A new statutory code of practice for right to rent checks takes effect on 1 October 2026, replacing the one that has run since February 2024. If you check documents by hand or through the share code service, very little about your process changes. If you use a digital identity provider, one thing does: from October they have to be registered, and using an unregistered one won't give you a statutory excuse.

Scope: England only. Right to rent doesn't apply in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, which trips up anyone running one process across the border.

The Basic Obligation

Section 22 of the Immigration Act 2014 says a landlord shouldn't authorise an adult to occupy property in England as their only or main home under a tenancy agreement where that person is disqualified by their immigration status.

The check happens before the tenancy is entered into. It covers every adult aged 18 or over who'll live there as their only or main home, including British citizens, including people who aren't named on the agreement, whether the agreement is written, oral or implied.

Do it properly and you get a statutory excuse, which is your defence against a civil penalty if it later turns out someone had no right to rent. The statutory code governs all of it, with a Landlord's guide alongside for the step-by-step.

What's Actually Changing

Five things, per the Home Office. Clearer wording on when checks must happen. Mandated use of registered providers where a DVSP is involved. An expanded account of what DVSPs can do. Alignment with updated digital guidance. And updated document lists that now include digital versions a landlord can verify.

Only the second of those is likely to change how you work.

A second code lands the same day. The discrimination code has also been updated, applying to tenancy agreements commencing on or after 1 October and to follow-up checks required from then. That one deserves attention if your process is digital-first, and there's a section on it further down.

One point of mechanics people get wrong. Which code applies depends what's being assessed. Whether you did a check correctly is judged against the code in force when you did it. The penalty amount is set by the code in force on the date of the breach. So a September check can sit alongside a breach assessed under the new framework if that breach happened on or after 1 October.

Three Ways to Check

1. Manual:
   Original documents from List A or List B. Check they're genuine and the person in front of you is the rightful holder, in person or by video. Copy each one clearly, front and back where relevant, in a format nobody can alter, and record the date.

2. Online:
   Where someone has an eVisa you must use the Home Office service via their share code. No other portal counts. And viewing the tenant's own version of the service isn't enough, you need the landlord-facing one, and you need to check the photograph is of the person in front of you.

3. DVSP:
   A right to rent digital verification service provider can verify British and Irish passports, including up to six months past expiry, plus List A and B documents supplied digitally by whoever issued them. They can also run facial recognition.

That last route is where the October change bites. The provider has to appear on the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes register with a note saying they can do right to rent checks. Using a DVSP isn't compulsory, but if you use one, it has to be a registered one.

Worth knowing separately: if you want facial recognition at all, it has to go through a DVSP, whichever checking route you're on. Keep the comparison with the document copy, and give the person a fair chance to verify themselves if the technology can't match them.

Timing

Someone with an unlimited right to rent can be checked at any point before the agreement is entered into.

Someone with a time-limited right to rent must be checked and recorded no earlier than 28 calendar days before the tenancy starts.

That second one catches people. Check too early on a time-limited case and you haven't established the excuse at all. There's an exception for people arranging accommodation from overseas before arriving for work or study. In those cases you can check before they take up occupation rather than before the agreement begins.

The Two Document Lists

List A is for unlimited right to rent and gives you a continuous excuse with no follow-up.

1. Group 1 needs one document: a British or Irish passport, current or expired, an Irish passport card, certain Channel Islands or Isle of Man documents verified by the Landlord Checking Service, a travel document endorsed with indefinite leave or right of abode, an immigration status document showing indefinite leave, or a certificate of registration or naturalisation.

2. Group 2 needs two, from a much longer list. UK birth or adoption certificates, driving licences, DBS certificates, letters from government departments, employers, prisons, probation officers, homelessness charities, and universities confirming acceptance on a course.

A clipped passport is cancelled and doesn't count.

List B is for time-limited right to rent and gives you a time-limited excuse that needs following up. Unexpired passports endorsed with limited leave, current immigration status documents, certain EUSS application documents alongside a Positive Right to Rent Notice, and visitor passports from specified countries together with evidence of arriving in the last six months.

How Long the Excuse Lasts

For a List B check, your excuse runs until the latest of three dates: one year from the last check, the day the person's permission to be in the UK expires, or the day their document expires.

Follow up before it runs out. Do it late and you may be asked to explain yourself.

If they can't show a continued right to rent, report it to the Home Office to keep your excuse. That generates a reference number, which you keep.

Two limits on that. The report has to be made as soon as reasonably practicable, and before the excuse expires. And reporting can't manufacture an excuse you never had. Skip the initial check and no amount of later reporting fixes it.

The Landlord Checking Service

Some situations you can't resolve yourself. Non-digital EUSS Certificates of Application. People with outstanding applications or appeals. Digital status errors. Asylum seekers. Long-term residents who arrived before 1988 without acceptable documents.

In those cases you contact the LCS, and you wait. Don't enter the tenancy until you've heard back. They answer within two working days with a yes or a no and a reference number. A Positive Right to Rent Notice gives you an excuse for 12 months. A Negative one means the person has no right to rent, and going ahead anyway leaves you with nothing.

There's a useful provision if they're slow. No response within two working days and you get an automatic reply saying you can let the property, which also carries a 12-month excuse. Keep whatever they send you. Without it, no excuse.

Where the Liability Sits

With the landlord, meaning whoever authorises occupation under an agreement providing for rent. But it moves in three situations.

Appoint an agent and the agent can accept responsibility in writing, at which point the civil penalty exposure is theirs rather than the landlord's. It can't be passed any further down the chain. For agencies this is the whole ballgame: a written acceptance puts the money on you, so make sure that agreement also covers follow-up checks and not just the first one.

An occupier who sublets becomes the responsible landlord themselves, unless it's formally transferred in writing to the superior landlord. Where a superior landlord does accept, they're treated as having authorised the sub-tenants and have to identify everyone, verify them and handle follow-ups.

And then there's buying a property with people already in it, which is the one that catches investors.

Confirm with the seller that checks were done and keep the evidence, including copies of the documents. Note when follow-ups are due. Then understand how liability actually falls, because it splits. If the occupier had no right to rent when the tenancy was granted, the original landlord stays liable even after the sale. But if they had one and later lost it, and nobody did the follow-up, the landlord at the point the breach is found carries it.

Buying doesn't inherit the old breach. It does inherit the follow-up obligation. Get the dates. For tenancies granted before the scheme existed you don't need to confirm a check happened, but keep evidence of the start date.

When It Applies, and When You Need a Fresh Check

Some arrangements sit outside the scheme entirely. Local authority accommodation, accommodation provided under immigration provisions, social housing, care homes, hospitals, hospices, hostels, refuges, mobile homes under the 1983 Act, tied accommodation, student accommodation and long leases.

Children aren't checked, and there's no check required when someone turns 18 mid-tenancy, though they should be included in follow-ups when those come round.

House guests usually aren't occupiers, because they're not living there as their only or main home. But if someone is living there as their main home and paying rent to another occupier, they may have their own tenancy agreement, and it falls to that occupier to check them.

Holiday accommodation is outside the scheme, though the Home Office reckons bookings of three months or more may point to someone using the place as their main home.

Where the scheme does apply, you need a check on all adult occupiers before an agreement is entered into. That includes a tenancy being varied to bring in new adults, assigned so new adults take over an existing tenancy, or surrendered and replaced with a new joint tenancy including new people.

What doesn't count as a new agreement: anything arising from a court order, statutory provision or operation of law, and a tenancy continuing between the same parties at the end of a term where the tenant exercised a contractual right. That last exclusion matters under the current tenancy framework.

The Money

Per disqualified individual, not per property. Three disqualified occupiers is three separate calculations.

A repeat breach means you've had a Civil Penalty Notice before and exhausted objection and appeal rights, within the preceding three years.

Pay a first penalty within 21 calendar days of the Civil Penalty Notice or Objection Outcome Notice and the Faster Payment Option knocks 30% off, taking £5,000 to £3,500 and £10,000 to £7,000. It doesn't apply to repeat breaches or where you've arranged instalments.

You can object within 28 calendar days on three grounds: you're not liable, you have an excuse, or the figure is wrong. Objecting before the deadline keeps your Faster Payment eligibility. After that it's the County Court, again within 28 days, where they can uphold, cancel or reduce the penalty, and can order you to pay the Home Office's costs if you lose.

Sitting behind all of it, knowingly renting to a disqualified person is a criminal offence carrying up to five years.

How You Lose the Excuse

The code sets out the failures plainly. You have no excuse if you can't evidence checks were done before the agreement, if it was reasonably apparent the person wasn't the rightful holder of the document, if it was reasonably apparent the document was false, if you relied on a DVSP check where the result was obviously wrong or the requirements weren't met, if you used an online check that wasn't the official GOV.UK service, if the check showed no right to rent, or if your time-limited excuse had already expired.

"Reasonably apparent" means what an untrained person, looking carefully but briefly and without any technology, could reasonably be expected to notice.

Records

Keep the check for the length of the tenancy plus one year, then destroy it securely.

That's a defined retention period on immigration data, so store it accordingly and don't hand it to contractors or guarantors.

Structured tenancy and property records holding checks, dates, LCS references and follow-up deadlines against each tenancy are the difference between producing an excuse and reconstructing one.

The Discrimination Code

Updated for 1 October 2026 alongside the main one, and worth reading if your process leans on technology.

The core rule hasn't moved: check every adult occupier, whether or not you think they're legally here. People who face unlawful discrimination can claim compensation in the civil courts.

What's been strengthened is the digital side. Apply checks consistently to everyone. Don't make assumptions from colour, nationality, ethnic or national origins, accent or how long someone has been in the UK. Don't treat people differently because of how they evidence their right to rent. Don't treat people with time-limited rights less favourably.

And two aimed directly at automated processes: don't favour people whose status is easier to verify, and make sure digital or automated systems don't produce discriminatory outcomes.

That first one deserves a moment if you run automated onboarding. The convenience of a share code is not a lawful basis for preferring one applicant over another.

The same thinking sits behind England's rules on children and benefits, which our guide to rental discrimination for letting agents covers.

Before October

Check whether your DVSP is on the OfDIA register with a right to rent note. That's the one with a hard date.

Look at your applicant journey and ask whether it's smoother for people with share codes than for people without. If it is, that's now an explicit concern in the discrimination code.

Audit your follow-up dates, because every time-limited excuse has an expiry and missing one loses it outright.

If you're an agent accepting responsibility, check the written agreement covers follow-ups and not just the initial check. If you're a landlord using an agent, check it exists in writing at all.

Confirm your retention is tenancy plus a year, and your check window on time-limited cases is no earlier than 28 calendar days before the start.

In Short

Right to rent gets treated as a formality more than almost any other obligation in lettings, and it carries some of the sharpest penalties. Twenty thousand pounds per occupier on a repeat breach, counted per person rather than per property.

The protection is entirely procedural. Check before occupation. Follow up before the excuse expires. Report when the position changes. Keep the record for the tenancy plus a year. Get that sequence right and you can establish a statutory excuse against civil penalty liability, even if it later emerges the occupier had no right to rent.

The October change is narrow but it has a date on it. If you verify digitally, the provider needs to be registered, and your process needs to treat everyone the same regardless of how their status gets checked. Five weeks is enough time to sort that. Not much more.

FAQ

1. Who needs checking?
Every adult aged 18 or over who'll live there as their only or main home. British citizens included. People not named on the agreement included. Under-18s aren't checked.

2. When?
Before the agreement is entered into. Any time beforehand for someone with an unlimited right to rent. No earlier than 28 calendar days before the start date for someone with a time-limited one.

3. What does it cost to get wrong?
£5,000 per lodger or £10,000 per occupier for a first breach in three years. Double that for a repeat. Calculated per disqualified individual, so several occupiers means several penalties. Pay a first penalty within 21 days and it drops by 30%.

4. What actually changes on 1 October?
A new statutory code, plus an updated discrimination code. In practice, the change that affects most people is that digital identity verification now has to go through a provider registered with the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes.

5. Can an agent carry the liability?
Yes, where they accept responsibility in writing. It then sits with the agent rather than the landlord, and can't be passed on again.

Important Notice

This article applies to England only. Right to rent does not apply in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

Information was checked against the Home Office statutory codes of practice coming into force on 1 October 2026, published 30 June 2026 and available as at 24 August 2026. Whether a prescribed check was carried out correctly is assessed against the code in force when the check was made. The civil penalty amount is determined by the code in force at the date of the breach. The discrimination code applies to tenancy agreements commencing on or after 1 October 2026 and to follow-up checks required on or after that date.

Always check the current codes and the Landlord's guide to right to rent checks on GOV.UK before conducting checks.

This content is general information only and does not constitute legal advice. RIOO is not a law firm. Knowingly renting to a disqualified person is a criminal offence. Consult a solicitor where immigration status is unclear.