Your landlord kept your deposit. What to do next

First, check it was protected

In England and Wales the money should be sitting with one of three government-approved schemes, not with your landlord. GOV.UK puts the duty plainly: your landlord or letting agent must put your deposit in the scheme within 30 days of getting it. Each scheme runs a free checker for tenants.

All three ask for roughly the same things: postcode, surname, the date the tenancy started, and the deposit amount. Try all three before you draw a conclusion, because they match on exact values and a middle initial or a start date one day out can return nothing when the deposit is in fact protected. If it really was not protected within 30 days, that is a separate claim that goes to court rather than to the scheme, and it is further down this page.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Both nations have their own approved schemes and their own rules, and the detail differs enough that it is worth reading from the scheme itself. In Scotland there are three approved schemes: SafeDeposits Scotland, mydeposits Scotland, and the Letting Protection Service Scotland. They are free for tenants, and Letting Protection Service Scotland publishes a checker of its own. For the Scottish deadlines and the dispute rules, go to the scheme holding your deposit.

Northern Ireland has two approved schemes: Tenancy Deposit Scheme Northern Ireland, which runs a tenant portal at scheme.tdsnorthernireland.com, and mydeposits. Both offer custodial and insured options. The Northern Irish deadline and the penalties for missing it have changed since the scheme started, and we could not confirm the current figures against the legislation, so we are not printing them. Ask the scheme holding your deposit, or ask Citizens Advice.

The free dispute service

Every approved scheme runs its own adjudication service for disagreements about deductions. mydeposits states on its dispute process page that the service is completely free to use for both landlords and tenants, and the others work the same way. There is no court, no hearing, and no representative to pay.

It is decided on paper. Each side uploads what it has, an adjudicator reads both files, and a decision comes back. Nobody gives evidence in person, which is why the next section matters more than anything else here.

The sequence, from the day you move out:

1. Ask for an itemised breakdown in writing. Every deduction, what it is for, and how the figure was reached. Email is fine and gives you a dated record.
2. Agree the part you do not dispute. Once you both agree how much comes back, GOV.UK says the deposit must be returned within 10 days. Settling the uncontested part early does not weaken the rest.
3. Raise the dispute with the scheme. Log in to the scheme holding the deposit and open a case. You do not need the landlord to agree to it first.
4. Upload your evidence before the deadline. The adjudicator sees only what arrives in time. Anything you forget is not part of the decision.
5. Wait for the decision. mydeposits says its adjudicators aim to decide within 28 calendar days once all evidence is submitted and the case is prepared.

End to end, the wait depends on how the deposit was held. Custodial schemes hold the cash themselves; insured schemes leave it with the landlord, and the extra step shows. On mydeposits data reported by Landlord Today on 15 August 2025, the custodial average in July 2025 was 15 days and the insured average was 55.

What actually wins a dispute

The adjudicator never sees the property. Guidance published by the National Residential Landlords Association, drawing on the Tenancy Deposit Scheme adjudication team, puts it flatly: the scheme can only adjudicate based on the evidence submitted by the parties. The same guidance says a signed check-in inventory, dated photographs, and clear correspondence from the start of the tenancy win more disputes than anything else, and that photographic or video inventories remain the single most effective way to support a claim.

Work through this list before you submit:

• The signed check-in inventory. If one exists and you signed it, it anchors everything else. If one does not exist, say so: the absence cuts against whoever claims the condition changed.
• Dated photographs or video from the day you moved in, and matching ones from the day you left. Same room, same angle, similar lighting. A pair that does not match up cannot show a change in condition, however bad the second photo looks. Export them with the timestamps intact.
• A scale reference in close-ups of damage. A set of keys or a phone in the frame tells the adjudicator whether a mark is two centimetres or twenty.
• Labels on every image. The guidance asks for the date, the time, the room, and a short line on what the photograph is meant to show. Unlabelled photographs get less weight than labelled ones showing the same thing.
• The check-out report and your early correspondence. Ask the agent for the check-out if you were not given it, and pull out anything you reported on day one.
• Your fair wear and tear argument. Ordinary use over time is not damage, and the two get conflated constantly. Adjudicators weigh how long you lived there and how many people lived with you against what is being claimed. A four-year tenancy with three occupants will leave marks a six-month let would not.

It helps to know what you are likely to be arguing about. These are the issues TDS saw across its dispute cases in the year to March 2025.

The odds, honestly

The gap between how often deposits are disputed and how often disputes succeed is the whole argument for bothering.

On TDS Group figures reported by the National Residential Landlords Association, 46,950 cases required formal adjudication in the 12 months to March 2025, about 1 per cent of all deposits, out of 4.7 million protected across England and Wales. The average protected deposit was £1,175.

For the outcomes, the numbers come from mydeposits and were reported by Landlord Today on 15 August 2025. In the insurance-backed scheme, tenants receive all or part of their deposit back in 90 per cent of disputed cases, and landlords receive the full amount they claimed only 7 per cent of the time. In the custodial scheme, tenants receive all or part back in more than 80 per cent of disputed cases. Across both scheme types, landlords get 100 per cent of what they claimed less than 20 per cent of the time.

Read those together. One deposit in a hundred reaches an adjudicator, and of those that do, the tenant walks away with something eight or nine times out of ten. Your case turns on your evidence, not on an average. But that is a reason not to write the money off without asking.

If it was never protected

A deposit that was never put in a scheme, went in late, or where you were never given the scheme details in writing, is a different claim. It goes to court rather than to the scheme, and it is worth more than the deposit itself. Section 214 of the Housing Act 2004 requires the court to order the landlord to pay you a sum of not less than the amount of the deposit and not more than three times it. Shelter and Citizens Advice both describe it the same way: compensation of up to three times the value of the deposit.

The Renters' Rights Act 2025 did not touch that range, and it did not touch the 30-day deadline either. Anyone telling you the penalty changed on 1 May 2026 is wrong. Two other things did change on that date:

• The duty now covers all assured tenancies. The Act replaces the word shorthold with assured throughout the deposit chapter of the Housing Act 2004. Because the Act also moved private renting in England onto periodic assured tenancies, the protection duty and the court remedy now reach every assured tenancy rather than only the shorthold kind.
• An unprotected deposit blocks eviction. The Act replaces the old restriction on possession orders with a stronger one: a court cannot grant possession unless the deposit is properly protected and the scheme details have been given to you. Narrow exceptions apply where possession is sought only on certain anti-social behaviour grounds. In practice this means a landlord who skipped protection cannot easily remove you either.

Our deposit protection guide walks the court route in full, including the letter you send first. If the property was unlicensed, or you were illegally evicted or harassed, a rent repayment order can sit alongside the deposit claim and is worth considerably more. Shelter publishes free letter templates for a deposit compensation claim.

The zero deposit trap

Some tenancies do not involve a deposit at all. Instead the tenant buys a deposit replacement product and pays a fee, and the landlord gets cover in place of cash. Reposit and Flatfair are the two names most people encounter.

The fee is not a deposit and it is not refundable. Reposit charges one week's rent, with a minimum of £150 and no VAT, paid up front, and Flatfair uses the same model. No money is held on your behalf, so leaving the property spotless returns nothing. That is not a deduction and not a dispute. It is how the product works, and it is where a lot of people realise what they bought.

The end of the tenancy runs differently too. With Reposit, the landlord registers the charges they want, Reposit collects the money from you, and if you do not pay, the insurer settles the landlord and you owe the debt to the scheme instead. Reposit says disputes go to an independent adjudicator and are resolved within 14 days. With Flatfair, the landlord claims, Flatfair assesses it, and if it stands you are invoiced directly after moving out.

If this describes your tenancy, there is no protected deposit to check or dispute. Look for the words deposit replacement in your paperwork before you go hunting on the scheme checkers.

What the paid options charge

No-win-no-fee firms advertise for deposit work, and what they take is worth seeing in pounds. Below is what each publishes, applied to a claim worth one times the average protected deposit of £1,175.

Roughly a quarter to a half of the award, then, for a route you can run yourself. Someone who will not face the paperwork may decide that is worth it. Make the decision knowing the number.

Free help, and our limits

We are not solicitors and this page is not legal advice. It is a plain-English summary of the published scheme rules and figures as they stood on 20 August 2026, with the sources listed below. Both of these are free and both know the subject well:

• Shelter on getting your deposit back, with separate pages on disputing unfair deductions and going to court
• Citizens Advice on getting your tenancy deposit back, and on what to do if your landlord did not follow the deposit rules

Citizens Advice and Shelter both note that a deposit claim in court is a small claim unless it is over £10,000.

How Untap helps

We have a wizard at untap.money/one-off/tenancy_deposit that asks about your dates and your paperwork and tells you whether you have a deposit-protection claim and what to do about it. It does not contact your landlord, open a case with the scheme, or file anything at court. Those stay with you, which is why the free route above is written out in full.

Sources

• GOV.UK, Tenancy deposit protection: Overview, for the 30-day protection deadline, the 10-day return after agreement, and the three approved schemes in England and Wales.
• mydeposits, dispute process, for the service being free to both sides, the 28-calendar-day decision target, the three-month window to raise a dispute, and decisions being made on the submitted evidence alone.
• Landlord Today, 15 August 2025, reporting mydeposits data, for the July 2025 custodial and insured resolution times and for the 90 per cent, 80 per cent, 7 per cent and 20 per cent outcome figures. These are mydeposits figures as reported by the trade press. We have not traced them to a government publication, so we have attributed them to the scheme rather than to a department.
• National Residential Landlords Association, what 2025 taught us about deposit disputes, citing TDS Group, for the 46,950 adjudications, the 4.7 million protected deposits, the £1,175 average, the custodial and insured split, and the dispute-cause percentages.
• National Residential Landlords Association, tips for presenting your case to an adjudicator, citing the Tenancy Deposit Scheme adjudication team, for the evidence guidance and the photograph labelling rules.
• Housing Act 2004, section 214, for the one to three times range, and Renters' Rights Act 2025, section 26, in force 1 May 2026, for the extension to all assured tenancies and the possession restriction.
• Reposit and Flatfair, for the deposit replacement fee model and the end-of-tenancy process, as described on reposit.co.uk and flatfair.co.uk.

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