Client money protection, fees and redress: what a letting agent's website must show

A letting agent in England has to publish certain things on its website: its fees, the redress scheme it belongs to, its client money protection scheme and a copy of that scheme's certificate. On 19 October 2026 we read the websites of 400 letting and property management firms in England to see how many do.

What we found

• 36.5% showed no client money protection certificate. That's 101 of the 277 sites that name a client money protection scheme: we found the scheme's name, but no copy of the certificate on any page we read.
• A quarter (24.8%) named no redress scheme, neither The Property Ombudsman nor the Property Redress Scheme.
• 38% (37.8%) showed no fees with VAT for tenants or landlords, and 34.5% had no fees page or link at all.
• 31% (30.8%) named no client money protection scheme. Not all of them need one: an agent that holds no client money, or only sells homes, may not.

We checked 20 of the sites with no certificate by hand. 16 were confirmed. The other 4 had a PDF or an image we couldn't read, so they may show it. We found no false alarms.

What the rules say

These are England's rules. Wales and Scotland have their own, and whether each applies depends on the work an agent does. We're not lawyers: check the rule and the guidance for your own business.

• Fees. Under section 83 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, a letting agent publishes its fees on its website: what each fee is for, the amount including tax, and whether a tenant's fee is per person or per property. Adverts on other websites, such as property portals, must carry the fees or link straight to them.
• Redress. The same section requires the agent to say which redress scheme it belongs to, alongside the fees.
• Client money protection. An agent that has to belong to a client money protection scheme names it with the fees and, under regulation 4 of the Client Money Protection Regulations 2019, publishes a copy of its membership certificate on its website. The scheme's logo on its own isn't the certificate.

Trading Standards can fine up to £5,000 for each of these. Not belonging to a client money protection scheme when you should is a separate breach, with a fine of up to £30,000. The government's client money protection guidance and its Tenant Fees Act guidance set out the detail.

Five things to check on your website

1. A fees page you can reach from every page, usually from the footer, with tenant and landlord fees including VAT.
2. Your redress scheme by name, next to the fees.
3. Your client money protection scheme by name, next to the fees, if you hold client money.
4. A copy of your current certificate, as a page or a PDF people can open, not only the scheme's logo. Replace it when the membership renews.
5. Your portal adverts: each one carries your fees or links straight to the fees page.

How we measured it

We picked 400 letting and property management firms registered in England at random: limited companies whose website we could match to their Companies House record, with a working home page that mentions letting, landlords, property to let or property management. On 19 October 2026 we read each home page, up to six linked pages (such as fees, landlords, tenants, contact and legal pages) and up to four linked PDFs.

“Showed no certificate” means we didn't find one on the pages we read. Some PDFs and images can't be read by a machine, so a few sites may show it where we couldn't see. Because the sample also includes some sales-led, holiday-let and commercial agents the rules may not cover, our headline figure counts only sites that name a client money protection scheme. Our reader identified itself and obeyed each site's robots.txt.

Journalists and trade bodies are welcome to the figures and the method: chris@themesmith.ai.

A website for estate and letting agents, with an example we built, or what we found on 1,056 plumbers' websites.