Right to Rent Checks: What Letting Agencies Are Still Getting Wrong

Right to Rent checks have been part of the lettings process in England for years. Yet they remain one of those compliance tasks that can appear straightforward while still leaving plenty of room for mistakes.

For estate agencies, the challenge is no longer simply knowing that a Right to Rent check needs to happen. It is making sure the right check is carried out, using the right route, at the right time — with evidence that can be relied upon later.

That distinction matters.

Under the Right to Rent Scheme, landlords and their agents can establish a statutory excuse against a civil penalty by carrying out the prescribed checks correctly. The Home Office currently sets civil penalties at up to £10,000 per occupier for a first breach and £20,000 per occupier for a repeat breach within three years.

And with updated Home Office codes of practice coming into force on 1 October 2026, now is a sensible time for agencies to look at where weaknesses can still creep into their processes.

Identity verification and Right to Rent are closely connected, but they are not interchangeable.

Confirming that an applicant is who they claim to be does not, by itself, establish their Right to Rent.

The relevant checking route depends on the applicant's circumstances. British and Irish citizens, for example, can generally establish their status through eligible documents or an appropriate digital verification service. Other applicants may need to use the Home Office online service and provide a Right to Rent share code.

This is where fragmented processes can cause problems. If identity verification happens in one system, immigration evidence is collected somewhere else and the final referencing decision sits in another, it becomes harder to see whether the complete requirement has actually been satisfied.

Right to Rent works best when it is treated as part of the wider applicant verification journey, rather than as an isolated administrative task.

The UK's move towards digital immigration status has changed what letting agencies should expect applicants to provide.

A particularly important example is Biometric Residence Permits and Biometric Residence Cards. These should not simply be accepted as proof of Right to Rent. GOV.UK directs landlords and agents to obtain a share code so that the applicant's status can be checked through the Home Office online service.

The distinction may sound technical, but it highlights a wider point:

• possessing a document is not necessarily the same as completing the prescribed check.

Letting agencies therefore need processes that reflect the current checking routes rather than workflows built around what applicants historically supplied.

Right to Rent should not begin with a judgement about who appears likely to need an immigration check.

The Home Office requires landlords and agents to check prospective adult occupiers consistently and warns against treating applicants differently because of nationality, ethnicity or other protected characteristics.

The current GOV.UK guidance is explicit that checks should be conducted on all prospective adult tenants, rather than only those believed not to be British citizens.

There is an important operational lesson here for agencies.

A consistent workflow is not simply more efficient. It reduces the opportunity for subjective decisions to enter a compliance process that should be applied systematically.

Some applicants have an unlimited Right to Rent. Others have a time-limited Right to Rent.

That difference matters long after the initial referencing process has finished.

Where a time-limited statutory excuse has been established, a further check may be required at the appropriate point. Missing that follow-up can mean losing the statutory excuse that the original check established.

For agencies managing hundreds or thousands of tenancies, this turns what initially looks like a document-checking exercise into something more operational:

Can you reliably identify which cases need attention again and when?

A successful initial check is only part of the picture if the applicant's status requires a future review.

In compliance, doing something and being able to demonstrate that it was done correctly are two different things.

Home Office guidance requires appropriate evidence of Right to Rent checks to be retained. For manual checks, copies should include a record of when the check was carried out. Evidence generally needs to be retained securely for the duration of the tenancy and for at least one year afterwards.

The same principle applies to online checks: the result of the Home Office check needs to form part of the record.

That makes the audit trail almost as important as the check itself.

A letting agency should not have to reconstruct what happened months later from emails, screenshots, downloads and notes spread across different systems.

Receiving a share code from an applicant is not the same thing as completing the Right to Rent check.

The share code is simply what enables the landlord or agent to access the applicant's Right to Rent information through the Home Office service. The check still has to be performed and the resulting information considered and retained appropriately.

It is a small distinction, but exactly the type of distinction that gets lost when compliance becomes a box-ticking exercise.

“Share code received” and “Right to Rent confirmed” are not the same status.

A well-designed referencing workflow should make that distinction obvious.

Perhaps the biggest issue is not one specific error at all. It is fragmentation.

Tenant details are collected during referencing. Identity is verified somewhere else. A share code arrives by email. Somebody checks GOV.UK. Evidence is downloaded. Another team member updates the CRM. The final tenant report is generated somewhere else again.

Every hand-off creates another opportunity for something to be missed.

For modern agencies, Right to Rent should sit naturally alongside the rest of the applicant journey: identity, referencing, affordability and compliance information brought together into a clear case record.

That does not remove the agency's responsibilities. It makes those responsibilities easier to manage consistently.

The Right to Rent Scheme continues to evolve alongside the UK's move towards digital immigration status and digital identity verification.

The Home Office has published an updated Right to Rent Code of Practice which comes into force on 1 October 2026. Among the changes are updated requirements around registered digital verification service providers, clearer provisions for digital Right to Rent checks, and updates to the types of digital documents that can be used as part of the process.

The government has also published a dedicated Supplementary Code for Digital Right to Rent Checks, setting out the rules applying to digital verification services supporting landlords and letting agents.

For agencies, that makes static processes increasingly risky.

A workflow designed around photocopying documents several years ago may no longer reflect the way applicants are expected to prove their status today.

The agencies best placed to manage this are not necessarily those adding more administration. They are the ones making compliance a structured part of their existing referencing process.

At Tenantviews, we believe Right to Rent should not feel like a separate compliance exercise bolted onto tenant referencing.

Our referencing platform brings applicant verification into a single workflow, helping estate agencies manage identity and Right to Rent alongside the wider referencing journey.

For British and Irish applicants, digital identity verification can form part of the process. Where an applicant needs to demonstrate their status through the Home Office service, the appropriate Right to Rent journey can be managed as part of the same application.

The result is a clearer process for your team, a smoother experience for applicants and a stronger record of what has been completed.

Because good referencing is not simply about collecting more information.

It is about making sure the right checks happen, at the right point, with a clear outcome behind them.