Tenants guide

Contents

• Overview
• Fees and upfront costs
• Help with your rent
• Tenant responsibilities
• Landlord responsibilities
• Difficulties with your landlord
• Rent arrears
• Housing standards and repairs
  
• Ending your tenancy
• Eviction

Overview

Renting a property in the private sector is becoming a more affordable and accessible option for households. Cheshire East has a significant shortage of social housing but has a large and thriving private rented market.

Renter's Rights Act

The Renters' Rights Act 2025 provides additional rights for residents and places a duty on local authorities to investigate and enforce action against landlords and letting agents who do not comply with the new law. You can find out more about the Renters' Rights Act on the government’s Housing Hub.

A number of the changes to the rights for tenants and landlord responsibilities take place on 1 May 2026. These include:

• abolishing section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions (the current way of ending a fixed term agreement with two months’ notice and no reason required)​
• introducing Assured Periodic Tenancies​ - tenancies which run on indefinitely, instead of fixed term agreements
• updating possession grounds​ - landlords will only be able to evict tenants if they have a valid reason
• limiting rent increases to once a year​
• banning rental bidding and rent in advance​
• making it illegal to discriminate against renters who have children or receive benefits​
• requiring landlords to consider tenant requests to rent with a pet​

Other parts of the Act, such as a database for landlords and a redress scheme for tenant complaints will be introduced later. You can view the Government's timetable for implementation - Implementing the Renters' Rights Act 2025: Our roadmap for reforming the Private Rented Sector - GOV.UK.

We will update this guide for the 1 May when the first changes to the law take place.

Finding a property

Before you start looking for private rented accommodation, you need to carefully consider the following:

• type - the type of accommodation required depends on individual circumstances, for example do you need ground floor access or a home with a garden
• size - think about how many people are in the household and how many bedrooms are needed
• affordability - you need to be sure that your rent is affordable before committing to a tenancy agreement. Make sure you have budgeted for Council Tax, water, electricity, gas and food, as well as any other financial commitments such as credit cards or loans that you have

Renting privately

Renting privately can be slightly more expensive than renting from a social landlord but there are advantages:

• you can usually move in quickly
• the accommodation can come furnished, carpeted and decorated
• you can be more selective about the location and type of property you rent.

Places you can consider looking for available properties include:

• online letting and estate agency sites
• local letting and estate agency offices, their websites and social media
• Facebook marketplace
• Small ads in local newspapers and noticeboards in local shops

If a property is advertised as ‘No DSS’ (won’t allow people in receipt of welfare benefits) then you can challenge this. Shelter has useful information on their website about how to challenge DSS discrimination.

When you enter into a tenancy, its important that you understand what type of tenancy agreement you have so that you know your rights. Use Shelter tenancy rights checker to help.