We have rebuilt GetRentBack.org from the ground up. It is live today.
The old site had grown by accretion since 2018, a page at a time, and it showed. The law underneath it had also moved on: the Renters’ Rights Act came into force on 1 May 2026 and changed who can be pursued, how far back a claim reaches, and how much a tribunal can order. Rather than patch that in, we started again.
The new site is built around the two questions every enquiry actually turns on.
Can I apply? The checker on the front page answers that one. It asks when you left, when the offence was happening and whether your landlord holds a licence, and it tells you whether you are in time and roughly what you could claim. It takes about a minute and nothing is stored.
Did my landlord commit an offence? That is the harder question, and it now has a page of its own. There are seven Rent Repayment Order offences in force. The overwhelming majority of applications are for failure to license, but not all of them, and it is worth knowing which one fits your situation before you fill in a form.
Around those sit the things people kept emailing us for: what an application actually involves, step by step; what awards look like now, with the cases behind them; what the Renters’ Rights Act changed, and what happens where an offence straddles 1 May 2026. There is a new page for landlords too, because most of the cases we see were avoidable.
We have also published a snapshot of every licensing scheme in the 32 London boroughs and the City, with the designations, the dates and the sources. It is a reference document, not a lookup tool — you still need to check with the council — but it is the sort of thing that is surprisingly hard to find in one place.
Our guide for tenants running their own applications is free to download from the site, as it always has been. Everything we publish is free to use.
One thing has not changed. If you are living in a house that should be licensed and is not, do not sit on it waiting for the claim to grow. An unlicensed house may well be an unsafe one, and an RRO application is usually what finally forces the licence application and the safety inspection that should have happened years ago.
Have a look around. If something is wrong, missing or unclear, tell us — the contact form goes straight to us.
