Lodger or tenant: which one have you actually got?

Most people decide this by what they call it. They advertise a "room to rent", the person moves in, everyone says "lodger", and that word quietly settles the tax, the licensing, the deposit and how the arrangement can be ended. None of which the word actually decides.

The law does not care what either of you called it. It looks at the arrangement, and the single fact that matters most is where you live. Get that reading wrong and you are not slightly off: you may be running an unlicensed HMO, holding an unprotected deposit, claiming a tax relief you were never entitled to, and one bad afternoon away from committing a criminal offence by changing the locks.

The word is not the test

There is no legal category called "lodger". It is ordinary English for a common arrangement, and the arrangement usually creates a licence rather than a tenancy.

The difference between the two turns on exclusive possession: whether the occupier has the right to exclude everyone, including you, from their part of the property. Somebody with their own front door, their own space and no expectation that you will come and go has exclusive possession, and that tends to be a tenancy however the paperwork is headed. Somebody living in your home, sharing your kitchen, whose room you can enter, does not.

You cannot fix this with wording. A document titled "lodger agreement" does not make a licence out of an arrangement that has every feature of a tenancy, and a landlord relying on the heading rather than the facts is relying on the one thing a court will look past first.

Where you live decides most of it

The statute puts it plainly. Under the Protection from Eviction Act 1977, section 3A, an occupier is "excluded" where two things are both true:

> "(a) under its terms the occupier shares any accommodation with the landlord or licensor; and

>

> (b) immediately before the tenancy or licence was granted and also at the time it comes to an end, the landlord or licensor occupied as his only or principal home premises of which the whole or part of the shared accommodation formed part."

Read (b) twice, because it carries two dates. You must be living there when the arrangement starts and when it ends. A live-in landlord who moves out a year later has not simply changed address: the exclusion in (b) stops applying, and the arrangement is no longer what it was on day one.

Section 3A(3) extends this to sharing with a member of the landlord's family, with two extra conditions: the landlord must occupy premises in the same building, and the building must not be a purpose-built block of flats.

So the practical test is short. Do you live there, and do you share living space with them? If yes to both, you are almost certainly in lodger territory. If no to either, start from the assumption that you have a tenancy and work back from there.

Four things change if you have this wrong

1. The tax relief you are claiming. Rent a Room is for a resident landlord. Let a room in a property you do not live in and the relief is not available, whatever you called the occupier. The rent is ordinary property income and belongs on your return with everything else.

2. Licensing. A property let to several unrelated people who share a kitchen or bathroom can be a house in multiple occupation, and in many areas an HMO needs a licence before the first person moves in, not after somebody complains. Councils also run selective and additional licensing schemes covering ordinary lets, and the penalties for operating unlicensed include a rent repayment order. Our HMO licence checker is a faster starting point than a council website, but the council's own designation is the answer.

3. The deposit. A tenancy deposit taken under an assured shorthold tenancy has to be protected in an approved scheme and the prescribed information served, within a deadline. A licence fee from a genuine lodger is not that. If you believed you had a lodger and actually had a tenant, the money in your account is an unprotected deposit and the penalty is a multiple of it. The deposit protection deadline calculator will tell you where you stand.

4. How it ends. This is the one that turns an expensive mistake into a criminal one, and it has its own section below.

Rent a Room: what it actually covers

GOV.UK sets out the scheme in short terms. You can earn "£7,500 per year tax-free from letting out furnished accommodation in your home", and "the threshold is halved to £3,750 if you share the income with someone else", which catches jointly owned homes and couples splitting the rent.

Three conditions are worth reading carefully:

The accommodation must be furnished. And the threshold is gross: it is £7,500 of receipts, not £7,500 of profit, so you cannot deduct expenses and then measure the remainder against it. If your receipts exceed the threshold you choose between paying tax on the excess and being taxed normally with expenses deducted, and which is better depends on your costs.

Getting someone out: the difference is a court order

For a tenant, ending the arrangement means a valid notice on the right ground and, if they do not leave, a possession order from the court. Since Section 21 was abolished for new notices, that means Section 8 with a ground you can actually prove.

An excluded occupier under section 3A sits outside that protection. The practical consequence is that the elaborate statutory process does not apply to them in the same way.

Do not read that as permission to act. Two things should stop you:

First, whether somebody is excluded depends on the facts in section 3A being true at the moment the arrangement ends, not on what was true when they moved in. If you have moved out, or the sharing has stopped, the exclusion may have gone with it.

Second, removing an occupier who turns out not to be excluded is not a civil mistake. Unlawful eviction and harassment are criminal offences under the Protection from Eviction Act, and the fact that you sincerely believed you had a lodger is not a defence to having been wrong.

If you are anywhere near this, get advice on the specific facts before you do anything. It is a cheap conversation compared with the alternative, and it is the one part of this guide where reading an article is not enough.

The grey areas that catch people out

You moved out. Section 3A(2)(b) needs you living there at both ends. Landlords who take a job elsewhere, move in with a partner, or spend six months abroad often keep calling the arrangement a lodger arrangement long after the thing that made it one has gone.

The room has its own everything. A room with its own kitchen, bathroom and lockable door, in a property where you also live, starts to look like a self-contained unit rather than shared accommodation. Rent a Room says in terms that it does not cover homes converted into separate flats, and the exclusion in section 3A depends on sharing accommodation.

It is your family member who lives there, not you. Section 3A(3) allows for this, but adds conditions: same building, and not a purpose-built block of flats. A flat you own in a block, where your brother lives next door, does not qualify.

Two lodgers, then three. Adding people changes the property, not just the arithmetic. Enough occupiers from enough households sharing facilities and you may have created an HMO in a home you live in, which is a category that surprises people every year.

You never wrote anything down. No agreement does not mean no tenancy. It means a tenancy on terms nobody recorded, which is worse for you than for them.

If you have a tenancy and thought you had a lodger

Work through it in this order, because the deadlines are not the same.

Deposit first. It has the tightest clock and the largest penalty relative to the sum involved. Find out whether the money you hold is a tenancy deposit, and if it is, protect it and serve the prescribed information now rather than after you have decided what to do about everything else.

Then licensing. Check whether the property needs an HMO, selective or additional licence in that council's area. Applying late is better than being found unlicensed, and a rent repayment order can reach back over rent already received.

Then the agreement. Put the arrangement in writing on the correct footing. Since 1 May 2026 a new letting is a periodic assured tenancy, and the written statement of terms has its own duty and its own penalty. Our guide to what a tenancy agreement must contain covers the current requirements, and the free tenancy agreement template produces one you can use.

Then the tax. If you claimed Rent a Room on income that was never eligible, that is a correction to make deliberately and early rather than a thing to hope nobody notices.

Then the evidence. A tenancy you did not know you had is usually a tenancy with no inventory, which is the document that decides deposit disputes. Our inventory and check-in guide sets out what adjudicators accept.

The short version

Ask one question before anything else: do I live there, and do we share living space?

Both yes, and you are probably a resident landlord with a lodger, Rent a Room is available, and section 3A may apply when it ends. Either one no, and you should proceed as though you have a tenant, with everything that follows: protection, licensing, a written agreement, and a proper route if it ever has to end.

The expensive version of this mistake is not the tax. It is discovering all four duties at once, years late, usually because somebody has asked for their deposit back.

Start free with one property and LetCompliance will track the certificate dates, the deposit deadline and the licensing position for you, so the answer to "what do I owe on this let" is on a screen instead of in your head.

Further reading: What a tenancy agreement must contain · Inventory and check-in · HMO compliance