Rent Repayment Orders: 12 months or 24, and what decides it

What a rent repayment order is

A rent repayment order is a decision by the property tribunal in England requiring a landlord to hand back rent you have already paid. It is not compensation for damage, stress or inconvenience. It is your own rent, returned to you.

It only becomes available when the landlord has committed one of a fixed list of housing offences. Renting out a property that needed a licence and did not have one is the most common route in. Illegal eviction and harassment are the two most people have heard of.

Two things changed on 1 May 2026, and both are large. The most the tribunal can order a landlord to repay to a tenant rose from 12 months’ rent to two years’ rent. The time you have to apply rose from 12 months to two years. Both came from the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, switched on by regulations made at the end of April 2026.

Neither change is retrospective. That is the part almost nobody states, and it decides which set of rules your case runs on before anything else does.

The ten offences that qualify

Ten offences sit on the list in the current text of the 2016 Act as at 16 August 2026:

• Using violence to secure entry to an occupied property
• Illegally evicting or harassing an occupier
• Knowingly or recklessly misusing a ground for possession
• Breaking the restriction on re-letting or re-marketing a home
• Continuing to break those tenancy rules after being penalised
• Failing to comply with an improvement notice
• Failing to comply with a prohibition order
• Controlling or managing an unlicensed house in multiple occupation
• Controlling or managing an unlicensed house that needed a licence
• Breaking a banning order

The third, fourth and fifth of those are new. They came in on 1 May 2026 with everything else in this package, and like the rest of it they only bite on conduct from that date onwards.

Three further offences are already written into the 2025 Act but are not live. They cover the landlord redress scheme and the new national database of private landlords, and they become claimable grounds only when those parts of the Act commence. The government’s own rollout puts the database in a later phase, arriving region by region from late 2026. Do not build a case on them yet.

Whether a particular property needed a licence is a question for your council’s private housing team, and they hold the register. Ask them in writing: the answer becomes evidence either way.

Who can apply, and how long you have

You can apply if the offence relates to a home that was let to you at the time, and you are still inside the application window. Your council can also apply, separately, and the two of you recover different money. You recover rent you paid yourself. The council recovers Universal Credit that was paid towards your rent. Neither of you can recover the same money twice.

The window is where 1 May 2026 bites again:

• Offence committed on or after 1 May 2026: two years from the offence to apply
• Offence committed entirely before 1 May 2026: 12 months from the offence, unchanged

This page was last checked on 16 August 2026. On the older rules, that means an offence which ended in the first half of 2025 is very likely out of time already, and one that ended last month is not. If you think you are near the edge, get advice this week rather than next.

There is one useful exception. For two of the new offences, misusing a ground for possession and breaking the re-letting restriction, you do not have to show the home was let to you at the time of the offence.

The cap, and the date that decides yours

The maximum is the rent paid over a capped period, less certain deductions. The length of that period is what changed:

• Offence committed on or after 1 May 2026: the tribunal can count up to two years of rent
• Offence committed before 1 May 2026: up to 12 months, as before
• Offence running across the date: the longer period applies only to the part from 1 May 2026 onwards

Two years’ rent is shorthand, and slightly misleading shorthand at that. The law caps the period over which rent is counted. It does not multiply a monthly figure by 24. What goes into the sum is the rent actually paid inside that window.

Universal Credit paid towards your rent for the same period comes off the ceiling. So does any rent you received yourself, which matters if you sub-let a room. What does not come off is your landlord’s side of the ledger. The Upper Tribunal settled that in 2020: the starting point is the full rent paid, not the landlord’s profit, so a mortgage, repairs and general outgoings do not reduce the figure, and neither do fines the landlord has already paid. Sums bundled inside your rent that were really for your own benefit, such as utilities, can come off, because that part was never rent the landlord kept.

What the tribunal actually decides

The maximum is a ceiling on the tribunal’s power, not a sum you are owed. Getting onto the list of offences gets you through the door. It does not set the figure.

Below that ceiling, the tribunal has to take into account how the landlord and you each behaved, any rent you received yourself, the landlord’s financial circumstances, whether they have been convicted or given a financial penalty for an offence of this kind, and whether an order like this has been made against them before. Those considerations are compulsory, the list is not exhaustive, and how they are weighed is the tribunal’s call rather than a formula.

The case law has moved twice. A 2020 Upper Tribunal decision pushed the starting point up to the full rent paid, ending an older practice of knocking the landlord’s costs off first. Later Upper Tribunal decisions pulled back from treating the full amount as the normal outcome, and insisted the statutory considerations be genuinely weighed. Awards regularly land below the ceiling.

There is one narrow exception where the maximum stops being a choice. Where the landlord has been convicted of the offence, or has received a financial penalty for it with appeal rights exhausted, or already has a conviction, penalty or order of the same type behind them, the award is to be the maximum the tribunal has power to order. Even then, the tribunal is not required to order an amount it considers it would be unreasonable to require.

Work out your ceiling

This gives you the statutory maximum for your dates. It is deliberately not a prediction, because a prediction would be invented.

Rent-to-rent and the landlord above yours

In a lot of shared housing the person you pay is not the person who owns the building. A company takes a lease from the owner, splits the property into rooms and sub-lets them. If that company folds or is dissolved, the money usually goes with it.

Until this year the law offered nothing here. The Supreme Court held in 2023 that an order could only be made against your immediate landlord, not against a superior landlord further up the chain, even where the immediate landlord had vanished and the owner was still collecting.

The 2025 Act reverses that. For offences committed on or after 1 May 2026, the tribunal can make an order against a superior landlord as well as against the one you paid, and the chapter treats a superior landlord as if they were the landlord. Where more than one of them is liable they are liable jointly and severally, and you cannot recover twice over for the same period.

The same non-retrospection rule applies. For an offence committed before 1 May 2026 the older position still stands and the owner above your landlord is out of reach. Working out who in a rent-to-rent chain counts as the landlord, and who to name in the application, is a genuinely difficult question of fact. This is the point on the page where free specialist advice is worth more than any calculator.

How to apply yourself

The route is yours to run and nobody needs to run it for you. There is no percentage to pay anyone.

1. Work out which offence you think happened, and when it started and stopped. The dates decide your cap and your deadline, so pin them down before anything else.
2. Gather what you have: the tenancy agreement, bank statements or receipts showing every rent payment, messages with the landlord or agent, photographs, and any notice you were given.
3. Ask your council in writing whether the property was licensed, and whether it needed to be. Keep the reply.
4. Apply to the property tribunal. Applying currently costs £114, with a further £227 if the case goes to a hearing, under the 2026 fees order. Rent repayment orders sit under a general catch-all row in that schedule rather than a row of their own, so check the current figure before you file.
5. If money is the reason you are hesitating, apply for help with the fees first. The scheme covers the property tribunal, and you can qualify on savings and income or by being on certain benefits, including Universal Credit where you earn under £6,000 a year. Apply at gov.uk/get-help-with-court-fees before you send the tribunal form, because the reference number it gives you has to go on the form itself. Get this right and the £341 stops being a reason not to claim.
6. Set out the offence, the period, the rent you paid, and what you say the landlord’s conduct was. Conduct is one of the things the tribunal must weigh, so evidence of it is not decoration.

Where these claims go wrong

• Assuming the new maximum is yours: it applies only to offences committed on or after 1 May 2026. Several pages currently ranking for this subject were written before the change and describe a world that has moved, and at least one has the old number in its title.
• Reading the ceiling as a payout: it is the limit of the tribunal’s power, and awards regularly come in under it.
• Deducting the landlord’s costs: their mortgage, repairs and outgoings do not come off the figure, and any calculator that invites you to subtract them is working from the pre-2020 position.
• Missing the older 12-month deadline: for anything that happened before 1 May 2026 the clock is short, and by late 2026 much of that cohort has already run out of time.
• Naming the wrong respondent: in a rent-to-rent chain, who counts as landlord or superior landlord is a question of fact, and getting it wrong wastes the fee.
• Applying on a ground that is not live: the redress scheme and database offences are drafted but not in force.

Free help, and our limits

We are not solicitors and this page is not legal advice. It is a plain-English reading of the law as it stood on 16 August 2026, with the sources listed below so you can check it yourself.

Money in the tens of thousands, a tribunal and a landlord who may still hold your home are three good reasons to talk to somebody qualified before you file. Both of these are free:

• Shelter for housing law, illegal eviction and harassment, including an emergency helpline if you are being pushed out now
• Citizens Advice for a first read of your situation and a referral onwards

If you are still living in the property, weigh the relationship cost before you act, and take advice on that too. Our deposit protection guide covers a separate claim that often sits alongside this one, and our guide to complaint letters covers the writing.

Sources

• Housing and Planning Act 2016, Chapter 4 of Part 2, sections 40 to 46A, as amended. Section 40, the offence table, section 41, who may apply and by when, and section 44, the amount.
• Renters’ Rights Act 2025 (c. 26), section 98 (the new offences and the two-year application window) and section 103 (superior landlords and the two-year calculation period).
• The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 2 and Transitional and Saving Provisions) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/421. Regulation 3 commences the changes on 1 May 2026; regulation 11 is the transitional provision for offences committed before that date.
• The First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) Fees (Amendment) Order 2026, in force 1 May 2026, for the £114 and £227 figures. Read the order. Rent repayment order applications fall under the schedule’s general catch-all row rather than a named row of their own, which is why this page says currently rather than stating the fees flatly.
• Rakusen v Jepsen [2023] UKSC 9, the Supreme Court decision limiting orders to the immediate landlord, reversed prospectively by section 103 of the 2025 Act.
• Vadamalayan v Stewart [2020] UKUT 183 (LC) on the full rent paid as the starting point, with Williams v Parmar [2021] UKUT 244 (LC) and Acheampong v Roman [2022] UKUT 239 (LC) on weighing the statutory considerations below the maximum. We have described the principle these decisions record rather than quoting them, because we have not read the judgments themselves.

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