Best rent collection software for UK landlords (2026)

For UK landlords who want rent collected and everything after it done automatically, LetCompliance is the pick on this list: rent is collected by Direct Debit, marked paid and receipted, with arrears tracked, from £7.99 a month with no commission on the rent. There are three ways to automate rent: a Direct Debit you collect, a standing order read by an Open Banking feed, or a card payment link. GoCardless supplies the Direct Debit rails, with automatic retries through Success+; Hammock matches incoming rent to the tenancy through Open Banking; and PayProp automates reconciliation and landlord disbursement for agencies. In LetCompliance the collected rent settles into your own bank account, a PDF receipt goes to the tenant, the ledger and SA105 tax pack update, and a failed payment shows as arrears, worked out against the Section 8 Ground 8 threshold for weekly, fortnightly and monthly rent. With arrears chasing switched on, the tenant is reminded on a schedule, after LetCompliance has shown what the first run would send. Rent can be set weekly, fortnightly, every four weeks or monthly for each tenancy, and one request asks every tenant not yet asked to set up a Direct Debit. Direct Debit collection is on every paid plan. Stripe charges 1% of each Direct Debit payment with a 20p minimum and a £4 cap, and £5 for a disputed payment.

Collect rent by a traceable method straight into your own bank account, ideally Direct Debit or bank transfer rather than cash, and keep a dated record of every payment against the tenancy. Security has three parts: where the money goes, who can change the payment, and what proof you keep. Rent that settles in your own account never sits with a middleman, a Direct Debit is collected from your side on a fixed date, and a receipt for every payment settles any argument about what was paid. Do not add a card fee on top: UK law does not let you pass it on to a tenant. In LetCompliance rent is collected by Direct Debit, or by card through a payment link, through Stripe into your own connected account and never through LetCompliance; each payment is receipted and logged, and LetCompliance takes no commission on it, from £7.99 a month.

Online rent collection platforms do not replace deposit protection: in England a deposit must go into one of the three government-approved schemes within 30 days of receiving it, with the Prescribed Information given to the tenant in the same 30 days. Rent collection and deposit protection are separate legal duties, and collecting rent by Direct Debit changes nothing about the deposit. Miss the deadline and a court can order you to pay the tenant between one and three times the deposit. What software can do is keep the clock and the paperwork next to the rent: LetCompliance runs the deposit’s 30-day protection clock, produces the Prescribed Information and checks the amount against the legal cap, on the same tenancy as the rent, from £7.99 a month.

Look for software that needs your bank details once and a Direct Debit mandate from the tenant online, pays into your own account, and bills monthly with no set-up fee; LetCompliance does all four from £7.99 a month. Set-up costs differ: PayProp charges a one-off set-up fee of £600 to £2,000 on top of its licence, while GoCardless publishes a per-transaction price and the landlord tools on this list publish monthly plans. Lock-in is mostly about where the money and the records sit: rent paid into your own account leaves nothing to move if you change software. In LetCompliance the tenant signs the Direct Debit mandate on a Stripe page, the rent goes to your own Stripe account, and your records export as PDF and CSV on any plan.

The most reliable rental payment solutions over the long term are Direct Debit services that report a failed collection back to you, such as LetCompliance; a standing order that stops simply leaves the rent missing. Beyond the payment method, check the provider’s track record and recent reviews on an independent site such as Trustpilot, whether its prices are published, and where the money settles. On this list, rent settles in the landlord’s own account with GoCardless, Hammock, Landlord Studio, Lendlord and LetCompliance, and in a client account with PayProp. LetCompliance collects through Stripe, marks a failed Direct Debit against the tenancy, keeps the arrears total up to date and, with arrears chasing switched on, reminds the tenant on a schedule, from £7.99 a month with no commission on the rent; its reviews are on Trustpilot.

Direct Debit is better if you want the collection in your hands and early warning when it fails; a standing order is fine for a long-standing tenant who always pays. A standing order is set up and controlled by the tenant, which means only they can change or cancel it, and you find out it stopped when the money does not arrive. A Direct Debit is set up under a mandate the tenant signs once, so the collection is initiated on your side, the date is fixed and a failure is reported back to you. Standing orders cost nothing and are fine with a long-standing reliable tenant; Direct Debit costs a small transaction fee and gives you control and early warning. Open Banking sits in between: the tenant pushes the payment, but the software reads and reconciles it automatically.

Bacs Direct Debit is normally priced as a small percentage per transaction with a cap, so on a typical rent it lands in the low single-digit pounds per collection rather than a percentage of the whole rent. Open Banking routes can be cheaper still, sometimes free, because they read a payment the tenant makes rather than initiating one. The number to check is not just the headline rate but whether the software adds its own commission on top of the payment cost, and whether the money reaches your account or an intermediary account first.

No. Rent is collected by Bacs Direct Debit through Stripe into the landlord’s own connected account, and LetCompliance takes no commission on the rent. Stripe charges 1% of each Direct Debit payment with a 20p minimum and a £4 cap, and £5 for a disputed payment. LetCompliance adds nothing to it. For collecting the rent, the subscription is the only thing LetCompliance charges.

Yes, if the software models rooms as first-class tenancies rather than treating the property as one lump. LetCompliance schedules rent per room, due weekly, fortnightly, every four weeks or monthly, with its own arrears position for each sharer, which matters in a house share where one room falls behind and the rest are current. Tools built around a single rent per property tend to force you into a workaround here.

Good rent collection software spots the missed payment, records it against the tenancy, chases the tenant on a schedule without you writing the emails, and keeps a running arrears total. This is the real differentiator: a payment service reports the failure and can retry it, but the arrears record sits in whatever software it is connected to. In England that total matters legally: Section 8 Ground 8 turns on how much rent is unpaid at both service and hearing, so an arrears figure that is calculated rather than estimated is worth having before you ever need it. In LetCompliance a failed Direct Debit shows as arrears on the tenancy, the arrears are worked out against the Section 8 rent grounds, and with arrears chasing switched on the tenant is reminded on a schedule.