A credit check is optional. An immigration check is not.

Yes, and it is not a loophole or a favour — a credit check has never been compulsory. No law requires one. A landlord or agent can only run one with your permission, and plenty do not bother at all. So “no credit check” is a real and lawful thing to offer. Two things follow that people do not expect. First, nobody may charge you for it. The list of payments a tenant can lawfully be asked for is exhaustive, a credit-check or referencing fee is not on it, and so it is a prohibited payment — up to £5,000 for a first breach, up to £30,000 or prosecution for a repeat within five years, and the money is recoverable by you. Second, and more usefully: fewer checks does not mean less scrutiny, it means different scrutiny. Where no credit check is run, affordability evidence and previous landlord references carry more weight, so expect to be asked for bank statements, an employer’s or benefit award letter, or a reference from your last landlord instead. That is a trade and you should know you are making it. What you should be wary of is the phrase “no checks”, without the word credit. That is not something anybody can offer you, because one check is compulsory and cannot be waived by agreement — and the page you are reading used to blur exactly that line, which is why it has been rewritten.

The Right to Rent immigration check, in England, and it is worth knowing precisely how wide it is. It must be carried out on every adult who will occupy the property, aged 18 or over — including British citizens, and whether or not they are named on the tenancy agreement. It has to happen before the tenancy is entered into. There are three permitted ways to do it: a manual check of original documents, the Home Office online service using a share code, or a certified digital identity check, which is available to British and Irish passport holders. It cannot be waived and there is no exemption for letting directly from a landlord. Responsibility can be transferred to an agent by written agreement, but no further than the agent, and never to you. The consequences fall on the landlord, which is why they will not budge. A first breach carries a civil penalty of £10,000 per occupier, or £5,000 per lodger; a repeat within three years is £20,000 and £10,000. And where a landlord knew or had reasonable cause to believe a person did not have the right to rent, it is a criminal offence carrying up to five years. So bring your passport or share code to the first viewing, whatever you have been told about checks. Being unable to produce it is the commonest way a letting collapses at the last moment. A new statutory code takes effect on 1 October 2026, so check the accepted document list if you are reading this later. The scheme is England only — it does not exist in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.

The list is exhaustive, which is the single most useful fact in this whole area. Anything not on it is a prohibited payment. What is permitted: rent; a tenancy deposit, capped at five weeks’ rent where the annual rent is under £50,000 and six weeks at or above it; a holding deposit capped at one week’s rent, for one property at a time, returnable within seven days unless you withdrew, gave false or misleading information or failed a Right to Rent check; default payments, which means late rent only once it is 14 days or more overdue and then capped at 3% above the Bank of England base rate calculated daily, and the reasonable cost of a lost key with written evidence; damages for breaching the agreement; a fee for varying or assigning the tenancy at your request, being the greater of £50 or reasonable costs; the landlord’s loss or the agent’s reasonable costs on early termination at your request; and council tax, utilities, the TV licence and communication services where the agreement requires them. That is the whole list. What is therefore unlawful: referencing fees, credit check fees, admin fees, application fees, renewal fees, inventory fees, check-out fees, and anything at all for a guarantor — charged to you or to your guarantor. If you have paid one you can recover it, and it is Trading Standards that enforces this rather than anybody you have to persuade about fairness.

No, and this changed on 1 May 2026, so a great deal of advice still tells you it is your best move. Before the tenancy agreement is entered into, a landlord or agent must not require, invite, encourage, accept an offer of, or accept any rent at all. After the agreement is signed but before the tenancy begins, the most that may be required is one month’s rent, or 28 days’ rent where the rent period is shorter than a month. 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 choose to pay early if you want to. The part that catches people is that it bites on the version you propose yourself. Offering six months up front to get past a failed reference now asks the other side to commit an offence, which is why an agent who knows the rules will refuse it and why the more scrupulous the agent the faster the refusal comes. Nor is the near neighbour available. Charging a higher rent for the first few months and dropping it later is a prohibited payment where it falls in the first year of the tenancy — so risk cannot be priced that way either. What this means in practice is that the workaround people used to reach for is gone, and what replaced it is that the demand itself is now challengeable and that nobody can charge you for meeting it. On balance that is a better deal, but only if you know it.

No, and this is the change that most dates the page you were probably reading before this one. Since 1 May 2026 a term providing for an assured tenancy to be a fixed term has no effect. The clause is simply stripped out and the tenancy takes effect as a periodic one with the same rent periods. Rent periods themselves are capped: they must be monthly, or 28 days or shorter. Assured shorthold tenancies have been repealed altogether, and existing tenancies converted automatically — if yours had an end date, it no longer applies. Read that as good news, because on balance it is. You cannot be tied into a term you want out of. You can end the tenancy at any time on no more than two months’ notice, expiring at the end of a rent period, from the very beginning. And your landlord cannot use the two commonest grounds for possession — wanting to move in, or wanting to sell — during the first twelve months, and must give four months’ notice for either. So the security runs your way, not theirs. If you are still being offered a twelve-month fixed term, that is usually a sign that somebody has not updated their paperwork rather than a trap. Point it out and ask for a current agreement. What it is not safe to assume is that a document headed “short let” or “licence” achieves the flexibility that fixed terms used to — see the next answer, because that route costs you a great deal more than it looks.

The catch is that it may not be a tenancy, and that is the one risk on this page nobody is breaking the law by creating. To be genuinely short and outside the ordinary rules, an arrangement has to fall outside the assured tenancy regime altogether — a genuine holiday let, a licence with no exclusive possession, a room in the landlord’s own home, a company let, or a rent above £100,000 a year. What you lose depends on which it is, and in the worst case it is severe. If you are an excluded occupier — typically where you share living space with a resident landlord, or where it is a genuine holiday arrangement — you can be evicted without a court order once notice expires, your deposit does not have to be protected in a scheme, and the notice required may be very short. Changing the locks while you are out can be lawful. The label does not decide any of this. If you have exclusive possession of your own accommodation, as your home, for a rent, it is very likely a tenancy whatever the document is headed, and calling something a holiday let when a person plainly lives there can be a sham. But establishing that means a court, and by then you may already have been put out, which is why the protection is worth much less than it sounds. Ask three questions in writing before you sign: will I have exclusive possession, does the landlord live here, and is this an assured tenancy? In London there is a separate point: letting a residential property as short-term sleeping accommodation for more than 90 nights in a calendar year generally needs planning permission, so a long “short let” may be unlawful for the landlord as well as insecure for you.

No, and the version of this page that said so has been rewritten because it was wrong. Renting directly from a landlord changes nothing about what is compulsory. The Right to Rent check applies identically — there is no exemption for letting direct, and the responsibility simply sits with the landlord instead of an agent. What renting direct does change is that nobody in the transaction is regulated in the way an agent is: no obligation to belong to a redress scheme, no client money protection, and no published fee list. Those are protections you lose, not checks you avoid. It is also worth being straight about who is telling you this. Fraser Bond is a letting agent. A page from us claiming to remove letting agents was simply false, and false information about what a business is falls squarely inside the consumer protection legislation that replaced the old unfair trading rules in April 2025 — the regulator’s guidance names a trader’s identity and status as exactly the sort of thing that cannot be misrepresented. Enforcement runs to the higher of £300,000 or 10% of worldwide turnover, and the equivalent offences are criminal. We removed the claim rather than rewording it, because there is no safe wording of it. What we can honestly say is what we require and what we do not, which is the rest of this page — and that is a more useful thing to know about an agent than whether they describe themselves as one.

Yes, two things, and the first is stronger than the second. The liability point is solid. A referencing service is inside the rules that bind the landlord. The government’s guidance says references to landlords include anybody acting on their behalf, such as a letting agent, referencing service or family member, contracted or not. So “that was the referencing company’s decision” is not a defence for the agent, and the company is exposed in its own right. If the sum was run without your benefit income — and the government’s guidance says that where affordability is assessed, income from benefits must be included in the same way as any other income — then the outcome is wrong and it is the landlord’s problem. The automation point is real but less settled. Where a decision is solely automated and has legal or similarly significant effects, data protection law entitles you to human intervention, to put your side, to an explanation and to contest it. A tenancy refusal is a significant effect on any ordinary reading. The honest qualification: the rules on automated decisions changed in February 2026 and the regulator’s own published guidance still describes the previous framework, so treat this as directionally right rather than decided. What to actually do: ask, in writing, for a human review of the decision and for the income figures that were used. It is free, it is quick, and in most of these cases the machine simply never saw half your income.

It is capped at one week’s rent, it can only be taken for one property at a time, and the default is that you get it back. It is the payment that reserves a property while referencing happens. The rules on returning it are specific. It must be repaid within seven days of the earliest of: the tenancy being entered into, the landlord deciding not to proceed, or the fifteen-day deadline passing without an agreement. If the tenancy goes ahead it is normally put towards your first rent or your deposit, with your consent. The grounds for keeping it are limited to four. You withdrew; you provided false or misleading information; you failed a Right to Rent check; or the landlord took all reasonable steps to enter the agreement and you did not. And if it is kept, you must be told why in writing within seven days. No written reasons means the retention is not lawful. Two practical points. Taking a holding deposit on more than one property at the same time is prohibited, so an agent asking you to hold two is asking for a prohibited payment. And the fifteen-day deadline can be extended, but only in writing and only by agreement — so if you are being kept waiting indefinitely with your money held, that is worth pointing out. The tenancy deposit is a separate thing entirely, capped at five weeks’ rent where the annual rent is under £50,000 and six weeks at or above, and it must be protected in a government-backed scheme.

Those are two different questions and they have different answers. No credit history is not a protected characteristic, and a landlord may lawfully decline an applicant on ordinary commercial grounds. What they cannot do is charge you for the check that produced the finding, or apply a criterion inconsistently. Being on benefits is completely different. Since 1 May 2026 it is unlawful for a landlord, or anyone acting on their behalf, to stop you enquiring about a property, getting information about it, viewing it or entering into a tenancy because you receive benefits — or to apply any practice designed to make claimants less likely to get the tenancy. Your council can impose a civil penalty of up to £7,000, more for a continuing or repeated breach, and it binds letting agents and referencing services as well as landlords. The lawful question is affordability. The Act preserves the ability to take income into account, and the government’s guidance says the same income requirement should be set for everyone and all forms of income treated equally — with a worked example in which a referencing company ignores benefit income, the tenant fails on earnings, and the landlord is fined. So the useful thing to establish is which question you are being asked. “Can you afford it” is lawful. “Are you on benefits” is not. And the way to find out is to ask, in writing, what the income requirement is and whether benefit income counts towards it.

No, but understand what refusing costs you and what it does not. There is no obligation to hand over financial documents. There is equally no obligation on a landlord to grant you a tenancy, so in practice refusing usually means not getting the property. What you can insist on is proportion. Data protection law requires that what is collected is adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary. That gives you a reasonable basis to ask why something is needed, to offer an alternative — a benefit award letter rather than six months of statements, say — and to ask that documents be deleted once the decision is made. The government’s guidance supports you on the alternatives point: a landlord should not unreasonably refuse a means of evidencing income that you provide, whether a bank statement, a proof of benefit letter, a payslip or otherwise. So a demand specifically for payslips, from somebody who has said they receive benefits, is on thin ice. Where you should be more careful is with speculative disclosure. Handing income and employment details to a platform so that landlords you have never approached can browse them is a different thing from evidencing affordability for a property you have applied for — it is much harder to justify, and it is one of the reasons the model this page used to describe has been dropped. Give what is needed for the property you actually want, and ask what happens to it afterwards.

Because the earlier version made claims we cannot stand behind, and quietly deleting them seemed worse than saying so. Three things were wrong. It advertised “short-term leases of one to twelve months” against “traditional” one-to-three-year ones — and since 1 May 2026 neither exists, because a fixed term in an assured tenancy has no effect. It said the service “eliminates intermediaries like letting agents”, which is false, since we are one. And it offered “direct owner contacts”, which creates the impression you are dealing with a private individual rather than a business, and separately would require a documented lawful basis before publishing anyone’s personal contact details. The claim about credit checks was the only one that survived, and even that needed the Right to Rent warning attached, because “no checks” sends people to viewings without documents. There is a self-interested reason as well as a principled one, and it is worth stating. A promise of no checks attracts people who have been refused elsewhere. If we then quietly filtered them, we would be doing precisely what the other pages on this site tell you to report — and since 1 May 2026 that is unlawful where benefits are in the picture. We would rather publish the criteria and lose the enquiries that were never going to work than collect applications we intend to decline. If you think anything on this page is still wrong, tell us, because on this evidence we are capable of it.