Right to Rent reform: what simpler guidance means for letting agents and landlords
Propertymark has had enough. The trade body is pushing the government to overhaul Right to Rent guidance — not because the underlying policy is wrong, but because the practical instructions for following it are, in their words, unclear enough to put agents and landlords at genuine legal risk.
That is a reasonable position. Right to Rent checks sit at the intersection of immigration law, data protection, and tenancy law. Getting them wrong can mean a civil penalty. Getting them very wrong can mean a criminal one. And yet the official guidance has never quite kept pace with the complexity of the checks it describes.
While we wait for any reform, the compliance clock keeps ticking. Here is what agents and landlords need to understand right now.
Why the guidance is genuinely confusing
Right to Rent is not complicated in principle: before granting a tenancy, you must check that the prospective tenant has the legal right to reside in the UK.
In practice, the complexity lives in the edge cases — and there are many of them.
What do you do when a tenant's leave to remain is pending and their biometric residence permit has expired? What counts as a valid check when someone holds a document type that does not appear on the standard list? How do you handle a share-code check that returns an unexpected result at 5pm on a Friday when the tenancy is due to start on Monday?
The Home Office guidance runs to dozens of pages and is updated periodically, but it does not always answer the question in front of you. Propertymark's concern is that agents are being asked to make quasi-immigration decisions without the training, tools, or clear reference points to do so reliably.
That concern is well-founded.
What the current rules actually require
The legal obligation falls on the landlord. Agents can carry out checks on a landlord's behalf, but the landlord remains liable if a check is not done correctly — unless there is a written agreement clearly delegating the responsibility to the agent.
That distinction matters enormously and is frequently misunderstood.
The mechanics of a compliant check depend on the tenant's nationality and immigration status:
- British and Irish citizens can be verified using a passport, birth certificate, or certain other documents.
- Non-EEA nationals with a biometric residence permit or eVisa are checked via the Home Office online share-code system.
- EU, EEA, and Swiss nationals who arrived before the end of the Brexit transition period and hold settled or pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme must also be checked online.
The online system sounds straightforward. In practice, share codes expire, tenants do not always know how to generate them, and the results are not always self-explanatory.
The follow-up check problem
One of the most commonly missed obligations is the follow-up check.
When a tenant has time-limited permission to be in the UK, the initial Right to Rent check does not close the file. You are required to diarise a follow-up check — typically twelve months after the initial check, or when the tenant's permission to be in the UK expires, whichever is sooner.
Miss that follow-up and you lose the statutory excuse that protects you from liability if the tenant's status has lapsed.
This is where many landlords with smaller portfolios fall down. It is not that they do not care about compliance — it is that there is no obvious system prompting them to act. A spreadsheet works until it does not.
What Propertymark is actually asking for
Propertymark is not asking for Right to Rent to be abolished. The ask is more targeted: clearer, scenario-based guidance that tells agents and landlords what to do in specific situations, rather than general principles that require legal interpretation to apply.
The specific gaps they have identified include:
- Better guidance on how to handle pending immigration applications
- Clearer instructions on what constitutes a valid manual check versus an online check
- More practical support for agents who are not immigration specialists but are nonetheless expected to make immigration-adjacent judgements
These are not unreasonable requests. The current guidance was written to be legally defensible, not operationally useful.
The Renters' Rights Act adds more pressure
Right to Rent compliance does not exist in isolation. The Renters' Rights Act is reshaping how tenancies are created and ended — and that reshaping has knock-on effects for when and how Right to Rent checks need to happen.
The abolition of fixed-term tenancies under the Act means that the tenancy lifecycle looks different. Agents and landlords who have built their compliance processes around the fixed-term model will need to revisit them.
There is also a broader point here: the regulatory burden on letting agents has increased substantially over the past few years, and it is not finished increasing. Each new obligation — Right to Rent, Awaab's Law, the Decent Homes Standard, EPC reform — is manageable in isolation. Together, they represent a significant operational load, particularly for smaller agencies.
What to do right now
Waiting for clearer guidance is not a compliance strategy. Here is what agents and landlords should be doing in the meantime:
1. Confirm who is responsible for checks in writing. If you are a landlord using an agent, make sure your agreement explicitly states whether the agent is carrying out Right to Rent checks on your behalf. Verbal arrangements are not enough.
2. Build a diarised follow-up system. Every time-limited Right to Rent check needs a follow-up date. If you do not have a system that surfaces these automatically, you are relying on memory — which is not a system.
3. Default to the online check where eligible. The Home Office online share-code system provides a statutory excuse when used correctly. Manual document checks can also provide a statutory excuse, but they require more careful handling of document authenticity.
4. Keep records. A compliant check that is not documented is, for practical purposes, a check that did not happen. Store copies of documents or share-code results, along with the date of the check and who carried it out.
5. Flag the edge cases before they become emergencies. Pending applications, expired documents, unusual immigration categories — these need to be escalated to someone with appropriate expertise, not resolved at the point of key handover.
The bigger picture
The problem Propertymark is highlighting is a systems problem, not a knowledge problem.
Most agents and landlords are not confused about whether Right to Rent checks are required. They are confused about what to do in specific, real-world situations — and they are operating without the infrastructure to manage the ongoing obligations that come with time-limited checks.
Clearer guidance from the Home Office would help. But the deeper fix is operational: processes that are repeatable, documented, and do not depend on any one person remembering to act.
Until the guidance improves, the compliance risk sits with whoever is named as responsible in the tenancy agreement. That is worth knowing before the next tenancy starts.
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