The deposit is your money. Your landlord has to prove otherwise.

Often you should not, and we would rather say that at the top of the page than bury it. Adjudication through TDS, the DPS and mydeposits costs nothing, you can raise it yourself in about half an hour, and if your landlord has no inventory you will probably win without help. What you are buying from us is presentation, and presentation matters more here than in almost any other process because there is no hearing, no site visit and no conversation — an adjudicator reads what you upload and decides, once, with no appeal. The evidence for that mattering is uncomfortable: on the schemes’ own figures, around 16% of tenants who reach adjudication submit nothing at all, and a further group miss the deadline. If you are organised, confident with documents and have the time, do it yourself and keep your money. If you are not, or the sum is large, that is what the fee is for.

Two reasons, one legal and one about incentives. Legally, a share-of-recovery arrangement for work like this is very likely a damages-based agreement, which brings a statutory cap and strict formal requirements — and an agreement that fails them is unenforceable, meaning we could not recover our fee anyway. The point has not been decided for deposit adjudications specifically, and we are not interested in being the test case. The incentive reason matters more to you: our money would come out of your recovery, so we would have every reason to push a weak case to adjudication and none at all to tell you it was weak. A published fixed fee means when we say your case is not worth running, we lose by saying it — which is the only circumstance in which you should believe us.

Your landlord is in serious difficulty and most tenants do not realise it. The three schemes publish joint guidance which says that where there is no check-in report to compare against, an adjudicator is highly likely to reject the landlord’s claim — there is simply no baseline from which to prove you caused anything. The same weakness attaches to an inventory that you never signed, one with no dated photographs, or one that describes everything as “good” or “fair”, which the schemes note can mean almost anything. This does not extend to rent arrears, which are proved from the rent account and are unaffected. But on cleaning, damage, redecoration and gardening — which between them are the overwhelming majority of disputes — a missing inventory is close to decisive, and it is the first thing we look for.

Not as a term of the tenancy, no. Under the Tenant Fees Act 2019 a landlord or agent cannot require you to pay for professional cleaning at check-out, and a clause purporting to do so is a prohibited payment. They also cannot make you use a particular company. What they can do is ask that the property is returned clean to a professional standard, and then, if it is not, claim the actual cost of putting that right — evidenced with an independent inventory and real invoices. The distinction matters because it changes the argument: you are not disputing whether the place should have been clean, you are disputing whether they can charge you a flat fee regardless of its condition. And the standard is always the condition at check-in, never better than that — cleaning the property to a higher standard than you found it is betterment, and adjudicators refuse it.

More than most people expect, and we would rather give you the real figures than a sales number. Across the schemes, tenants get back all or part of the deposit in over 80% of custodial disputes and around 90% of insured ones, and landlords achieve full recovery in under 20% and 7% respectively. The counterweight is that disputes are rare — about 1% of the 4.7 million deposits protected in England and Wales end in a formal dispute — so the population raising them is self-selecting and probably has better cases than average. What no scheme publishes, and what we therefore cannot tell you, is the average percentage of the disputed sum awarded to each side. Anyone quoting you one has made it up. Our tool gives you a modelled figure and labels it as a model rather than a forecast, which is the honest limit of what a calculator can do here.

Frequently, yes, and it is the part tenants most often never look at. If your landlord failed to protect the deposit in an authorised scheme within 30 days of receiving it, or failed to serve you the prescribed information, a county court must order them to pay you between one and three times the deposit. The award is mandatory once the breach is established; only the multiplier is discretionary, and courts set it mainly by how culpable the landlord was — a professional landlord who never protected it at all sits near the top, an honest clerical slip put right quickly sits at the bottom. You have six years to bring it, and you can bring it after the tenancy has ended. Two cautions. First, the courts have tightened up: technical defects in the prescribed information no longer win unless a reasonable tenant would actually have been misled, and the Supreme Court hears the leading case in November 2026. Second, issuing court proceedings will suspend a scheme dispute, so the order in which you do things matters.

No, and be careful with anyone who says they can. Preparing and presenting a case to a deposit scheme is not litigation and anybody is allowed to do it, which is why this service exists. Issuing and running a claim in the county court is a reserved legal activity under the Legal Services Act 2007, and an unregulated firm that takes one over commits a criminal offence — a property consultancy was found by the High Court to have done exactly that in a reported case, and the fact that the client signed everything did not save them. So on a deposit protection penalty claim we will assess it, explain what it is worth and hand you to a housing solicitor. If we ever receive a referral fee for that introduction, we will tell you the amount before you speak to them.

Shorter than you think, and this is the failure we see most. On the insured schemes you generally have three months from the end of the tenancy to raise a dispute; miss it and adjudication is closed to you, leaving only a court claim. The schemes also run tight evidence windows once a dispute is open — in some cases only a few working days to respond to what the landlord has filed — and evidence submitted late is simply not considered. If your landlord has gone silent on a custodial deposit there is a separate route: after 14 days with no response you can make a single claim supported by a statutory declaration, and if they still do not reply the scheme pays you. If you are near any of these deadlines, raise the free dispute today and improve the case afterwards. A rough submission filed in time beats a perfect one filed too late.