Seven and a half million households are missing at least one thing they are entitled to, averaging £3,203 a year each — and that figure leaves disability benefits out altogether, so the true number is higher. The checker below screens your household against the lot in about ninety seconds, and asks nothing of you first.
Four answers, straight away, with nothing asked of you first.
1. We will not charge you a penny, ever. There is no version of a property company charging a benefit claimant for this that we could defend, so the question does not arise. Everything below is free, nothing is stored, and there is no form before you get an answer. If you are a landlord, the money on this page is on your side of the transaction and it is set out plainly further down.
2. We will not estimate your Universal Credit, because two organisations already do it properly and better. Turn2us and entitledto run free, independent, properly maintained calculators, and Citizens Advice will do it with a human being. What we can add that they do not is the Local Housing Allowance rate for your specific rental market area sitting next to your actual rent, so you can see the gap. That is what this tool is for.
3. We will never tell you how to answer an assessment question. Information about what exists is one thing. Coaching somebody on how to describe their own life so it scores points is another, and it is the line between helping and something that can end with an overpayment, a penalty or a prosecution. Every Universal Credit overpayment is recoverable from you, including one caused entirely by an official mistake. That rule alone is why we route the hard parts to people who do this for a living.
The panel rebuilds as you answer. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored — it runs entirely in your browser and disappears when you close the tab.
Local Housing Allowance is the maximum Universal Credit will put towards your rent. It is not related to what your landlord charges, and since April 2024 it has not moved at all.
This is a screener, not a calculation of your benefit. It shows the published Local Housing Allowance rate for the area you chose against the rent you entered, and lists routes worth looking at. It does not know your income, your savings, your immigration status or your assessment period, and it does not try to. For a figure, use Turn2us or entitledto, both free and both better at it than we are. For anything contested, go to Citizens Advice or your council’s welfare rights team before you go to an agent.
Local Housing Allowance was designed to cover the cheapest thirty per cent of a local market. It is nowhere near that now, and the reason is arithmetic rather than policy argument: the rates were set from rents surveyed in September 2023 and have been frozen since April 2024, while rents have not been.
From a study of more than eight hundred thousand one, two and three bedroom listings over a full year. England was 1.8%. London was 1.2%. The year before it was 2.7%, so it is still falling. The design target was thirty per cent.
Between the LHA rate and the cheapest third of local rents. That money comes out of the standard allowance, which is the part meant for food, heating, clothes and everything else. There is nowhere else for it to come from.
Rates from 1 April 2026 are, in the Valuation Office’s own words, the same rates that came into force on 1 April 2024 — themselves based on the thirtieth percentile of lettings in the year to September 2023. Current market data is collected and then expressly excluded from the calculation.
Against the thirty per cent it is meant to. More than a million households are affected, with an average loss approaching £1,500 since the freeze began, and a six per cent hit to disposable income overall — twelve per cent for the poorest fifth.
Ealing spans four rental market areas. A two-bedroom rate there runs from £1,300 to £1,794 a month depending on which side of the borough you are — a swing of nearly £500 for the same council. Anyone quoting you a rate by council name is guessing.
There is no five bedroom rate. A family of seven gets the four bedroom figure and finds the rest themselves. The benefit cap then applies on top, and it is taken out of the housing element — which converts directly into rent arrears rather than a smaller food budget.
Personal Independence Payment is not means-tested, is not affected by savings or earnings, and is tax-free. What makes it the single most valuable thing on this page is not the payment. It is everything that becomes available the moment it is awarded, most of which nobody tells you about.
If somebody claims Carer’s Allowance or the carer element for looking after you, you lose the severe disability premium, or the Pension Credit severe disability addition. They are mutually exclusive.
Depending on the household this can leave you collectively worse off. It is one of the most common accidental self-inflicted losses in the whole system, and it is why the honest instruction here is to model the household total with a proper calculator before anybody claims anything.
The Universal Credit health element was roughly halved for most people newly entitled from April 2026 — and then frozen in cash terms to 2029–30. Three groups keep the higher rate: those already entitled before April 2026, those meeting the severe conditions criteria, and those who are terminally ill.
The difference between the two rates is over £200 a month. So if you are disabled and on Universal Credit, the single most valuable question you can answer is whether you were already getting the health element before April 2026 — and if you were, whether anything you are about to do would end that entitlement and restart it at the lower rate.
Thirty-eight per cent of landlords told the government they were unwilling to let to anyone receiving housing support. That position is no longer available, and the way most people are getting caught is not the advert — it is the referencing.
The Renters’ Rights Act prohibits taking steps intended to make somebody less likely to take a tenancy because they receive benefits — including blocking information about availability, blocking a viewing, or refusing the tenancy. For discrimination against children there is a proportionate-means defence, and it genuinely works in some cases. For benefits there is no such defence at all, and a mistaken belief that somebody claims is still a breach.
Penalty up to £7,000, on the balance of probabilities rather than the criminal standard, with a further £7,000 for each 28-day period it continues and another for a repeat within five years. Widely reported as £40,000 — that figure belongs to the database offences, not this.
Income requirements are expressly still lawful, and you can set them where you like. The government’s own worked example of a breach is a referencing company that leaves benefit income out of the affordability calculation. The threshold is not the problem; the arithmetic is. Count benefits and state pension as income of equal value, apply the same test to everybody, and accept an award letter as evidence.
The same applies to guarantors. Requiring one from every applicant is fine. Requiring one only from benefit claimants — even because your insurer demands it — is an express breach example. There is no statutory income multiple, and anyone quoting you one is quoting an industry habit.
Terms in a superior lease or a mortgage prohibiting letting to benefit claimants or families with children were voided on 1 May 2026, including in agreements signed years earlier. You cannot rely on them and neither can your freeholder.
Insurance is the single narrow exception: a policy entered into before 1 May 2026 with an express prohibition can still be relied on, but only until it renews or ends. On an annual policy that exception is spent by 30 April 2027, which for most portfolios means it has already gone or is about to.
Explicit “no DSS” wording had already collapsed to a fraction of a per cent of listings by 2021. What replaced it was coded language and preference filters — one study found over half of listings on a major room-share platform expressing a professionals-only preference, including forty-one per cent of the listings that were actually affordable at LHA rates.
That phrasing is expressly caught. Portals themselves are exempt as pure publishers; liability sits with whoever wrote the copy, which is the landlord or the agent. If you have stock advertised anywhere with those words in it, that is the first thing to fix and it takes an afternoon.
The renter side of this page is free and is going to stay free, because a property company charging a benefit claimant to find out what they are owed is not a business we want. Everything priced below is landlord-side, and most of it is compliance work that the law created in May.
This is a screener, not benefits advice, and we are not benefits advisers. It shows published Local Housing Allowance rates against a rent you type in, and lists routes worth investigating. It does not know your income, capital, immigration status or assessment period. For an actual figure use Turn2us or entitledto, both free and independent; for anything contested use Citizens Advice or your council’s welfare rights team. The LHA figures are the DWP rates for 2026/27 for all 152 English broad rental market areas, taken from the published table. They are the same rates that came into force on 1 April 2024, derived from the thirtieth percentile of lettings in the year to September 2023. LHA is set by rental market area and not by council — one borough can span four areas — so check your postcode on the Valuation Office LHA checker rather than assuming. Rates and rules change every April and several changed materially in April 2026: the Universal Credit health element was roughly halved for most new claims, the two-child limit was abolished, Discretionary Housing Payments became Housing Payments under the Crisis and Resilience Fund, and the Household Support Fund closed. Anything on any website still referring to DHPs or the Household Support Fund is out of date. We will not advise on how to answer an assessment question. Every Universal Credit overpayment is recoverable from the claimant, including one caused entirely by official error, and incorrect information can lead to a penalty or a prosecution. That risk sits with you, which is exactly why we route it to people who do this professionally and free.
If you are renting, we will tell you what the rate is and what the gap means in practice — and if the answer is that you need a welfare rights adviser rather than an agent, that is what we will say. If you are a landlord, send us a link to one of your adverts and we will tell you whether it is a problem.
Every one of these has a free tool on it. None of them asks for your details before it gives you an answer.
For renters leaving a property. Your earliest lawful last day, your deposit deadlines, and the council tax trap the Renters’ Rights Act quietly created.
A dated timeline built from your rent day and your move datefree, and free to the renter always →For tenants, owners and landlords. Twenty-two exemption classes, twenty-one disregards, nine mandatory premium exceptions — and a power that can reduce any bill to nothing.
Screen your household and your property against every route at oncefree, or £120 a claim and 0% of your refund →For renters, and for universities and employers who place them. Who owns it, is the agent real, and what the checks cannot catch.
Screen a listing against the legal bright linesfree, or £39 checked →Two different things, and it is worth understanding that they are separate because most people only hear about one. The first is the Renters’ Rights Act route. Since 1 May 2026 it is unlawful in England for a landlord or agent to take steps intended to make you less likely to enter a tenancy because you receive benefits — and that expressly includes stopping you finding out a property is available, stopping you viewing it, and advertising in a way that discourages you. “Professionals only” is caught. So is a mistaken belief that you claim. Unlike the parallel rule about children, there is no proportionality defence for benefits at all. You report it to the council’s private rented sector or housing enforcement team, and they can impose a civil penalty of up to £7,000, decided on the balance of probabilities rather than the criminal standard. But be clear about who gets the money: the penalty goes to the council, not to you. The second route is the Equality Act 2010, which is how you get compensation for yourself, including for injury to feelings. That needs a protected characteristic — the cases that established this were argued on sex and on disability — and it has a hard limit of six months less one day from the refusal. That deadline defeats more of these claims than any defence does. If it has happened to you, talk to Shelter or Citizens Advice this week rather than next month.
Because it was calculated from rents in the year to September 2023 and has not moved since April 2024. The Valuation Office states it plainly: the rates applying from 1 April 2026 are the same rates that came into force on 1 April 2024. Current market data is still collected every year and then expressly excluded from the calculation. Local Housing Allowance was designed to cover the cheapest thirty per cent of a local market; on the best available estimate it now reaches about ten per cent. A study of more than eight hundred thousand listings across a full year found 1.9% of them affordable at LHA rates across Britain, 1.8% in England and 1.2% in London, down from 2.7% the year before. The average gap on a two-bedroom home between the rate and the cheapest third of local rents is around £403 a month. None of that is a defect in your claim or something you have filled in wrongly. It is the design, and the honest thing to say is that no benefit fills that gap as of right — the only route is a discretionary housing payment from the council, which is cash-limited and carries no right of appeal.
If you are single, under 35 and have no children, the rules cap you at the shared accommodation rate — the lowest of the five rates in your area — regardless of whether you actually live in a shared house. In much of London that is a difference of several hundred pounds a month against the one-bedroom rate. There are around nine ways out of it and two are badly under-claimed. The first is having lived in a hostel or refuge for three months or more since you turned 16, and it is cumulative rather than continuous — several short stays add up. The second is having experienced domestic abuse from a partner, former partner or relative at any time since you were 16, which has been an exception since October 2022 and which a great many people who qualify have simply never been told about. The others: you are 35 or over; you get PIP daily living or DLA middle or higher rate care; you need someone to stay overnight to care for you; you are a care leaver under 25; you are a recognised survivor of modern slavery; you are aged 25 to 34 and subject to certain offender management arrangements; or you are claiming as a couple. Each needs evidence and each is permanent once accepted. It is the single largest swing available to a single renter under 35 and it is worth an appointment with a welfare rights adviser to get right.
No. It was announced in 2025, it caused a substantial backbench rebellion, and the government removed the PIP clauses from the Bill entirely on 1 July 2025. The Act that emerged — renamed the Universal Credit Act 2025 — contains no changes to PIP whatsoever. What was promised instead was a review of the assessment led by the Minister for Social Security and Disability. That review published an interim report on 9 July 2026 containing no recommendations at all; its findings were blunt, concluding that PIP is not fit for purpose, with over ninety per cent of some forty thousand respondents describing negative experiences. The final report with recommendations is expected in autumn 2026, and any change after that would need the Secretary of State to act on it. So as at today the points system, the activities, the descriptors and the eligibility rules are exactly as they were. If you have been putting off a claim because you read that the rules had tightened, that reason does not exist.
If somebody in the household has a long-term condition, PIP or Attendance Allowance, before anything else — not primarily for the payment, but for what it unlocks. A PIP daily living award exempts the whole household from the benefit cap, which on a large family in an expensive area is often worth more than the PIP itself. It takes a single person under 35 out of the shared accommodation rate and onto the one-bedroom rate. It removes the deduction taken from your housing element for every other adult in the home. It opens Carer’s Allowance for whoever helps you, and a council tax disregard where there is also a cognitive impairment certificate. It buys an extra bedroom where a carer stays overnight. None of that appears on the claim form and none of it is explained when the award letter arrives. After that: Council Tax Reduction, because a Universal Credit claim does not get it for you and it is the most missed award in the country by volume — roughly two and a half million households, averaging £1,286 a year. Then the ones that are a phone call to a company rather than a claim to the state: the Warm Home Discount, and broadband and water social tariffs, which around seven and a half million eligible households do not have.
Yes, and it is the most common self-inflicted loss in the system. If somebody claims Carer’s Allowance or the Universal Credit carer element for looking after you, the person being cared for loses the severe disability premium, or the Pension Credit severe disability addition — currently £86.05 a week. They cannot be held at the same time. Depending on the household the arithmetic can go either way, and there is no way to know which without running both scenarios. So the instruction is simple and slightly unglamorous: put the household through Turn2us or entitledto both ways before anybody claims anything, or better still take twenty minutes with a welfare rights adviser. While you are there, two other things worth checking: Carer’s Allowance is a cliff edge and not a taper — a pound over the £204 weekly earnings limit and the whole £86.45 goes — and if you are over State Pension age and have been told you cannot have it, claim anyway, because underlying entitlement can still increase Pension Credit.
Yes, expressly so, and this is where a lot of well-meaning landlords have over-corrected in the wrong direction. The Act specifically preserves the right to take income into account, and the government’s guidance says a landlord is not liable where a set income requirement is not met, regardless of whether the applicant has children or receives benefits. There is no statutory rent-to-income multiple — the 2.5 or 3 times figures circulating are industry habit, not guidance. What makes it lawful is equal treatment of income sources and consistency of the threshold. Apply the same requirement to everybody. Count benefits and state pension as income of equal value to earnings. Do not unreasonably refuse a way of evidencing income — an award letter is evidence. And once the threshold is met, do not then use benefits status to choose between applicants. The government’s own worked example of a breach is a referencing company that leaves benefit income out of the affordability calculation, and you remain liable for your agent’s and your referencing provider’s method. One genuinely open question we would flag rather than pretend to resolve: a threshold set so high that a benefit-funded household could never meet it may itself be caught, even where benefits are counted. There is no case law and no guidance on that yet.
It leaves you with a term that has been void since 1 May 2026, including in a mortgage you signed years earlier. The same applies to a prohibition in a superior lease, which catches both freeholder-imposed restrictions and rent-to-rent arrangements. Neither is a defence and neither is enforceable. Most major lenders removed these clauses from around 2019 anyway, so in many cases the term you are worried about no longer exists in your lender’s current conditions. Insurance is the one narrow exception: a policy entered into before 1 May 2026 containing an express prohibition can still be relied on, but only until it renews or ends. On an annual policy that exception is spent by 30 April 2027, which for most portfolios means it has already gone. Two related traps. Requiring a guarantor from every applicant is perfectly lawful; requiring one only from benefit claimants — including because your insurer asks for it — is an express breach example in the guidance, and the insurer’s requirement is not a defence. And the penalty is widely misreported: it is up to £7,000, with a further £7,000 for each 28-day period it continues and another for a repeat within five years. The £40,000 figure that appears in a lot of commentary belongs to the property database offences, not to this.
Renters are charged nothing here and never will be. There is no version of a property company charging a benefit claimant to find out what they are entitled to that we could defend, so we do not do it and the question does not arise. What we also will not do, for a fee or otherwise, is run your benefit claim. That is specialist work, it is done free and better by Citizens Advice, by local welfare rights services and by the calculators at Turn2us and entitledto, and the consequences of getting it wrong land on you rather than on us — every Universal Credit overpayment is recoverable from the claimant, including one caused entirely by an official mistake. We will also never suggest how to describe your circumstances so that they score points, which is the line between information and something that ends in a penalty. The fees on this page are on the landlord’s side: £295 for an audit of adverts, criteria, referencing and lease, mortgage and insurance terms against the discrimination provisions, and £450 to set a property up properly for a benefit-funded let. Letting and management are charged at our ordinary rates. All fixed, all quoted first.
A landlord can no longer turn you away for claiming benefits, and that is a real and hard-won change. It does not put a single pound into the gap between what Local Housing Allowance pays and what a flat costs, and pretending otherwise would be the easiest thing on this page to do. What is left is knowing the rate, knowing the gap, and knowing which of the routes above are actually open to you.
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