What a Good Tenancy Agreement Actually Includes

Nobody reads a tenancy agreement carefully at signing. Everyone reads it forensically during a dispute. The document's whole value is decided years before it is needed — by which template you started from and how you filled it in.

The essentials every agreement needs

• Parties and property: full names of every adult tenant (joint and several liability spelled out — each tenant liable for all the rent), landlord's name and an address in England or Wales for serving notices (a legal requirement for rent to be due), and the property including any parking or storage.
• Money: rent amount, due date, payment method; the deposit amount, the scheme protecting it (see deposit protection), and — since the Tenant Fees Act — nothing beyond the permitted payments: rent, refundable deposit capped at five weeks' rent (below £50,000 annual rent), holding deposit up to one week, and narrowly defined default fees.
• Term and notice: as fixed terms give way to periodic tenancies under the Renters' Rights Act, notice mechanics matter more than end dates — track the current statutory position rather than inventing your own.
• Responsibilities: who maintains what (your statutory repair obligations cannot be shifted, so the clause allocates the rest — gardens, bins, minor upkeep), rules on smoking and subletting, and how access for inspections works (24 hours' written notice, reasonable times).

Clauses that are void no matter what you write

Templates from the internet's darker corners still contain clauses with no legal force: banned fees dressed as "admin charges", blanket "no repairs unless reported in writing within 24 hours" wording, penalty clauses beyond the permitted default fees, attempts to contract out of deposit protection or statutory repair duties, and unfair terms an average tenant would never expect. Void clauses are worse than useless — they signal to a tribunal that the document (and perhaps the landlord) is not to be taken at face value. Pet clauses deserve special mention: blanket bans are giving way to a right to request that cannot be unreasonably refused, so modern agreements handle pets through a consent process, not a prohibition.

The paperwork that travels with the agreement

The agreement is one document in a signing bundle: How to Rent guide (current version), EPC, gas safety certificate, EICR, deposit prescribed information within 30 days, and a proper inventory with photographs — the single most dispute-winning document a landlord holds. Miss items in this bundle and possession routes clog later; our obligations guide has the full checklist.

Where to get a good template

Use a maintained source — the NRLA's agreements, a solicitor's, or the government's model tenancy agreement — and re-download at each new tenancy rather than recycling a 2019 file. Law in this area is moving quickly, and the cost of a current template is nothing against the cost of a void clause discovered in front of a judge. Read the whole thing once yourself: if you cannot explain a clause, it should not be in your contract.

This is general information about the law in England, not personalised legal advice — Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have different rules, and landlord law changes regularly (some areas covered here are under active reform). For anything that affects a real tenancy, check GOV.UK for the current position or speak to a solicitor or a body like the National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA).