Renting your first house at 17 or 18: guarantors, deposits and the under-18 problem

Rules and figures checked: 2026-07-24. Funding, tenancy and tax rules move — verify before relying on them.

I signed my first tenancy at 18, for a shared house about 150 miles from home, with housemates I knew mostly as usernames in our cohort's group chat. I was more nervous about the paperwork than the actual moving, and that instinct was half right. The paperwork is where the real commitments live, and nobody in our house read all of it properly, including me. We got away with it. Don't plan on getting away with it.

First, a warning about advice, including recent advice. The law on renting in England changed on 1 May 2026, when the main tenancy reforms in the Renters' Rights Act 2025 came into force. Fixed-term contracts are gone. Section 21 "no-fault" evictions are gone. The money a landlord can take before you move in is capped. The twelve-month contract I signed in 2021 is no longer something a landlord can lawfully offer you. So treat older forum threads, and a fair chunk of what parents remember from their own renting days, as historical documents. Everything below is checked against the rules as they stand in July 2026, with links to official sources where it matters.

One boundary for this piece: it covers the legal and money mechanics between "we've found a house" and "we've got keys". Finding the housemates and viewing houses in a city you don't live in yet are covered separately.

What changed in May 2026

Four changes matter most for a group of first-time renters.

Every private tenancy is now periodic. There are no fixed terms any more. Your tenancy rolls month to month from day one, and the landlord cannot offer or enforce anything else. You can end it whenever you like by giving at least two months' written notice ending on the last day of a rent period. Shelter's summary of the changes is the best plain-English overview.

Section 21 is gone. A landlord can no longer end your tenancy without a reason. They need one of the legal grounds set out in the Act. For a group of apprentices paying rent on time, the risk of being turfed out on a whim is far lower than it was in my day.

Rent in advance is capped. A landlord cannot take any rent before you've signed the agreement, and after signing can require at most one month's rent before the tenancy starts, per the Tenant Fees Act statutory guidance, updated for the 2025 Act. The old trick of paying six months upfront to patch over weak referencing is now a prohibited payment. Hold that thought, because it makes guarantors more important, not less.

The advertised rent is the rent. Adverts must state an actual figure and it is illegal to invite or accept offers above it. If an agent asks for your "best offer", something is wrong.

All of this is England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own systems, so check locally if your apprenticeship is elsewhere.

The money, in the order you'll hand it over

Take an illustrative four-person house at £1,600 a month. A week's rent is the monthly figure times twelve, divided by 52: about £370.

The holding deposit comes first, when you ask the agent to take the house off the market. It's capped at one week's rent. You get it back, usually knocked off your first payment, unless one of a short list of things happens: you fail a right-to-rent check, you pull out, you drag your feet so badly the tenancy can't go ahead, or you gave false or misleading information that reasonably affected your suitability. That last one is the trap. Round your salary up, "forget" an overdraft that went wrong, guess your guarantor's income, and if referencing contradicts you, the week's rent is gone. If the landlord keeps the money, they must tell you why in writing within 7 days of deciding not to proceed, otherwise it must be repaid in full. It's all in the same statutory guidance.

The security deposit is capped at five weeks' rent for any normal house share (six weeks only applies where total annual rent is £50,000 or more, which yours won't be). On our illustrative house that's about £1,850, call it £460 each. The landlord must protect it in one of the three government-approved schemes, the Deposit Protection Service, MyDeposits or the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, within 30 days, and give you the "prescribed information" saying which scheme holds it and how disputes work. Check this actually happened. It's a two-minute search on the scheme websites, and most deposit horror stories start with nobody checking.

The first month's rent is due before you move in, and one month is the most they can ask for.

That's the lot. Agents haven't been allowed to charge admin, referencing or check-in fees since 2019, so query any fee that isn't rent or the deposits above.

Then, on move-in day, do the inventory like it's an exam. Photograph every mark, the worn carpet edge, the inside of the oven, the meter readings, and email the lot to the agent so there's a dated record. Deposit deductions are decided on evidence years later, and the tenant who documented move-in day usually wins.

Guarantors: what your parent is actually signing

You have no rental history, a nearly empty credit file, and a salary the referencing software squints at. Some or all of you will probably be asked for a guarantor. This is normal and not an insult.

This bit is market practice rather than law, but typically the agent wants a UK-resident guarantor, often a homeowner, with income somewhere around three times the annual rent being guaranteed, who passes a credit check and signs a guarantee deed. Since paying months of rent upfront stopped being legal, the guarantor route is now the main fallback when referencing wobbles.

The deed is the point. It's a real contract, and the single most important question in it is this: does it cover only your child's share, or the whole tenancy? In a joint tenancy, most standard deeds guarantee all the obligations of all the tenants. Read that again. A parent who signs one can be pursued for the unpaid rent of a housemate they have never met. Some agents will limit a guarantee to one tenant's share if you ask; many won't. Either way, your parents should know which version they're signing before anyone is committed, not after.

Two smaller points. Because tenancies are now open-ended, the guarantee has no natural end date either, so ask in writing how and when it ends. And since May 2026 a guarantee cannot be enforced for rent falling due after the death of the tenant it covers (section 19 of the Act). Morbid, but deeds used to reach even there, and now they can't.

Joint and several liability, in plain English

This is the clause nobody reads, and it's the one that matters most.

When four of you sign one tenancy agreement, you are not each renting a quarter of a house. There is one tenancy with four names on it, and every name is liable for the whole rent and every obligation in it. That is what "joint and several" means. If one housemate stops paying, the landlord doesn't have to chase them. They can pursue any of you, or any guarantor, for all of it, and in practice they go after whoever looks most collectable, which is usually the guarantor who owns a house. Shelter's page on joint tenancies sets it out. The 2025 Act changed a great deal; it did not change this.

What you do about it is unglamorous. Pick housemates like you're opening a joint bank account with them, because financially you are. And have the money conversation before signing: who pays what, on which date, into which account, and what happens if someone's short one month. An agreement between yourselves doesn't bind the landlord, but it makes the eventual argument shorter.

When one of you wants to leave

Here's the trade the new system hands to house shares. Under my 2021 fixed term, nobody could leave for a year, which was its own kind of trap. Under the new rules, any one joint tenant can end the tenancy by giving at least two months' written notice ending on the last day of a rent period, and section 20 of the Act is explicit that a notice from one joint tenant is valid without the others' consent, and that it ends the tenancy for everyone.

Sit with that for a second. Your flakiest housemate can, lawfully and without telling you, serve a notice that ends your home in two months. If the rest of you want to stay, you need the landlord to grant a brand-new tenancy, which they don't have to do, and which means fresh referencing and possibly a different rent. (Agreeing a notice period shorter than two months is only valid if the landlord agrees it in writing with all of you.)

So make it a house rule on day one: nobody serves notice without a house meeting first. Not because you can stop them, but because warning of the warning is the difference between an orderly move and a scramble.

The under-18 snag

Now the legal oddity that catches a few apprentices every year. Under section 1(6) of the Law of Property Act 1925, a minor cannot hold a legal estate in land, which means a 17-year-old cannot be granted a legal tenancy. This rule is a century old and the 2025 Act didn't touch it.

Most people finishing A-levels are already 18 by a September start, but the collisions do happen: August start dates meeting late-summer birthdays, anyone who went through school a year young, younger housemates arriving via different routes. Check everyone's date of birth against the intended tenancy start before you fall in love with a house.

Where one of the group is 17, a willing landlord typically does one of a few things, and Shelter covers the detail: grant a licence to occupy rather than a tenancy; have an adult hold the tenancy on trust for the 17-year-old until they turn 18; put the legal tenancy in the adult housemates' names with the minor holding an interest behind it; or have a parent take the tenancy or stand as guarantor. Note that the 17-year-old still has to pay. Contracts for "necessaries", which includes accommodation, bind minors, so none of this is a loophole for free rent.

The honest version, though, is that many agents simply refuse, because it's extra admin in a market where they have plenty of applicants. The cleanest fixes are boring ones: start the tenancy after the birthday, or add the youngest housemate to a new agreement once they're 18. Plan around the birthday rather than fighting the 1925 Act.

Referencing on an apprentice salary

Referencing checks three things: identity and right to rent, credit history, and affordability. A thin credit file is normal at 18 and rarely fatal. Affordability is where apprentices need to prepare.

Agents commonly want your income to be around two and a half to three times your share of the annual rent. The arithmetic usually works. On a £22,000 apprentice starting salary, a £400-a-month room means £4,800 a year in rent; even at a multiple of three you clear it comfortably. The problem isn't the maths, it's the evidence, because you're referencing in June for a job that starts in September and you have no payslips.

The fix is your offer letter or signed contract stating salary and start date. Save it as a PDF the day it arrives, and ask HR early whether they produce a standard letter for landlords; big employers usually can, and mine did without blinking. If affordability still fails, the answer is a guarantor, because the pay-upfront fallback is off the table.

And be boringly honest on every form, down to the overdraft. Misleading information isn't just bad form; it's one of the specific grounds for losing your holding deposit.

The order to do things in

1. Before viewing anything, check everyone's date of birth against the likely move-in date. Solve any under-18 problem now, not during referencing week.
2. Line up guarantors early and send them the deed to read before anyone commits. Make sure they know whether they're guaranteeing one share or the whole rent.
3. Gather your documents: offer letter or contract as a PDF, passport for the right-to-rent check.
4. View, decide, and be ready to move quickly. The holding deposit, capped at one week's rent, is what takes the house off the market.
5. Fill in referencing truthfully.
6. Before signing, check the sums: no rent payable before you sign, then at most one month's rent plus a five-week deposit.
7. Read the joint and several liability clause together, out loud. It sounds twee. Do it anyway.
8. Within 30 days of paying the deposit, confirm it's protected with the DPS, MyDeposits or TDS and that you've received the prescribed information.
9. On move-in day, photograph everything and email the annotated inventory back.
10. Pin "two months' notice, house meeting first" in the group chat.

After the keys, the tenancy mostly gets out of the way and the actual living starts, which has its own learning curve; the first three months' budget and the wider business of moving out at 18 are their own pieces. None of this is a reason not to do it. It's a reason to read what you sign, which at 18 turns out to be a rarer skill than passing the interview. And if you're still weighing up the route itself, start with degree apprenticeship vs university.