RentCompare: Terms of Service

Version: 1.1 · Effective from: 1 September 2026 · Last updated: 2 September 2026

1. Who we are, and how to reach us

RentCompare is a service operated by Reliable People, trading as RentCompare, a company registered in Hong Kong under Business Registration Number 76807660, with its registered office at 16th Floor, The L. Plaza, 367-375 Queen's Road Central, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong ("we", "us", "our").

You can contact us at support@rentcompare.uk. We aim to reply to everything within one working day.

We are based outside the United Kingdom. The service is offered to renters in England, your rights as a UK consumer are unaffected by where we are, and these terms are governed by the law of England and Wales whatever our address says. Clause 20 sets that out.

Your data stays in the UK, the EEA and the EU, and we do not access it from outside those countries. Our Privacy Policy sets that out, along with what we collect and how long we keep it.

We do not pay the ICO data protection fee, because it applies to controllers established in the United Kingdom and we are not one. The UK GDPR still applies to us, and your rights under it are unaffected. Our UK representative under Article 27 is Anthony White, at ant@rentcompare.uk, and you can raise anything about your data with him instead of with us.

2. These terms, and your agreement to them

These terms are a contract between you and us. They apply when you use rentcompare.uk (the "site") or buy anything from us.

You agree to them by ticking the box that says so before you pay. If you do not agree to them, do not buy the paid service: the free parts of the site remain free to use under clauses 1 to 6, 13, and 15 to 22.

We have written these terms in plain English on purpose. If any part of them is unclear, ask us before you agree, and we will explain it.

3. What RentCompare is

RentCompare helps private renters in England understand what has happened to rents like theirs, whether a rent increase notice is valid, and how to challenge a rent increase at the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber).

We do two different things:

The free service. Statistics from official sources, published tribunal decisions, a checklist against your notice, and a letter you can send your landlord yourself. You give us nothing to use it and we do not ask who you are.

The paid service. We complete the tribunal's application form MR1 from answers you give us, assemble the supporting evidence, and send the application to the tribunal.

4. What RentCompare is not

This matters more than anything else in these terms, so it is not buried.

We are not a law firm and we are not your solicitor. We are not authorised or regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and we do not carry on any reserved legal activity within the meaning of the Legal Services Act 2007.

Nothing we give you is legal advice. We tell you what the law says, what the tribunal has decided in published cases, and what the official statistics show. We do not advise you on your own tenancy, we do not tell you whether to apply, and we do not represent you.

We do not act as your agent before the tribunal. We prepare and send an application in your name, on your instruction. You remain the applicant. The tribunal corresponds with you, not with us.

We cannot promise an outcome. The tribunal decides the rent. It may reduce it, or it may confirm the rent your landlord proposed. Under the Renters' Rights Act it cannot set a rent higher than the one your landlord proposed on a notice served on or after 1 May 2026, but that is the law's doing, not ours.

If your home or your tenancy is at stake, take advice from a solicitor, from Citizens Advice, or from Shelter. We say so on the site, and we mean it.

5. Who may use the paid service

You may use it if all of these are true:

• You are 18 or over.
• The property is in England.
• You are a tenant, or one of the tenants, under an assured or assured shorthold tenancy, or an assured agricultural occupancy.
• Your landlord has served you a notice proposing a new rent, and the date the new rent is due to start has not passed.
• You are acting for yourself, not on behalf of somebody else, unless you tell us and we agree in writing.

We may refuse or cancel any application where these are not met, and we will refund you in full if we do.

6. Deadlines; your responsibility and ours

An application must reach the tribunal before the date the new rent is due to start. If it does not, the increase takes effect and there is no remedy, however good your case would have been. This is the law, and neither we nor the tribunal can waive it.

You are responsible for the date you give us. We calculate the deadline from it and we show you the result, but we cannot check it against your notice unless you upload the notice, and even then we may misread it.

We are responsible for sending your application promptly once you have submitted it and paid: see clause 8.

If you are close to your deadline, apply directly through GOV.UK instead of buying from us. We would rather lose the sale than have you miss it.

7. Prices, and what you pay us

Current prices, all in pounds sterling:

We are not registered for VAT, so no VAT is charged on these amounts and no VAT element is shown or recoverable. If we become registered we will say so, and these terms and the prices will be updated first.

The tribunal's fee is set by HM Courts & Tribunals Service. We never collect it and it never passes through us. The tribunal bills you directly and will email you a payment link. If you may be entitled to help with that fee, apply to HMCTS on form EX160 before you buy from us; we do not administer fee remission and we do not assess whether you qualify.

You pay nothing until your application is ready to send. Payment is taken by our payment provider; we do not see or store your card details. The provider is named in our Privacy Policy, and we will name it here once payment is switched on.

The price you are shown before you pay is the price you pay. If we get a price wrong on the site, we will honour the price shown to you unless the error was obvious and you could reasonably have spotted it.

8. The one-hour guarantee

If you buy the optional guarantee, we will complete and send your application within one hour of you submitting it.

If we miss the hour, we refund everything you have paid us: the preparation fee and the handling fee as well as the guarantee itself. We do not refund the tribunal's £47 fee, because you pay that to HMCTS directly and it never reaches us. Only the tribunal can refund it.

The hour runs from the moment you submit a complete application and pay. It does not run while we are waiting for something from you.

We will refund without you having to ask. If you think we have missed it and have not refunded you, tell us and we will look.

9. Your right to cancel

You have a legal right to cancel a contract made online within 14 days, under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013.

Because our service is usually needed quickly, we ask you to agree to two things when you buy:

1. That we begin work immediately, within the 14-day cancellation period; and
2. That you understand you will lose the right to cancel once we have fully performed the service; that is, once your application has been sent.

Before your application is sent, you may cancel for any reason and we will refund what you have paid us, less a proportionate amount for work already done.

Once your application has been sent, the service has been performed and the right to cancel is lost. Nothing in this clause affects your rights if the service was not performed with reasonable care and skill.

The tribunal fee follows the tribunal's own rules once lodged, not ours.

10. What you must give us, and what you promise about it

You must give us information that is accurate and complete, and documents that are genuinely yours.

By submitting an application you confirm that:

• The answers you have given are true to the best of your knowledge.
• The documents you upload are the real documents and you are entitled to provide them.
• You are not asking us to say anything to the tribunal that you know to be untrue.

Your application includes a statement of truth. Making a false statement in it is a serious matter, and it is your statement, not ours.

We complete the form from your answers. We do not verify them. Where we can check something against a public record: a floor area on the energy performance register, a postcode against the postcode directory; we will, and we will tell you when what we read disagrees with what you told us. That is a help, not a guarantee.

11. Your documents, your data, and your link

There is no account and no password. Your application is reached by a single link containing a secret. Anyone who has that link can open your application. Keep it as you would keep a password, and do not post it anywhere public. We cannot send it to you again, because we do not know who you are.

We keep your application for 90 days from the last time you open it, and then delete it, along with any documents you uploaded. Codes for uploading from a phone last two hours.

What we do with your personal data, the legal bases we rely on, and your rights under the UK GDPR are set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms.

12. The rent transparency register (optional), and separately agreed

We are building a public register of what rents are actually being paid and how they are actually changing, because no such record exists and its absence is one reason renters negotiate blind.

This is optional. You are never required to take part, and the service costs the same and works the same either way. If you do not opt in, your tenancy agreement is used only for your own application and then deleted with it.

If you do opt in, by ticking a separate box that asks only about this, you agree that we may extract the following from your tenancy agreement and from your answers, and publish it, and share it as described below:

• The rent, and how often it is paid.
• The date the tenancy began and the date of any rent change, to the month.
• The property type, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and the floor area.
• Whether it is furnished, and what services the rent covers.
• The postcode of the property.

What we never publish: your name, or anyone else's; your contact details; bank or payment details; your landlord's or agent's name; the street address or any part of the address other than the postcode; signatures; any document itself; anything else in the agreement not listed above.

Sharing the agreement itself. Separately from what we publish, if you opt in you also agree that we may share your tenancy agreement in full and in confidence with the public bodies listed below. This is private sharing, not publication: the document is never put on the site, never shown to another user of RentCompare, never sold, and never used in anything we charge for. It is shared because the bodies that set housing policy and hear rent cases work from tenancy terms, and a register of figures without the documents behind them can be doubted in a way that one with them cannot. If you would rather this did not happen, do not opt in; your agreement is then used for your own application and deleted with it.

Location. We publish against the full postcode. A postcode covers about fifteen addresses on average, so this is precise, and this clause is where that is explained rather than the opt-in box, which names the postcode among the things published and links here. What it means is that somebody who knows your street: including your landlord: may be able to work out which tenancy is yours from the rent, the property type and the size, even though your name and address are not published. The floor in the next paragraph is what stops that becoming a certainty.

The one thing we will not do. Where publishing at full postcode would disclose a single household's rent, because we hold only that one tenancy for that postcode and the property is identifiable from it; we publish at postcode sector instead. That floor exists so that opting in can never amount to publishing your rent, by name, in all but name. It is never relaxed for a commercial reason.

Who we may share with. The list below applies both to the published figures, on the same terms and with the same suppression, and to the agreement itself under the paragraph above. Nobody else receives either:

• Government departments and their agencies, including the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Office for National Statistics.
• Local authorities, in respect of their own areas.
• The First-tier Tribunal and HM Courts & Tribunals Service.
• Publicly funded researchers, where the research is in the public interest.

Commercial use. We may use the register commercially, including in products we charge for, on the same basis and with the same limits as above. We say this plainly here and again on the opt-in itself, because consent given without knowing that is not consent to it. This does not extend to your tenancy agreement, which is shared only with the bodies above and never appears in anything we sell.

Withdrawing. You may withdraw at any time by contacting us, and we will remove your tenancy from the register. We cannot recall figures already published in a downloaded dataset or already shared, and we will tell you so plainly at the time you opt in rather than only here.

Your consent is recorded. We keep a version reference for the exact wording you were shown, and the date, so that it is always possible to establish what you were actually asked. We never alter an old version.

Ticked to begin with. The box is presented already ticked, and we say so here because it is the kind of thing that should not be a surprise: you are opting out rather than opting in, the dialog cannot be dismissed without answering, and unticking it costs you nothing and changes nothing else.

13. Using the site properly

Please do not:

• Upload anything unlawful, or anything that is not yours to upload.
• Try to get at applications that are not yours, or guess at links.
• Scrape, bulk-download or systematically extract the site's contents.
• Upload files designed to overwhelm us, or make automated requests at a volume a person would not.
• Interfere with the site's operation or security.

We apply rate limits to protect the service. If you hit one, wait and try again. We may suspend or block access where we reasonably believe this clause is being broken.

14. Our own material, and yours

The site, its text, design, and the analysis we produce belong to us or our licensors.

The official statistics and tribunal decisions we publish come from third parties and are used under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and equivalent terms. They remain theirs. Our methodology names every source.

Your documents and your answers remain yours. You give us permission to use them only so far as is necessary to provide the service you have bought, and, if you have separately opted in, for the ledger described in clause 12.

15. If something goes wrong

If we fail to perform the service with reasonable care and skill, you have rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and nothing in these terms limits or excludes those rights. We cannot exclude them and we do not try to.

We also do not exclude or limit our liability for:

• death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or
• anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Subject to that, and because of the nature of what we do:

• We are not liable for the outcome of your application. The tribunal decides.
• We are not liable for a missed deadline arising from information you gave us that was wrong, or from you submitting too close to the deadline to leave us time.
• We are not liable for the acts of your landlord, the tribunal, or HMCTS.
• We are not liable for business losses; this is a consumer service.

Subject always to the first two paragraphs of this clause, our total liability arising out of any one application is limited to the total amount you have paid us for that application.

To be clear about what that cap does and does not cover: it does not apply to our duty under section 49 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 to perform the service with reasonable care and skill, because section 57 of that Act does not allow a trader to limit liability for it. If we prepare or send your application carelessly, the cap in this clause is not a defence and we do not put it forward as one.

We hold professional indemnity insurance. Details are available on request at support@rentcompare.uk. We mention it because the cap above is not the answer to a claim that we did the work badly, and you are entitled to know that there is something behind that.

16. Complaints

If you are unhappy, tell us at support@rentcompare.uk and we will reply within five working days and try to put it right.

We do not currently belong to an alternative dispute resolution scheme, and we are not obliged to use one. We say so because the Alternative Dispute Resolution for Consumer Disputes Regulations 2015 require a trader who cannot resolve a complaint to tell the customer whether they use an ADR provider, even when the answer is that they do not.

Nothing here affects your right to take a dispute to court.

17. Changes to the service and to these terms

We may change the service, and we may change these terms: for example if the law changes, or the tribunal's fees or forms change.

If you have an application in progress, the terms you agreed to when you paid are the terms that apply to it. A change never applies retrospectively to work you have already bought.

For the free parts of the site, the current version of these terms applies.

We will post any new version here with a new effective date.

18. Ending this agreement

You may stop using the site at any time. If you have an application in progress, clause 9 governs cancellation.

We may end this agreement, or refuse service, if you break clause 10 or clause 13, or where we are required to by law. If we do so and you have paid for work we have not done, we will refund that part.

19. Other terms

No third-party rights. Nobody other than you and us may enforce these terms.

If part of this is unenforceable, the rest still stands.

Delay is not waiver. If we do not enforce something straight away, we may still enforce it later.

The whole agreement. These terms, the Privacy Policy, and any consent wording you agreed to separately are the whole of what is agreed between us.

Transfer. You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our agreement. We may transfer ours if the business is sold, and your rights will not be reduced.

20. Law and jurisdiction

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may also bring proceedings in your own courts.