Handing over the keys without a right to rent check is one of the fastest ways for a landlord in England to walk into a five-figure penalty. The check itself takes minutes. What trips people up is the paperwork around it: which documents count, what must be copied, what date must be noted, and how long the file has to sit in a drawer or a cloud folder before it can be destroyed. Since the civil penalties were sharply increased in February 2024, the Home Office no longer treats a missing record as a technicality. This guide sets out what the law actually requires a landlord to verify and record before any adult moves in, and how to keep a statutory excuse that will hold up if an enforcement officer ever asks to see it.
What a right to rent check actually involves
A right to rent check is the verification that every adult who will live in the property has lawful immigration status allowing them to rent in England. The duty applies to every occupier aged 18 or over, whether or not their name appears on the tenancy agreement. An adult son moving in with his parents, a partner joining mid-tenancy with your consent, a friend who "just stays over" but treats the address as their main home: all of them fall within the scheme. Nationality is irrelevant to the duty itself. British citizens must be checked exactly like anyone else, and applying stricter scrutiny to tenants with foreign-sounding names is unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act 2010.
The check must happen before the tenancy begins and before occupation, not on move-in day once the deposit has cleared. It also applies to arrangements that are not tenancies in the strict sense. A landlord who takes in a lodger under a licence must run the same verification, which is why a properly drafted lodger agreement structured as an excluded occupier licence should always sit alongside a dated check record. The scheme applies in England only: landlords in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have no equivalent statutory duty, although many still verify identity as part of referencing.
Legal framework
The scheme sits in sections 20 to 37 of the Immigration Act 2014 and has applied across England since 1 February 2016, after a pilot in the West Midlands. A landlord who lets to a person disqualified by their immigration status faces a civil penalty of up to £10,000 per occupier for a first breach and £20,000 for a repeat breach, with lower bands of £5,000 and £10,000 where the occupier is a lodger in the landlord's own home. Those figures date from 13 February 2024, when the government multiplied the previous maximums several times over. Beyond the civil regime, section 33A of the Immigration Act 2014, inserted by the Immigration Act 2016, makes it a criminal offence to let premises knowing, or with reasonable cause to believe, that the occupier has no right to rent. Conviction carries up to five years' imprisonment and an unlimited fine.
The landlord's shield is the statutory excuse. A compliant check, carried out on time and properly documented, is a complete defence against the civil penalty even if the tenant's status later turns out to be defective. The excuse stands or falls on the record: the Home Office guidance is explicit that a landlord who cannot produce the copies and the date of the check may be treated as never having checked at all. The official requirements, including the acceptable document lists and the code of practice on avoiding discrimination, are set out in the government guidance on checking a tenant's right to rent. The Renters' Rights Act 2025 left the checking duty untouched, but it reshaped the consequences, as we will see below.
The three routes to a compliant check
There are now three ways to verify status, and the tenant's situation dictates which one is open to you. The first is the manual document check. You examine original documents from the Home Office lists in the physical or live-video presence of the holder, satisfy yourself that they appear genuine and belong to the person in front of you, and take clear copies. A current or expired British or Irish passport gives an unlimited right to rent and the check never needs repeating. Certain combinations also work, such as a UK birth certificate paired with an official document showing the person's National Insurance number.
The second route is the Home Office online service. Anyone whose status is held digitally, which now covers eVisa holders and everyone whose biometric residence permit has lapsed as physical evidence, generates a nine-character share code beginning with the letter R. You enter that code and the tenant's date of birth on the official GOV.UK checking page, compare the photograph on screen with the person, and save the result page. No other portal gives you a statutory excuse, and a share code issued for work purposes, starting with a W, will simply not run. The code stays valid for 90 days and can be reused within that window.
The third route uses an identity service provider (IDSP), a digital verification service certified by the Home Office, available for British and Irish citizens holding a valid passport. It produces an equivalent excuse to a manual check, provided the provider appears on the official list. Whichever route applies, if the tenant's documents are held by the Home Office because of a pending application, you request a check from the Landlord Checking Service, which answers yes or no within two working days and, on a positive answer, gives you a twelve-month excuse.
What must be recorded before the keys change hands
This is where most penalties are actually won or lost. For a manual check, you must keep a copy of every document examined, in hard copy or in a format that cannot be altered, a PDF or JPEG rather than an editable file. You must record the date on which the check was carried out, either as a dated declaration written on the copy itself or in a separate secure record. For an online check, you save a clear copy of the profile result page showing the photograph, the outcome and any expiry date. For an IDSP check, you retain the output the provider gives you.
Retention has a fixed horizon: the records must be kept securely for the duration of the tenancy plus at least one year after it ends, then securely destroyed. Right to rent copies are personal data under the UK GDPR, so holding them indefinitely is itself a breach in the other direction. A check without a dated, retrievable record is worth nothing: the Home Office may treat it as if it never happened. Where the result shows a time-limited right to rent, one more entry belongs in the file before anyone moves in: the date the permission expires, diarised, because that date drives your follow-up duty.
Follow-up checks and Ground 7B
Where the initial check relies on time-limited permission, the timing rules tighten at both ends. The check itself must be done within the 28 days before the tenancy starts, and a follow-up check is required before your initial excuse runs out. If the follow-up shows the occupier has lost the right to rent, or the occupier refuses to cooperate, you must report it to the Home Office using the online form as soon as reasonably possible, keeping the reference number the form generates. The report preserves your excuse; silence destroys it and, if you knew the position, exposes you to prosecution.
The Renters' Rights Act 2025 then changed what happens next. Because every assured tenancy is now periodic with no fixed end date, follow-up checks continue for as long as a time-limited occupier stays, not merely until a renewal. And where the Home Office serves notice that an occupier is disqualified, the landlord can seek possession under Ground 7B, a Section 8 ground under the Housing Act 1988. A possession claim rises or falls on its evidence, and the check record you kept two years earlier becomes an exhibit; a properly drafted witness statement complying with CPR Part 32 is the vehicle for putting that record before the court.
Building your check record on Captain.Legal
A landlord can assemble all of this in a spreadsheet, but a structured document is faster and far harder for an enforcement officer to pick apart. The Right to Rent Check Record designed around the Immigration Act 2014 on Captain.Legal walks you through exactly the fields the statutory excuse depends on. You enter each adult occupier, whether or not they are named on the agreement, then select the route used: manual documents, share code, IDSP or Landlord Checking Service. The template prompts for the document types examined or the share code result, the date of the check, the presence requirement, and, for time-limited permission, the expiry date and the follow-up deadline it triggers.
The generator adapts the declarations to the answers you give, so a check on a British passport holder produces a continuous-excuse record while a check on an eVisa holder produces one with a diarised repeat date. The finished record downloads in Word and PDF, ready to sit in the tenancy file next to the agreement, the deposit paperwork and the inventory. It slots naturally into the wider set of tenancy documents for residential lettings that a compliant file needs from day one, and you can regenerate it in minutes when a new adult joins the household.
Mistakes landlords still make
The most common failure is checking the lead tenant and nobody else. The duty attaches to occupiers, so the adult partner who is not on the agreement must be checked with the same rigour, and a landlord who "did not know" someone had moved in will struggle once the council tax record says otherwise. Close behind comes the copy problem: landlords who glanced at a passport but kept nothing, or who accepted a photocopy sent by email rather than examining the original in the person's presence. Both leave you with no excuse at all, even where the tenant's status was perfectly lawful.
The digital transition has produced its own crop of errors. Some landlords still accept an expired biometric residence permit as physical proof when the holder should instead be producing a share code, and others complete an online check correctly but never save the result page. Timing slips matter too: a check on time-limited permission done six weeks before move-in falls outside the 28-day window, and a missed follow-up leaves the landlord exposed for every day after the excuse expired. Finally, over-checking is a trap of its own. Demanding extra documents only from tenants who look or sound foreign invites a discrimination claim that no statutory excuse will answer.
Frequently asked questions
Is a right to rent check record legally valid as proof of compliance?
Yes, provided it reflects a check that was actually carried out correctly. The statutory excuse under the Immigration Act 2014 depends on two things together: a compliant verification before occupation, and a dated record with copies that you can produce on request. A written record has no magic of its own if the underlying check was skipped or done late, but where the check was sound, the record is precisely what converts it into a complete defence against the civil penalty. Keep it in an unalterable format, signed and dated, together with the document copies or the saved online result it refers to.
In what format can I download the check record?
Captain.Legal generates the record in both Word and PDF. The PDF version is the one to archive, because Home Office guidance asks for copies in a format that cannot be manually altered, and a locked PDF meets that description. The Word version is useful as a working copy: you can update the follow-up section after a repeat check, then export a fresh PDF and date it. Whichever format you keep, store it with the document copies or share code result page, since the record and its supporting evidence only work as a pair.
What is the deadline for carrying out the check?
The check must be completed before the tenancy is granted and before the person occupies the property. Where the prospective occupier has an unlimited right to rent, a British passport for instance, the check can be done at any point beforehand. Where the right is time-limited, the check is only valid if carried out within the 28 days immediately before the tenancy starts. A follow-up check must then be completed before the initial excuse expires, which the online result or Landlord Checking Service answer will state. Missing either deadline leaves you liable for the period the property was occupied unchecked.
Do lodgers need a right to rent check?
Yes. The scheme covers any arrangement under which an adult occupies premises in England as their only or main home for rent, and that includes lodgers living in your own house under a licence. The penalty bands are lower, up to £5,000 for a first breach and £10,000 for a repeat, but the checking and record-keeping duties are identical. Verify the lodger's status before they move in, keep the dated copies, and diarise a follow-up if their permission is time-limited, exactly as you would for a tenant of a whole property.
How is this different from a right to work check?
The two schemes are cousins but legally distinct. Right to work checks bind employers under the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006; right to rent checks bind landlords under the Immigration Act 2014. The mechanics look similar, share codes included, but a work-purpose share code cannot be used for a rental check and vice versa. A landlord who also takes on staff, a property manager or a cleaner for an HMO for example, must run both regimes separately and paper the employment side with a full-time employment contract meeting section 1 of the ERA 1996 alongside the work check.
Do I need to redo checks now that tenancies are periodic?
Not for occupiers with an unlimited right to rent: one compliant check covers them for the life of the tenancy, however long it runs. For occupiers with time-limited permission, the periodic structure introduced by the Renters' Rights Act 2025 means follow-up checks continue indefinitely, since there is no fixed term at which the tenancy naturally ends. Diarise each expiry date shown on the online result and repeat the check before it passes. If a follow-up fails, report to the Home Office promptly to keep your excuse intact.
How long must I keep the records after the tenant leaves?
For the duration of the tenancy and at least one year after it ends, after which the file must be securely destroyed. Keeping the copies longer than necessary sits uneasily with the UK GDPR, so build the destruction date into your filing system rather than leaving old passports scans on a hard drive for a decade. The same discipline applies to the rest of the tenancy file: the deposit receipt with the prescribed information and the check record should live together, because enforcement and possession claims tend to test both at once.
Can my letting agent carry out the checks instead?
Yes, and this is common, but the transfer of responsibility must be agreed in writing before the check is due. Where a written agreement makes the agent responsible, liability for a defective check shifts to the agent; without it, the landlord remains on the hook regardless of who actually looked at the passport. Ask the agent for copies of everything they examined and the dates of the checks, and keep them in your own file. If you later sell the property with tenants in place, the buyer will want that evidence, and the follow-up calendar, handed over at completion.