What Can Landlords Do About Tenant Damage to Property?

Which route should you use to recover the cost?

Start with the deposit, because using it costs you nothing and no excess applies. Move to the policy only once the repair bill is comfortably bigger than your excess, and to court only when the tenant has something worth enforcing against.

What each route costs you to use

A deposit deduction has no fee and no effect on your premium, but its ceiling is the deposit itself. An insurance claim costs you the excess on the day and usually a higher premium at renewal.

A court claim costs an issue fee up front, which you can add to the sum you are claiming.

Damage rarely turns up on its own. If the tenancy also ended in arrears, rent guarantee insurance deals with the unpaid rent so the whole deposit can go towards repairs.

Which route fits your situation

That table assumes the deposit was protected on time. If it was not, the deposit route closes and the other two become your only options.

Why does the deposit rarely cover serious damage?

Because the law caps it at five weeks’ rent, which is about £1,385 on a £1,200 a month tenancy. A wrecked kitchen, a stripped garden or a flat full of abandoned furniture costs several times that.

The five week cap and how it is calculated

Schedule 1 to the Tenant Fees Act 2019 sets the permitted maximum at five weeks’ rent where the annual rent is under £50,000, and six weeks where it is £50,000 or more.

One week’s rent is the annual rent divided by 52, not the monthly rent divided by four. Get that wrong and you are holding a prohibited payment.

On a buy-to-let let at £1,200 a month the cap lands at £1,385. At £2,000 a month it is £2,308, and even that will not re-fit a bathroom.

What happens if the deposit was never protected

Deposits have to sit in one of the three approved schemes within 30 days, with the prescribed information served on the tenant, as the government’s deposit protection guidance sets out.

Miss that and a court can order you to repay the deposit plus between one and three times its value. gov.uk also warns that the court may decide your tenant does not have to leave when the tenancy ends.

How do adjudicators apply betterment and apportionment?

They will not let the tenancy end with you better off than you started. Every award is reduced for the age and the remaining useful life of whatever the tenant damaged.

The lifespan calculation in practice

The Deposit Protection Service assesses a claim as replacement, repair or loss of value, and refuses anything that upgrades the property at the tenant’s expense.

Take a £900 carpet with a ten year life that a tenant ruins in year six. Four years of life were left, so the award is £360 rather than £900.

Budget items depreciate fastest, so a cheap carpet in a five year tenancy is usually written off as wear and tear altogether.

Furniture and white goods you supplied are insured under landlord contents cover, and insurers apply the same age deduction unless you bought new for old.

Where the line between wear and damage sits

Adjudicators weigh the length of the tenancy, the number of occupants and the quality of the original item. Five years with a family will fairly leave more marks than eight months with one professional.

What evidence does a claim or an adjudication need?

A signed check-in inventory, dated photographs and itemised invoices. Without the check-in document there is nothing to compare the check-out against, and the claim usually fails on that alone.

The check-in pack

• A room by room inventory of every fixture, fitting and appliance, using consistent wording such as new, good, fair or worn.
• Dated photographs of each room, plus close-ups of damage that already existed.
• The tenant’s signature within the first few days, with their comments recorded where they disagree.

In an HMO, run the inventory room by room and have each tenant sign for their own room as well as the shared areas. Joint liability arguments collapse without it.

What to capture when damage appears

• Photograph and film the damage the day you find it, with something in shot for scale.
• Write a dated note of what you found, how you found it and what the tenant said about it.
• Get two written quotes from contractors, then keep the paid invoice. Quotes prove the cost and invoices prove you spent it.

Carry out the check-out inspection within 24 to 48 hours of the tenant leaving. Every day you wait is a day the tenant can argue somebody else caused it.

The deadlines you are working to

Once a dispute is raised, both sides get 14 calendar days to submit evidence and the adjudicator then has around 15 days to decide. The DPS puts the whole process at roughly 44 days.

The deposit itself has to be returned within 10 days of both sides agreeing the figures. Send your itemised schedule of deductions quickly, because a slow landlord reads as an unprepared one.

When should you claim on your landlord insurance instead?

When the repair bill is clearly bigger than your excess and the damage falls inside a section you actually bought. Malicious damage and accidental damage are separate sections with separate triggers, and neither is standard on every policy.

Malicious damage against accidental damage

Malicious damage covers deliberate destruction, and insurers almost always want a police crime reference number before they will pay. Accidental damage cover picks up the one-off mishaps instead, such as a foot through a ceiling or a sink cracked by a dropped pan.

Structural harm from fire, flood or impact sits under landlord buildings insurance whoever caused it. Gradual neglect sits outside all of them, because insurance pays for sudden events.

Your policy never covers the tenant’s own belongings. Those are their problem, which is worth saying at check-in and pointing them towards contents cover for renters.

Why the excess usually decides it

The policy excess comes off every claim, so a £900 repair against a £500 excess is rarely worth notifying. A £6,000 repair against the same excess plainly is.

How does the small claims track work for the shortfall?

You sue the former tenant in the county court for the balance the deposit and the policy did not cover. The small claims track takes claims up to £10,000 in England and Wales, and Scotland’s simple procedure covers up to £5,000.

The letter before action

Send a dated letter setting out the total repair cost, the deposit already retained and the balance owed, with 14 days to pay. Attach the invoices and the check-out photographs rather than promising them later.

Plenty of claims settle here, because the tenant sees the evidence for the first time. Keep a copy, because the court expects you to have tried.

Fees, interest and the six year limit

You can claim interest at 8% a year on top, worked out daily from the date the money fell due. A hearing fee becomes payable once the claim is listed, and both fees are recoverable if you win.

The clock runs for six years from the date of the damage, but tenants get harder to trace with every month that passes.

Whether the judgment is worth having

A judgment against someone with no income and no assets is a piece of paper you paid for. Legal expenses cover will often fund the claim, which changes the arithmetic on whether to bother.

Courts frequently order payment by instalments rather than in one go. An attachment of earnings order is the realistic route where the tenant is employed.

What does the same £6,000 loss cost on each route?

On a £1,200 a month tenancy with £6,000 of damage, the deposit returns about £1,150 after apportionment, adding an insurance claim nets roughly £5,650, and the court route wins on paper but not always in cash.

The scenario

A two year tenancy ends with a burned worktop, two ruined carpets, three damaged internal doors and a garden full of rubbish. Two quotes put the work at £6,000 and the deposit held is £1,385.

The adjudicator allows the doors and the worktop in full but apportions the carpets for age. The award comes back at £1,150.

Route by route on one claim

Once the insurer pays, it takes over your right to chase the tenant through subrogation. Never settle privately with a tenant after a payout without telling your insurer first.

The eight weeks of repairs also cost you two months of rent. Loss of rent cover pays that where the property is genuinely uninhabitable, which on a £1,200 tenancy is another £2,400.

Can you still get possession for damage since may 2026?

Yes, but only on discretionary grounds and only if a judge decides possession is reasonable. Section 21 was abolished on 1 May 2026, so there is no no-fault route left to fall back on.

The grounds that cover damage

Schedule 2 to the Housing Act 1988 gives you Ground 13 for deterioration of the property through waste or neglect, Ground 15 for ill-treatment of furniture you supplied, and Ground 14 for nuisance or criminal conduct.

All three need two weeks’ notice under section 8 as amended. All three are discretionary, which means proving the facts is only half the job.

Why discretionary grounds move slowly

The court weighs the tenant’s circumstances against yours before it orders anybody out, and the government’s guide to the Renters’ Rights Act sets out how the new regime works in practice.

Budget six to nine months from notice to bailiff on a defended claim. That is another reason to fix damage during the tenancy rather than banking it for the end.

What can you do while the tenant is still there?

Inspect, record and repair. You have a statutory right of entry on 24 hours’ written notice, and dealing with damage early stops a £500 problem becoming a £5,000 one.

Getting in to look

Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 lets you enter at reasonable times on 24 hours’ written notice to view the condition and state of repair.

Inspect every three to six months and photograph what you find each time. Those dated inspection reports are the evidence that damage happened on this tenant’s watch and not the last one’s.

Repair now, recover later

Fix anything that is getting worse, then bill it. A leak left running or a broken window left boarded turns into a claim your insurer may decline, and landlord home emergency cover exists for exactly these out-of-hours calls.

Tell your insurer the moment the property empties for major repairs, because most policies restrict cover after 30 to 45 days and longer voids need unoccupied property cover.

Staying quiet about a change in occupancy or a known defect is one of the things that invalidate a policy. Write to the insurer, keep the reply, and the claim stays intact.