Your landlord collected your deposit, pocketed it in their bank account, and never registered it with a scheme. That used to be a grey area with manageable consequences. The Renters Rights Act 2025 makes it a much more expensive mistake for them to have made.
The Act, which applies to new tenancies from 1 May 2026 and transitions all existing tenancies to the new regime, tightens the part of the deposit process that bites hardest. The 30-day protection deadline is unchanged, but the consequences of missing it are sharper. The one-week holding deposit cap set by the Tenant Fees Act 2019 still applies, and any clause requiring more has no legal effect. Courts can now refuse possession orders where a deposit was mishandled. And the three government-approved schemes, DPS, TDS, and mydeposits, remain the only lawful options.
This article covers the specific changes the Act introduces to deposit rules, what landlords must now do differently, and what you can claim if they don't.
What the 30-day deposit protection deadline requires
The requirement to protect a deposit within 30 days of receiving it was already law under the Housing Act 2004. The Renters Rights Act 2025 does not extend that window. What it does is close the gaps landlords previously used to argue their way around the consequences.
Landlords must protect the deposit, lodge it in one of the three approved schemes (DPS, TDS, or mydeposits), and serve the prescribed information on the tenant, all within 30 days of receiving it. The compensation a court can award for a breach, one to three times the deposit, is set by the Housing Act 2004 and the 2025 Act does not change it.
The prescribed information is not optional paperwork. It tells you which scheme holds the deposit, how to raise a dispute, and what the landlord's obligations are. If your landlord protected the deposit but never sent you the prescribed information, that is still a breach. You are still owed compensation.
If your landlord has not protected your deposit, you can apply to the county court under Section 214 of the Housing Act 2004 and claim between one and three times the deposit amount. On a £1,500 deposit, that is up to £4,500 on top of the original deposit being returned. Where in that range a court lands turns on the landlord's conduct, so deliberate or persistent non-compliance tends towards the higher multiples.
Check whether your deposit is protected right now. Your landlord was required to give you the scheme details in writing. If you never received them, that is worth investigating before you do anything else.
What happens to deposit protection when a tenancy converts to periodic
This is the area where the new deposit rules are most likely to catch landlords out.
Before the Act, many tenancies ran as fixed-term contracts for 12 months and then rolled into a statutory periodic tenancy. Some landlords treated the periodic stage as a continuation of the same deposit protection registration, which was broadly acceptable. Others unprotected the deposit when the fixed term ended, which was a breach but often went unchallenged.
From 1 May 2026, all tenancies become assured periodic tenancies by default. There are no more fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies for new lets. This means the transition question now applies to the entire private rented sector, not only tenancies that happened to roll over.
The rule is straightforward. The deposit must remain protected for the entire duration of the tenancy, including any holdover period. A landlord cannot unprotect a deposit while the tenant is still in occupation. Under Section 215 of the Housing Act 2004, as rewritten by the Act, a court cannot make a possession order on most Section 8 grounds unless the deposit is held in an approved scheme with the prescribed information served, or the deposit has been returned to you. The only grounds this bar does not apply to are the anti-social behaviour grounds.
For tenants, this is a significant shift. If your landlord is trying to evict you and you have reason to believe the deposit protection was allowed to lapse at any point, raise it. It may be enough to block the possession claim entirely until the landlord puts things right.
See our guide to assured periodic tenancy rights under the Renters Rights Act for more on how the new tenancy structure works.
How the holding deposit cap works under the new rules
A holding deposit is the money you pay to reserve a property before signing a tenancy agreement. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 capped it at one week's rent, and since that Act came in any clause requiring more has been unenforceable. The Renters Rights Act 2025 leaves that cap in place.
If your tenancy agreement or pre-contract paperwork includes a clause saying you paid or agreed to pay more than one week's rent as a holding deposit, that clause has no legal effect. You cannot be held to it.
Rent in advance is also capped at one month. Some landlords had started asking for two or three months' rent in advance, particularly from tenants with no UK credit history or self-employed income. That practice is now unlawful for new tenancies from May 2026. A landlord who demands more than one month's rent in advance is in breach of the Act. See our article on the one month rent in advance rule for the detail on how this is enforced.
A holding deposit must be returned within 7 days of the landlord deciding not to proceed, the tenancy being entered into, or the 15-day deadline for agreement passing, unless the landlord can show a specific permitted reason for withholding it (such as you providing false information or withdrawing without reason). The permitted reasons are listed in the Tenant Fees Act 2019 and have not changed. If your landlord is sitting on a holding deposit without a valid reason, you can claim it back through the county court or via your local council's enforcement team.
What landlords must give you in writing about your deposit
The prescribed information requirement has always existed. What changes under the Renters Rights Act 2025 is the documentation context around it.
For new tenancies from 1 May 2026, landlords must provide written information about key tenancy terms before the tenancy begins. This includes the deposit amount, the scheme holding it, and the scheme's dispute resolution process. It is a standing requirement, not a one-off letter filed away in a drawer, and courts will ask for evidence of it if a dispute reaches possession proceedings.
For existing tenancies created before 1 May 2026, landlords were required to provide an official Information Sheet explaining the new rights introduced by the Act. Where the tenancy was only ever verbal, the landlord also had to give a written statement of the key terms.
If you never received prescribed information, the landlord is in breach regardless of whether the deposit itself was properly protected. Both conditions must be met. You can bring a claim for compensation under Section 213-214 of the Housing Act 2004 if either condition is missing.
Deposit protection and prescribed information are enforced by you, the tenant, through a claim under the Housing Act 2004, not by council fines. The compensation goes to you, not to the state, which is what makes the claim worth bringing.
How to claim compensation if your landlord broke the deposit rules
If your landlord failed to protect your deposit, failed to serve the prescribed information, or allowed protection to lapse at any point, you have a live claim. The process is more accessible than most renters think.
The route is a county court claim under Section 214 of the Housing Act 2004. You do not need a solicitor to bring it. Where the facts are not really in dispute, which is the usual position when the deposit is still held, you use the Part 8 procedure on form N208. If the tenancy has ended or the landlord contests the facts, it goes on the Part 7 form (N1) instead. Either way the court decides the penalty, between one and three times the deposit amount. On a £2,000 deposit, you are looking at a minimum of £2,000 and a maximum of £6,000 in compensation, plus the return of the original deposit.
Your council has a separate role for the Tenant Fees Act side of things. If your landlord charged an unlawful fee, took more than one week's holding deposit, or demanded more than a month's rent in advance, your local council's enforcement team can investigate and issue a civil penalty. That is a different route from the deposit-protection claim, but where both apply, a council report costs nothing and can add pressure.
Before either route, a formal letter before action gives your landlord 14 days to respond. A significant number of landlords who have mishandled a deposit will return it and pay up rather than face court. How Pat recovered his £1,000 tenancy deposit in 24 hours shows exactly how that can play out.
If you want to understand what your claim is worth before sending anything, Remedy's free assessment will check your deposit protection status, calculate the compensation range, and tell you which route is most likely to get you paid. You can also read more about how to claim compensation from your landlord in the UK for a broader picture of what is available.
What the deposit changes mean if your landlord tries to evict you
Deposit compliance now feeds directly into whether a landlord can evict you. On most grounds, they cannot obtain a possession order if the deposit was not protected correctly.
A court will grant possession on most Section 8 grounds only where the landlord can show the deposit is protected in an approved scheme and the prescribed information has been served, or that the deposit has already been returned to you. Late protection and late prescribed information can satisfy this, so a landlord who slipped up can still put it right before serving notice.
This means that if you receive a possession notice and your deposit was never protected, or the protection lapsed and was not renewed, or you never received the prescribed information, you have a defence. Raise it in your response to the possession claim. The landlord will need to resolve the deposit situation before the court will hear the possession application.
This is not a permanent shield. A landlord can cure the breach by protecting the deposit and serving the prescribed information late, or by returning the deposit, and then re-filing for possession. But it buys time, and it often leads to a negotiated outcome where the tenant receives compensation as part of an agreed departure.
If you have received a Section 8 notice and you are unsure whether your deposit was properly handled, read our guide to Section 8 eviction defence for UK tenants alongside this article.
Since 1 May 2026, every private landlord in England has been operating under a stricter regime where deposit mishandling blocks possession orders, triggers fines, and exposes them to civil compensation claims worth up to three times the deposit amount. The practical upshot for you is leverage: a deposit slip-up you can prove is both a defence to eviction and a claim in its own right.
If you do not know whether your deposit is protected, find out now. Check the DPS, TDS, and mydeposits websites using your name and tenancy postcode. If you cannot find a registration, that is almost always a breach. Remedy will check your protection status, calculate your compensation range, and draft the letter before action for you.
