Tenant Fees Act: what letting agents can and can't legally charge

The Tenant Fees Act's core rule is simple to state and easy to get wrong in practice: unless a payment is explicitly listed as permitted, it's a prohibited payment. There's no grey area to interpret in an agency's favour, and no "reasonable admin fee" carve-out: the list of what can be charged is the exhaustive list, not a starting point.

The permitted payments are: rent, the tenancy deposit, a holding deposit, default fees for a genuinely lost key or security device or for unpaid rent, a charge for a contract variation made at the tenant's request, a charge for early termination requested by the tenant, and payments for council tax, utilities, a TV licence and communications services where they're written into the tenancy agreement. Everything else (reference checks, credit checks, inventory fees charged to the tenant, "administration" fees of any description) is banned outright, regardless of how it's labelled on an invoice.

The holding deposit specifically is capped at one week's rent, and it comes with a hard deadline: if the tenancy hasn't been agreed, contracts signed, or a valid reason given for withholding it by day 15, the full amount has to be refunded. Agencies that sit on a holding deposit past that point without a documented, valid reason are exposed regardless of intent.

A recent change is worth flagging specifically for 2026: under the Renters' Rights Act, rent can no longer be required or accepted before an assured tenancy has actually been entered into. Taking a rent payment ahead of the tenancy being signed is now itself a prohibited payment, which changes how agencies need to sequence the final steps before move-in.

The financial exposure for getting this wrong is real. Prohibited payments taken from a tenant generally have to be repaid, and a landlord who's taken an unlawful fee can be barred from serving a valid Section 21 notice until it's refunded, which means a fee ban breach doesn't just cost money, it can actively block an agency's ability to recover a property when it needs to. Given how easy it is for an old, pre-ban fee structure to survive quietly in a legacy tenancy pack or a junior team member's habits, it's worth a periodic, deliberate audit of every fee an agency actually charges against the permitted list, rather than assuming a ban from several years ago is still fully reflected in every process.