What are the May 2025 UK letting-agent sanctions rules?

Since 14 May 2025, UK letting agents are "relevant firms" under financial sanctions law. A relevant firm must report to OFSI (the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation, part of HM Treasury) as soon as practicable if it knows, or has reasonable cause to suspect, that a person is a designated (sanctioned) person or has breached financial sanctions. For letting agents the duty covers all letting agency work, whatever the rent. Where the sanctioned person is a client, the report also covers any funds or property the agent holds for them.

The rule is a reporting duty, not a set screening procedure: OFSI's guidance for letting agents does not prescribe a particular check. In practice, screening every tenant and landlord against the UK sanctions list is how a firm makes sure it would know, and a dated record of each screen shows it took the duty seriously. Separately, UK sanctions law prohibits making funds or economic resources available to a designated person or dealing with their frozen assets, which can include letting a property to them or handling their rent.

The Money Laundering Regulations 2017 are a separate regime. They apply to letting agency work only for lets with a monthly rent of £10,000 or more (the threshold was 10,000 euros until 30 June 2026), and to all estate agency (sales) work. For those lets HMRC is the supervisor, and its guidance for letting agents (AMLG2300) sets out what it expects, including customer due diligence on both landlord and tenant, checks for politically exposed persons, and records kept for 5 years after the relationship ends.

Certaby runs the whole let as one transaction: the sanctions screen (UK, UN, EU and US lists) on tenant and landlord, the company and its owners when the landlord is a company, PEP and adverse media as a 40p add-on per person, and one signed certificate for the client file, kept for 7 years. A let with the property risk pack is £3.27, or £4.07 with PEP and adverse media.

You can do parts of this yourself for free. The UK Sanctions List is a free download (and a free search) on GOV.UK, and the gov.uk Right to Rent check costs nothing (Certaby does not charge for Right to Rent). A paid check earns its price where the work is hard by hand: screening four official lists in one run, PEP and adverse media, and a dated certificate with a public verify link that a folder of screenshots cannot give you. For the occasional let, the free route may be enough. For a firm doing this every week, the record and the time saved are the point.

Source: OFSI: Financial sanctions guidance for letting agents

Last updated 2 October 2026.