What are the May 2025 UK letting-agent sanctions rules?
From May 2025, every UK letting agent must perform sanctions screening on the tenant and the landlord at the start of every let. The rule sits inside the existing Money Laundering Regulations 2017 framework and is enforced by HMRC through the existing inspection regime. The screening must cover the OFSI consolidated sanctions list (UK), the UN Security Council Consolidated List, and the EU Consolidated List of Financial Sanctions, plus a check for politically-exposed person (PEP) status and an adverse-media check on the named individuals or entities.
The audit trail must be retained for 7 years per MLR-2017's standard retention rule. HMRC inspections randomly sample a letting agent's records and ask for the screening evidence on specific recent lets; failing to produce a screening record is the most common finding. Penalties for non-compliance under MLR-2017 range from formal warnings to financial penalties scaling with the firm's revenue.
The Letting Sector AML Guidance 2025 (LSAG-2025) operationalises the rule. Compared to LSAG-2018, the 2025 version adds the explicit PEP + adverse-media expectation, names beneficial-ownership screening for corporate landlords (per MLR-2017 reg 5), and tightens the audit-trail format to include list-version timestamps. Certaby's letting-agent suite runs all four sources in one transaction (sanctions + PEP + adverse media + Companies House PSC tree for corporate landlords) and ships an audit-grade PDF for the client file at £4.95 per check.
You can do parts of this yourself for free. The OFSI consolidated sanctions list is a free download, and the gov.uk Right to Rent check costs nothing (Certaby does not charge for Right to Rent). Where a paid check earns its £4.95 is the work that is hard to do by hand: the PEP and adverse-media screening LSAG-2025 now expects, aggregating all the sources into one run of about 90 seconds instead of 30 to 45 minutes across six tabs, and producing a hash-bound audit certificate with a public verify URL that a folder of screenshots cannot. For the occasional let you do yourself, the free route may be enough. For a firm doing this every week, the audit trail and the time saved are the point.
Source: LSAG-2025 Guidance
Last updated 2026-06-19.