How Long Does a Landlord Have to Return a Deposit?

Your tenant has moved out and wants the deposit back. How long do you have? The answer is not "within 10 days of the tenant moving out". It is within 10 days of you and the tenant agreeing how much comes back. Those are very different clocks, and mixing them up is how landlords end up accused of holding a deposit too long.

This guide is the plain-English version: exactly what starts the 10-day clock, what you can lawfully take off, what happens if you cannot agree, and how the whole thing runs differently depending on which scheme holds the money.

This is guidance, not legal advice. Deposit rules are set by the Housing Act 2004 and your scheme's terms. Check your scheme and GOV.UK for your own situation.

The 10-day rule, precisely

Once you and the tenant have agreed the amount to be returned, the deposit (or the agreed portion of it) must be repaid within 10 calendar days of that agreement.

The key word is agreed. The clock does not start when the tenant moves out; it starts when there is an actual agreement on the figure. So if the tenant leaves on the 1st but you do not settle the deductions until the 20th, you have until the 30th to pay, and you are not "late" for the first 19 days, because there was nothing agreed yet.

One trap: silence is not agreement. If you email the tenant proposing deductions and they never reply, that is not them agreeing. It is an open dispute. Agreement means the tenant has clearly confirmed, usually in writing, that they accept the figure.

What you can lawfully deduct

You can only take money off for a genuine loss you can evidence. In practice that is:

• Unpaid rent or bills the tenant owes at the end.
• Damage beyond fair wear and tear, not the normal ageing of carpets and paint, but actual damage.
• Cleaning to bring the property back to the standard recorded at check-in, if the tenant left it worse.
• Missing items listed on the inventory.

Every one of those turns on evidence, which means the check-in inventory and the check-out report are what actually win or lose the money. A dated, photographed inventory that both sides signed is the difference between a deduction that sticks and one an adjudicator throws out. "It looked worse than before" without a check-in record almost always fails.

What happens if you cannot agree

If the tenant disputes your deductions, you do not get to just keep the money, and you should not sit on the whole deposit either. Two things happen:

1. 1Repay the undisputed part. If you are keeping £300 of a £900 deposit and the tenant only disputes the £300, the other £600 is agreed, so pay it within the 10 days. Holding the whole £900 because part is in dispute is itself a breach.
2. 2Use the scheme's free dispute resolution. TDS, DPS and mydeposits all offer free adjudication (ADR). You submit your evidence, the tenant submits theirs, an independent adjudicator decides. Their decision is based on the inventory and evidence, which is why the paperwork matters more than the argument.

Custodial vs insured: who actually holds the money

How the return happens depends on which type of scheme you used:

• Custodial (the scheme holds the money, e.g. the DPS free scheme). The money already sits with the scheme. After the tenancy ends the tenant can log in and request it back, which notifies you; you agree or propose deductions, and the scheme releases the agreed amount. You are never holding the cash.
• Insured (you hold the money and the scheme insures it, e.g. TDS Insured, mydeposits Insured). You keep the deposit in your own account during the tenancy and pay it back yourself within the 10 days of agreement. The 10-day discipline is entirely on you here.

Either way the 10-day-from-agreement rule applies; the difference is just whether the money is in your account or the scheme's.

Get this wrong and it is not just the deposit

The return timeline sits on top of the protection rules, and those carry the real teeth. If the deposit was never protected, or the Prescribed Information was never served, a tenant can claim one to three times the deposit and you lose the ability to use most possession grounds (all except Grounds 7A and 14) until it is put right. A slow return on a properly protected deposit is a smaller problem than a deposit that was never protected correctly in the first place, but both are avoidable with a system that tracks the dates.

How LetCompliance helps: the deposit and its protection deadline, the check-in inventory with its photos and the check-out evidence all sit on the same tenancy. When it ends, you have the dated record an agreement (or an adjudicator) is built from, next to the rent ledger that shows whether any rent is owed.

Sources

• GOV.UK: Tenancy deposit protection
• Shelter: How long for a deposit refund

Can a landlord keep the deposit for cleaning?

Only up to a point, and the rule surprises landlords who have used the same tenancy clause for years.

You cannot require a tenant to pay for professional cleaning as a blanket condition of the tenancy. Since the Tenant Fees Act 2019 that is a prohibited payment, and a clause saying "the property must be professionally cleaned at the end of the tenancy, with receipts" is unenforceable however clearly it was signed.

What you can do is deduct the reasonable cost of returning the property to the standard of cleanliness recorded at check-in. The comparison is against your inventory, not against an ideal. If the property was professionally cleaned before the tenant moved in and the check-in report says so, and it is returned dirty, a cleaning deduction is fair and adjudicators allow it routinely. If your check-in report says nothing about cleanliness, you are asking an adjudicator to take your word for it against the tenant's, and you will usually lose.

The same logic runs through every category of deduction. The deposit exists to put you back where you started, not to improve the property or to fund a refurbishment the tenancy happened to precede.

What counts as fair wear and tear?

This is where many deposit disputes start, and there is no formula. Adjudicators weigh four things.

How long the tenant lived there. Carpet that looks tired after five years is wear. The same carpet after eight months is damage.

How many people lived there. A family with young children will wear a property faster than a single professional, and that is expected rather than culpable.

The age and quality of the item at the start. A ten-year-old carpet has almost no life left to lose. You cannot charge a departing tenant for the last year of something that was already at the end of its life.

Betterment. You cannot end up better off. If a tenant damages a section of a worn carpet, you are entitled to a contribution towards its remaining value, not to a brand-new carpet at their expense. Adjudicators apportion this routinely, and landlords who claim full replacement cost usually receive a fraction.

In practice: scuffed paintwork after two years, minor carpet flattening, faded curtains and small marks around light switches are wear. Cigarette burns, pet scratching, a cracked hob, mould from a blocked and unreported vent, and holes from unapproved shelving are damage.

Evidence decides all of it. Dated photographs at check-in and check-out, a signed inventory, and receipts or quotes for what you are claiming. Without those, the scheme's default is to return the money to the tenant.

What if the landlord will not return the deposit?

Worth setting out plainly, because tenants search for this and landlords should know how it looks from the other side.

If the deposit was protected, the tenant raises a dispute through the scheme's free adjudication. The disputed amount is frozen; the undisputed part must still be paid out. The landlord submits evidence, the tenant responds, and an adjudicator decides on documents alone. There is no hearing, and it is for the landlord to justify each deduction, so thin evidence usually means the money goes back to the tenant.

If the deposit was never protected, adjudication is not available and the tenant applies to the county court. The court must award between one and three times the deposit, with no discretion to go below one times, on top of returning the deposit itself. And on most grounds, the court cannot make a Section 8 possession order against that tenant until it is put right, by protecting it and giving the prescribed information (late still counts) or by returning it.

The practical lesson for landlords is the same at both ends of the tenancy: this is an evidence process, not an argument. The landlord who wins is not the one who is most obviously right, but the one whose check-in report, photographs and receipts make the answer obvious to someone who has never seen the property.