How long should a landlord keep tenancy records?

What goes in a tenancy file

A single tenancy collects a lot of paper: the agreement, the deposit paperwork, the inventory and check-in report, certificates, notices, letters about repairs, and the check-out report at the end.

Once the tenancy ends, most of it isn’t needed day to day, but it may be the only record of what was agreed, what state the home was in and when each notice went out.

This guide covers renting out homes in England. It’s general information, not legal advice, and the periods you choose are your judgement.

Deposit paperwork

When you take a tenancy deposit, you have 30 days from receiving it to comply with the initial requirements of an authorised scheme and give the tenant the prescribed information (Housing Act 2004, section 213).

If a court finds you didn’t, it must order you to pay the tenant between one and three times the deposit (section 214). That’s why proof of what you did, and when, is worth having to hand.

Certificates have rules of their own

Gas and electrical certificates come with record rules of their own, and they don’t work as a fixed number of years:

• Gas: you’ll need to retain each check record until two further checks have been made, or for two years from the last check if the appliance is removed (Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, regulation 36).
• Electrical: you’ll need to retain a copy of each report until the next inspection is due or has been done, whichever is later. Inspections are needed at least every five years (Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, regulation 3).

You may decide to keep past certificates for as long as the tenancy file itself, which helps if a question ever comes up about an old one.

The rest of the file

For the agreement, inventories, notices and letters, no law sets a period. The question is how long a former tenant, or you, could bring a claim about the tenancy.

Notices deserve particular care, since the date one was given and the exact version the tenant received can matter a great deal if the end of a tenancy is disputed.

A claim in contract can be brought for six years from when it arose (Limitation Act 1980, section 5), and an action on a document executed as a deed for twelve years (section 8).

Counted from the end of the tenancy, those periods are a sensible starting point for the core file.

Tenant files are full of personal data, so UK GDPR applies too: once you no longer need a record, it shouldn’t stay in a form that identifies the tenant.

Setting your periods

A few habits make a schedule easy to follow across hundreds of homes:

• Treat each tenancy as its own file, even when the property and the landlord stay the same.
• Count most periods from the end of the tenancy, and certificate periods from the next check.
• Leave anything about a dispute where it is until the dispute is settled, whatever the schedule says.
• Write the periods down with the reason for each, and review them when the rules change.

How folio will help

In folio, each property will have a folder with a subfolder for each tenancy, and each kind of record will have a retention class with the period you’ve set.

When a deposit dispute or a disrepair claim starts, you’ll be able to place a hold on that tenancy, and nothing in it will be disposed of until two people release it.

The property and housing page shows how a day with folio will look.

Read next

• folio for property and housing
• What is a legal hold, and how do you run one?
• How search will work