The form is called RRO1, and the clock on it runs for two years. That is longer than it used to be — since May 2026 the window to apply for a rent repayment order stretches back twenty-four months from the day you send the form, not the twelve it was before — and you are going to need most of it, because first you have to work out that you are owed anything at all.
You didn’t move in suspecting anything. There were five of you in a converted terrace, a shared kitchen with a rota nobody kept, a landlord who preferred cash and met questions about paperwork with a change of subject. The heating was a rumour. The deposit went somewhere. You paid on time every month, because that was the one part of the arrangement anybody seemed to care about.
A house like that — several households, shared facilities — often has to be licensed by the council as a house in multiple occupation. Yours wasn’t. You found this out the dull way: the council keeps a public register of licensed properties, and yours simply wasn’t on it. Renting out an HMO that should be licensed and isn’t is an offence under the Housing Act 2004. The landlord doesn’t need to have been prosecuted for any of this to matter. The First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) can make a rent repayment order if it is satisfied, beyond reasonable doubt, that the offence happened — conviction or no conviction.
Before the form, the free help. Citizens Advice will talk you through whether you qualify. Shelter’s guidance sets out the qualifying offences in plain terms. Your council’s private-housing or tenancy-relations team can tell you what was and wasn’t licensed — and councils can apply for these orders themselves. GOV.UK publishes RRO1 and the guidance that goes with it. None of it costs anything to read, and you should read it before you commit a single date to paper. (Wales runs a separate system; this is the England route.)
Then the work. The order can return up to two years of the rent you paid — a real sum, the kind that changes a year — but the tribunal doesn’t hand it over for a good story. It wants the tenancy agreement. It wants proof of what you paid and when, which in practice means bank statements lined up against months. It wants the dates the offence covers, and here the two-year clock turns unkind: rent paid outside the window doesn’t count, so the arithmetic has to be exact to the month. There is a tribunal fee to apply, and a further fee if it goes to a hearing; you may be able to get help with the fee, and if you succeed you can ask for it back. Miss a date, though, and nothing chases you to fix it. The form just sits there, quietly incomplete, until the window closes on its own.
This is the point where most people stop — not at the unfairness, at the admin. The offence is often the easy part to see. The hard part is turning it into an RRO1 that holds together: the right dates, the rent totalled month by month, the licensing gap set out plainly, the offence named against the right provision, the evidence attached in an order a stranger could follow on the first read.
That is where Chris comes in. You describe the tenancy in your own words — the house, the months, what you paid, what the council register did and didn’t show. Chris walks you through it, keeps the two-year window in front of you so nothing quietly falls outside it, and helps you build the application section by section: the offence identified, the period calculated, the sums reconciled, the evidence marshalled. What you end up with is a completed RRO1 — the application filled in and assembled, ready to send to the tribunal regional office. Not a view on whether you should. The finished document, in your hands, so the decision to send it stays entirely yours.
Come back when the next form lands on the mat — there is usually a way through it.
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