Demand for a rent guarantor has risen since the Renters' Rights Act came into force, as landlords can no longer accept several months' rent upfront and many now ask tenants for a guarantor instead.
UK rental services provider Housing Hand has set out what renters should look for in a guarantor service. It links the advice to Prime Minister Andy Burnham's push to make subscriptions easier to cancel and to make companies flag when contracts auto-renew at a higher price. Housing Hand says it has covered more than £1 billion in rent, assisted over 100,000 students and professionals and works with over 4,000 partners.
The prime minister's focus is on giving families "room to breathe" by tackling the cost of living through "everyday fixes." One such fix is helping people avoid becoming trapped in subscriptions. Housing Hand says its aim is similar, helping people understand what to expect from guarantor services and what to avoid.
The 2024/25 English Housing Survey shows that one in five private renters (22%) were asked to provide a guarantor even before the Act took effect, equivalent to around one million households. Housing Hand reported significant growth in applications in July and August 2026 and expects the same for September.
What to expect from a rent guarantor service
Tenants without a family member or friend who can act as a guarantor usually turn to professional services, and Housing Hand says knowing what to look for matters. It argues that renters should be able to pay monthly with no additional fees and cancel if their rental plans change.
Not all providers offer this, according to Housing Hand. Some sell three-year guarantees that renters must pay for upfront, with no cancellation or refund option, so a tenant who leaves early gets nothing back. Others offer monthly payments but add fees, or use services such as Klarna that commit the renter to paying with no way to end the arrangement early. Housing Hand's model runs month by month, and tenants can end the arrangement when they leave their accommodation.
"The taxi rule really applies here," said Graham Hayward, managing director at Housing Hand. "You find out the cost before you get in and if your journey needs to stop before the end, you pay for what you use rather than for the original journey. You shouldn't become a captive audience.
"That means being clear on what you're paying from the outset and what your total liability is. That's precisely the point of the Government's current push in relation to subscriptions – to help people avoid paying more than they originally thought they would."
Housing Hand also expects providers to pay out on all valid claims, a commitment it says it maintains. Cover should be flexible too, it says, because the Renters' Rights Act created different rights for tenants in purpose-built student accommodation, houses in multiple occupation and periodic tenancies outside those two categories. Renters should be able to access products tailored to each tenancy type rather than a blanket product that ignores the detail of England's new rental legislation.
Housing Hand adds that tenants should not have to pay an excess before a provider pays out. Finding funds for an excess during a period of financial distress, it says, feels both unrealistic and unreasonable.
"Things like monthly payments with no additional fees, confidence that the provider will pay out if the situation arises, and no excess to pay all boil down to an approach of genuinely helping renters," he said.
"Rent guarantor companies that make these commitments are the ones that renters can rely on – they deliver genuine peace of mind for renters, not some uneasy sense that things might hopefully work out after the renter jumps through a series of costly hoops."
