The damp patch above your bed has grown all winter. Your landlord keeps promising to send someone, and nobody comes. If you rent in Wales, the law gives you something most renters have never heard of. When a rented home is unfit for human habitation, rent is not payable for any day it stays that way.
Here is what counts as unfit, which safety requirements are automatic, and how to get your money back.
What fitness for human habitation means in Wales
Renters in Wales are contract-holders under occupation contracts, thanks to the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016. Tenancies signed before 1 December 2022 converted automatically on that date.
Section 91 of the Act requires your landlord to make sure the home is fit for human habitation on the day you move in and for the whole life of the contract. It covers almost every renter in Wales, private or social, on any contract shorter than 7 years. It is a fundamental term, so your landlord cannot write it out of the contract, and section 93 bans them from penalising you for relying on it.
Section 92 adds a separate repairing duty covering the structure, exterior and the installations for water, gas, electricity, sanitation and heating. Repairs must be done to a reasonable standard, the landlord must make good any damage the works cause, and the cost cannot be passed to you unless the problem was your fault. A home can be in good repair and still be unfit, for example where condensation damp makes a bedroom unusable.
England has its own version, the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018. If you rent there, our England fitness for human habitation guide covers it.
The 29 hazards that make a Welsh home unfit
Whether a home is fit is judged against the Renting Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) (Wales) Regulations 2022, which list 29 matters and circumstances a court must consider. Here is the full list, in the order the Regulations set it out:
Full list of the 29 fitness for human habitation hazards in Wales
- Damp, mites and mould or fungal growth
- Cold (excessively low temperatures)
- Heat (excessively high temperatures)
- Asbestos and manufactured mineral fibres
- Biocides (chemicals used to treat timber or mould)
- Carbon monoxide and fuel combustion products
- Lead
- Radiation (including radon gas)
- Uncombusted fuel gas (gas leaks)
- Volatile organic compounds
- Crowding and space
- Entry by intruders (a home you cannot keep secure)
- Lighting
- Noise
- Domestic hygiene, pests and refuse
- Food safety (inadequate kitchen facilities)
- Personal hygiene, sanitation and drainage
- Water supply
- Falls associated with baths and showers
- Falling on surfaces
- Falling on stairs, steps or ramps
- Falling between surfaces (falls from height)
- Electrical hazards
- Fire
- Flames and hot surfaces
- Collision and entrapment
- Explosions
- Position and operability of amenities (fittings you cannot reach or use safely)
- Structural collapse and falling elements
Damp and mould sit first on the list, and they come up most in real disputes. Further down, the list holds a few surprises. Hazard 1 covers house dust mites as well as mould. Hazard 5 covers the chemicals used to kill mould or treat timber, so a botched treatment can be a hazard in its own right. A front door that will not lock falls under hazard 12, entry by intruders, so a home you cannot keep secure can fail the fitness test. Noise, hazard 14, is about the building's sound insulation, not your neighbours' behaviour. And falls get four entries of their own, numbers 19 to 22, a reflection of the fact that falls injure more people at home than anything else on the list.
Two of the invisible hazards are worth a closer look. Radiation, hazard 8, includes radon, the natural radioactive gas that seeps from the ground in many parts of Wales. Public Health Wales says action is needed where the average level tops 200 becquerels per cubic metre (a typical UK home measures around 20), and you can check your postcode on the UK Health Security Agency's free map at ukradon.org. Lead, hazard 7, still turns up in the paint and water pipes of older homes, and Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water offers customers a free lead test of their drinking water on request.
The question throughout is risk. If a hazard on the list poses a serious threat to your health or safety, the home can be unfit even though everything in it works. One serious hazard is enough. The bar cuts the other way too: a minor blemish, the official guidance gives a slightly uneven floor as its example, will not make a home unfit on its own. The Welsh Government's fitness guidance walks through all 29 hazards with the actions landlords are expected to take against each.
Smoke alarm, carbon monoxide and electrical report rules for Welsh landlords
The 2022 Regulations also impose fixed requirements that leave no room for argument.
- Smoke alarms on every storey, wired to the mains and linked to each other. A battery alarm alone does not meet the requirement.
- A carbon monoxide alarm in any room with a gas appliance, an oil-fired appliance or a solid fuel burner.
- A valid electrical condition report (EICR) from an inspection no more than 5 years old. You must be given a copy within 14 days of your occupation date, and if the report calls for a retest sooner than 5 years, that earlier deadline applies.
Fail one of these and the Regulations treat the home as unfit for human habitation while the failure continues. No survey needed, no argument about severity. A rented house in Wales with no mains-wired smoke alarms is legally unfit until they are installed. If you want the alarms looked at, the Welsh fire and rescue services offer free Safe and Well home visits on request.
Do I have to pay rent if my home in Wales is unfit?
This is the part almost nobody knows. Regulation 11 of the Renting Homes (Supplementary Provisions) (Wales) Regulations 2022 writes this term into occupation contracts:
The contract-holder is not required to pay rent in respect of any day or part day during which the dwelling is unfit for human habitation.
Put plainly, if your home was unfit for 3 months at £900 a month, £2,700 of rent was never legally due. Two cautions before you act on that.
First, do not stop paying rent on your own judgement. Whether the home was unfit, and for how long, is for a court to decide if the landlord disputes it. Get it wrong and you are in arrears, which is a ground for eviction. The safer route is to keep paying and claim the money back.
Second, check your written statement. The no-rent term is a supplementary term, so it applies automatically unless your written statement modified or dropped it. Most contracts leave it untouched, but read yours.
Can my landlord evict me for complaining about repairs in Wales?
Welsh law expects this move and blocks it. Under section 217 of the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016, if the court decides a no-fault possession claim was made to avoid the fitness or repair duties, it can refuse to order possession. A written complaint sent before any notice arrives is what makes that protection work.
How to report an unfit home in Wales and claim rent back
Your landlord's duty to fix a problem starts when they become aware of it, and section 97 gives them a reasonable time to act. So tell them in writing, with photos and the date the problem started. Keep everything.
If nothing happens, escalate:
- Contact your council's environmental health team. They can inspect free of charge under the Housing Act 2004 and order the landlord to do the works. An improvement notice is strong evidence for any later claim.
- Send a formal letter before action. The Pre-Action Protocol for Housing Disrepair Cases (Wales) expects you to set out the defects, the reporting history and what you want. Our guide to writing a letter before action covers the format.
- Claim in the county court. You can ask for an order that the works be done, compensation for the time you lived with the problem, and repayment of rent for any period the home was unfit.
The evidence that wins these cases is the same as in English damp claims, so our mould and damp guide is worth a read, though the law it describes is England's. In Wales, your claim rests on the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016.
If you think your home fails the fitness test, Remedy can check your occupation contract against the Welsh requirements and work out how much rent may be reclaimable for the time your home was unfit.
