Right to Rent checkinstant results in your browser

Right to Rent is a landlord duty in England under the Immigration Act 2014. Before a tenancy starts you must check that every adult who will occupy the property as their only or main home has the right to rent in the UK. Do it correctly and you have a "statutory excuse" — a defence against a civil penalty (up to £5,000 per lodger and £10,000 per occupier, with criminal liability for knowingly renting to a disqualified person). Skip it, check the wrong way, or miss a follow-up, and you lose that protection. This wizard tells you which of the three check routes applies and whether you will need to check again.

The check method depends on what status and documents the occupier has. British and Irish citizens can be checked either by a manual check of a valid passport (or Irish passport card) or digitally through a certified Identity Service Provider using Identity Document Validation Technology (IDVT). Most other people now hold digital immigration status — an eVisa, EU Settlement Scheme status, or what used to be a biometric residence permit — and must be checked online using a share code at gov.uk/prove-right-to-rent. Crucially, since 1 October 2022 a manual document check no longer gives a statutory excuse for digital-status holders, even if they show you a physical card.

The online share-code check is now the workhorse of Right to Rent. The prospective tenant generates a share code from their own gov.uk account and gives it to you with their date of birth; you enter both on the landlord checking page and see a result that confirms their right to rent and, importantly, whether it is unlimited or time-limited. You should keep a copy of the online check result. If a person genuinely cannot provide documents or a share code — for example, an outstanding Home Office application — you use the Home Office Landlord Checking Service, which returns a Positive Right to Rent Notice valid for six to twelve months.

The unlimited-versus-time-limited distinction is what drives follow-up checks. British and Irish citizens and people with settled status or indefinite leave to remain have an unlimited right to rent: you check once and never again for that tenancy. People on a time-limited visa — skilled worker, student, pre-settled status, dependants — have a time-limited right, and you must carry out a follow-up check before their permission expires to keep your statutory excuse running. Diary that date the moment you do the initial check; the most common Right to Rent failure is not a bad first check but a forgotten follow-up.

Process discipline protects you in two directions. First, you must check every adult occupier, not just the named tenant — a partner, an adult child or a friend who moves in is within scope. Second, you must apply exactly the same process to everyone and never base a letting decision on someone’s nationality, accent or perceived immigration status; doing so risks unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, and the Government’s own code of practice warns landlords against it. The safe posture is a uniform check for every applicant, recorded identically, with the evidence retained.

Keep the evidence for the life of the tenancy and for a year after it ends. For a manual check that means a clear copy of the document, dated and marked as checked in the presence of the holder; for an online check, the profile page from the checking service; for the Landlord Checking Service, the Positive Right to Rent Notice. If you ever face a civil penalty referral, the statutory excuse stands or falls on whether you can produce the right evidence for the right person at the right time — which is exactly the record this wizard helps you structure.