. Read that sentence twice, because it contains both halves of the law: from all prospective tenants is lawful, only in practice of benefits recipients is not. So the useful question is never “can they ask?” It is “do you ask everybody?” — and it is worth asking in writing, because the answer is either reassuring or it is evidence.

Write it down while you remember the sequence, because the sequence is the case. A blanket requirement and a targeted one look identical in a single conversation; what distinguishes them is when the requirement appeared and to whom it applies. If a guarantor was never mentioned in the advert, at the viewing, or in the first email, and surfaced only once benefits came up, that is the pattern section 34 is aimed at. Then ask the question plainly and in writing. Something as simple as “just to confirm, do you require a guarantor from every applicant, or only in some cases?” sent by email or WhatsApp. You are not accusing anyone; you are creating a record. An honest blanket policy is easy to confirm and costs the agent nothing. What to do with the answer. If it confirms the requirement is applied to claimants specifically, report it to your borough’s private sector housing team, which enforces the ban under section 40 with a civil penalty of up to £7,000, rising for conduct continuing beyond 28 days or repeated within five years. Note what that route does and does not do: the penalty is paid to the council, not to you. The route that pays you is a claim under the Equality Act 2010 for indirect discrimination, which is how the pre-2026 “No DSS” cases were run — in one, at Birmingham County Court in September 2020, a disabled father of four won after a contested trial. The £6,000 damages figure repeated everywhere for that case is one we could not source, so treat the win as solid and the number as press reporting. Take free advice from Shelter or Citizens Advice before starting either. They do this daily and we do not.

No, and this is the least ambiguous point on the whole page. The government’s guidance for landlords puts the question and answers it in two words: “Can I charge a tenant for a rent guarantor? No.” You can be asked to provide a guarantor. You cannot be charged for the referencing or administration involved, and neither can your guarantor — the Tenant Fees Act 2019 defines a “relevant person” to include anyone acting on the tenant’s behalf, which catches them. Requiring you to sign up to a paid guarantor service engages section 1(3), which prohibits a landlord requiring a relevant person to enter into a contract with a third party for a service or insurance. The penalty is up to £5,000 for a first breach, up to £30,000 or prosecution for a repeat within five years, and the payment is recoverable by you. Now the qualification, because there is one and you will meet it. Section 1(7) permits a landlord to offer something as an alternative to complying with another lawful requirement. So “a UK homeowner guarantor or, if you would prefer, this paid service” is how these products are lawfully sold, and it is not in itself a breach. The whole question is whether it is genuinely an option or a requirement wearing a coat. Two arguments we think are available, and which we will label as arguments rather than law: where the “alternative” is one you demonstrably cannot meet, the choice may be illusory in substance; and naming a single named provider sits much closer to requiring a contract with that third party than offering a category. We found no published enforcement case on either. We are telling you they are untested rather than dressing them up.

Not any more, and following that advice now asks the landlord to commit an offence. This is the single biggest change for anyone in your position, and most advice pages — including, until we rewrote it, ours — still carry the old version. Since 1 May 2026, before the tenancy agreement is entered into, a landlord or letting agent must not require, invite, encourage, accept an offer of, or accept any rent. The prohibition is drafted to catch the tenant-initiated version deliberately: the enforcement guidance states that where a tenant offers rent before everyone has signed, the landlord must not accept it, and the council may issue a civil penalty if they do. So it is no longer a bargaining chip. An agent who takes it is exposed to a £5,000 penalty and to repaying you, which means the more scrupulous the agent, the faster the offer will be refused. What you can still do. After the agreement is signed but before the tenancy begins, the most that may be required is the initial rent — the first rent period, or any later period ending within the first 28 days. Once the tenancy is running, a term requiring you to pay further ahead than the period it relates to is of no effect, though you may voluntarily choose to pay early and the landlord may accept. Which is the difficulty in one line: the thing that used to win you the flat can now only happen once you already have it. And do not reach for the near neighbour either — a higher rent for the first few months, dropping later, is a prohibited payment where it falls in the first year.

One narrow thing, and it is narrower than the headlines suggested. Section 19 inserts new provisions into the Housing Act 1988 which make a guarantee of no effect as to rent falling due after the tenant’s death, apportioned to the day of death. This was a real and humane reform — bereaved parents were being pursued for rent on a flat their child had died in — and it is worth knowing. But read what it covers. It covers rent. It does not cover arrears that had already accrued before the death, it does not cover damage, and it does not cover anything else the guarantee secures. And it applies only where the guarantor became a party to the guarantee on or after 1 May 2026. Somebody who signed on 30 April 2026 gets nothing from it at all. Everything else about guarantors is unchanged. No cap on who can be required to provide one, no restriction on requiring a homeowner, no limit on the amount guaranteed, no statutory right for a guarantor to withdraw. The change that matters most to guarantors is not in the guarantor provisions at all. It is that every assured tenancy is now periodic and open-ended, so a guarantee expressed to last “for the term of the tenancy” no longer has an end date built into it. The government’s own guidance acknowledges that pre-May agreements “may be affected” and suggests taking legal advice, which is a fairly remarkable thing for guidance to say. Treat that as the government telling you it does not know either.

Assume: all of the rent, all of the damage, all of the costs, for as long as the tenancy runs, jointly with everyone else who signed. Then check whether the document says anything narrower, because most say more rather than less. The practical points, in the order they catch people out. It is open-ended now. Fixed terms are gone, so “for the term of the tenancy” means until the tenancy ends, whenever that is. It usually is not limited to rent. Most standard forms extend to damage beyond fair wear and tear, unpaid utilities and council tax where the tenancy makes the tenant liable, and the landlord’s reasonable costs of recovery. It is usually joint and several. If you guarantee for one sharer in a joint tenancy, read very carefully whether you have guaranteed that person’s share or the tenancy. If it is the tenancy, the landlord can pursue you for the whole rent because the other tenants stopped paying, and your recourse is against them, not the landlord. Two things genuinely in your favour. A guarantee is a secondary liability: you can never owe more than the tenant actually owes, so wording purporting to go further is unenforceable to that extent. And if the landlord materially varies the tenancy without your consent, that can discharge you altogether — the rule in Holme v Brunskill, decided in 1878 and still good law. One that is not. We could find no English authority that a tenancy guarantor may simply withdraw from a continuing guarantee on notice. Assume you cannot get out unless the document says you can, and negotiate a cap, a time limit or a right to withdraw before you sign, when you still have something the landlord wants.

No, and this is the mistake that costs guarantors the most money. Moving out is not the same as ending a tenancy. If the tenant hands back the keys and leaves without serving a valid notice to quit, the tenancy continues to exist, the rent continues to fall due, and your guarantee continues to answer for it. People discover this months later, when the arrears letter arrives for a flat nobody has lived in since the spring. The remedy is simple and free: serve the notice. A tenant may end an assured tenancy by giving notice of no more than two months, and that limit is one of the better things in the new regime. It also bounds your exposure in a way the old system did not: your forward liability is broadly two months of rent plus whatever has already accrued, rather than the balance of a twelve-month fixed term. But only if the notice is actually served, in the right form, on the landlord. If you are a guarantor and the tenant you guaranteed has gone quiet, the most valuable thing you can do this week is establish whether notice was given, and if it was not, get it given. Check the deposit position at the same time, because a protected deposit and a proper check-out inventory are what will decide the damage argument later, and both get neglected when somebody leaves in a hurry. Take advice from Citizens Advice if the tenant is uncontactable, because your options then are narrower and more time-sensitive.

It might be, and we are not going to tell you it certainly is, because that would be inventing law you might then rely on. Here is the honest state of it. A homeowner requirement is substantially harder to meet if you are a migrant, if you are young, if you are a care leaver, or if you come from a group with lower home-ownership rates — which is the classic shape of indirect discrimination under section 19 of the Equality Act 2010: a neutral rule that puts people sharing a protected characteristic at a particular disadvantage, unlawful unless the landlord can show it is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. Reducing the risk of unrecoverable arrears is plainly a legitimate aim; whether insisting specifically on ownership, as opposed to income or a rent guarantee product, is proportionate is the arguable part. We searched for a decided case and found none. Not a county court decision, not an EHRC enforcement action. So the argument is available and, in our view, respectable — but it is untested, and an untested argument is a poor thing to build a housing application on. The stronger ground is almost always the other one. If the homeowner requirement is applied to you and not to other applicants, you do not need the Equality Act argument at all: section 34 catches it directly, the council enforces it, and the worked example in the government’s guidance is on all fours with your facts. So ask the everyone-or-only-me question first, and keep the discrimination argument in reserve for a case where the requirement genuinely is universal and genuinely does exclude you.

Five things, roughly in order of how much difference they make. One: get the housing element paid directly to the landlord. On Universal Credit you can request an Alternative Payment Arrangement, which can mean a Managed Payment to Landlord. Almost every guarantor demand is underneath it a fear of arrears, and this answers that fear more directly than a guarantor does. It is discretionary, and it must be your request — an agent cannot lawfully impose it as a condition on claimants only. Two: approach your council before you are homeless, not after. If you are likely to lose your home within 56 days the prevention duty is owed to every eligible applicant, regardless of priority need, and it is the gateway to help with the money. Single people routinely assume this is not for them and are wrong. Three: ask about the Crisis and Resilience Fund. Discretionary Housing Payments ended in England on 31 March 2026 and were replaced from 1 April by the housing strand of the CRF, run by your borough. It can cover rent in advance and a deposit as a grant. Some councils still use the old name. Four: look for a borough bond or deposit scheme. A written bond means no cash changes hands and the council stands behind the landlord to a limit — functionally close to what a guarantor does, and offered by the council rather than by you. The Crisis Help to Rent database is the best place to find them. Five: consider a company let or a room in a shared house as a bridge, because twelve months of clean payment history is itself the reference you currently lack. What we will not tell you to do is offer rent up front, because as of May 2026 that asks the landlord to break the law.

No. The deposit cap is statutory and it does not flex for perceived risk. A tenancy deposit is capped at five weeks’ rent where the annual rent is below £50,000, and six weeks at or above it. Anything beyond that is a prohibited payment under the Tenant Fees Act, recoverable by you and enforceable by the council. A holding deposit is capped separately at one week’s rent, and must be repaid within seven days unless you withdrew, provided false or misleading information, failed a Right to Rent check, or the landlord took reasonable steps and you did not. So “we will take three months’ deposit instead of a guarantor” is not on the table, however reasonable it sounds. What about a “no deposit” product? It may be offered, but never required, and you should understand what it is: a non-refundable fee, typically about a week’s rent, paid to a company. You get nothing back at the end however immaculate the flat, you remain fully liable for damage and arrears, and if the company pays out it pursues you for the whole amount with no credit for the fee. You also lose free binding adjudication and the one-to-three-times penalty that applies where a real deposit is not protected. And note the specific point for this page: it replaces the deposit, not the guarantee. It does not answer a guarantor demand at all. Anyone presenting it as the solution to one is selling you a product for a different problem. We do not sell these and take nothing from anyone who does.

Not necessarily, and the reason may be the opposite of what you expect. The instinct is that a private landlord is more flexible than an agent following a checklist, and sometimes that is true. But since 1 May 2026 the discrimination rules bind “a relevant person”, which means the landlord or anyone acting on their behalf — so an agent who filters you out faces the same £7,000 penalty, and agents, being regulated businesses with compliance obligations and something to lose, are in practice more likely to know that than an individual landlord with two flats. The agent is also the one who cannot charge you anything. Almost all tenant fees are banned: no referencing fee, no admin fee, no renewal fee, no inventory fee. If you are asked for one, it is unlawful and recoverable. What an agent genuinely gives you is speed and a straight answer about whether what you want exists at your budget. What they cannot do is change the arithmetic. Where we sit, honestly. Fraser Bond is a letting agency. We are paid by landlords, which is the arrangement across the industry, and it means nobody in the transaction is being paid to act for you — worth knowing rather than pretending otherwise. We are not benefits advisers or a law centre, and for advice on your own case Shelter and Citizens Advice are free and better at it than we are. What we will do is tell you straight whether something is findable at your budget in your area, including when the answer is that it is not. A tenancy you cannot sustain is worse than no tenancy, and it can affect what the council owes you later.

The load-bearing parts are statute and official guidance, and we have separated them from the parts that are argument. Solid: that a guarantor may lawfully be required from all applicants, and that requiring one only of benefit claimants is capable of breaching section 34 — the worked example is the government’s own, in Annex B of its rental discrimination guidance, with a council penalty of up to £7,000. That a tenant cannot be charged for a guarantor: the guidance answers its own question “No”, and section 1(3) of the Tenant Fees Act 2019 covers a required contract with a third party. That pre-tenancy rent cannot be required, invited, encouraged, offered-to, or accepted since 1 May 2026, and that only the initial rent may be taken between signing and the start. That section 19 of the Renters’ Rights Act voids a guarantee as to rent falling due after the tenant’s death, for guarantors who became party on or after 1 May 2026. Argument, and labelled as such on the page: that a UK homeowner requirement is indirect discrimination — we found no decided case; and that a paid guarantor service dressed as an “alternative” under section 1(7) can be a requirement in substance — we found no published enforcement case either way. Not found at all: any English authority that a guarantor may revoke a continuing guarantee by giving notice. We say “we found none” rather than “there is none”, because those are different claims and only one of them is ours to make. None of this is legal advice, and nobody here has seen the wording you were sent. Whether a particular demand is a lawful blanket policy or an unlawful practice aimed at you turns on facts this page cannot see. Shelter and Citizens Advice are free.