The duty, in the Act’s own words
The relevant wording is short. "The agent must publish a list of the fees on the agent’s website (if it has a website)." There is a parallel duty to display the list at each premises where the agent deals with people face to face.
There is no exemption for a small agency, and no provision for supplying the list on request instead. If you have a website, the list goes on it.
What the fee list has to contain
Three requirements attach to each fee, and the second and third are the ones most often missed.
- A description of the fee sufficient to enable a person who is liable to pay it to understand the service or cost covered by it, or the purpose for which it is imposed. "Administration fee: £250" does not do that.
- An indication of whether the fee relates to each dwelling-house or each tenant. The difference between a charge per property and a charge per person is material and the Act requires you to be explicit about which it is.
- The amount of each fee inclusive of any applicable tax. Where an amount cannot reasonably be determined in advance, a description of how the fee is calculated instead.
That third point is worth stating plainly: the published figure is the tax-inclusive one. A list of fees plus VAT, where the reader has to do the arithmetic, is not what the Act asks for.
The two statements that go with it
The fee list does not travel alone. Two statements must be displayed or published with it.
Client money protection. If the agent holds money on behalf of people to whom they provide services, they must publish with the fee list a statement of whether they are a member of a client money protection scheme. Note the wording: a statement of whether, not only a statement that. The Act contemplates the answer being disclosed either way.
Redress. If the agent is required to be a member of a redress scheme for dealing with complaints, they must publish with the fee list a statement indicating that they are a member and giving the name of the scheme. Naming it is part of the requirement, so a generic line about belonging to an ombudsman service does not satisfy it.
Both have to sit with the fee list rather than somewhere else on the site. A scheme logo in the footer is not the same thing as a statement published with the fees.
What happens if it is not there
Enforcement sits with local weights and measures authorities — trading standards. Where an authority is satisfied on the balance of probabilities that an agent has breached the section 83 duty, it may impose a financial penalty.
Section 87 sets the ceiling: the amount "may be such as the authority imposing it determines, but must not exceed £5,000".
It is worth being clear that this is a published-information duty rather than a fee-capping one. Separate legislation governs which fees may lawfully be charged to tenants; this section is about disclosing the ones you do charge.
How to publish it so it earns something
Most agencies treat this as a page to be survived. The ones that treat it as a landlord-facing sales page are doing the same work for a very different return.
- Put it on a page, not in a PDF. A downloadable fee schedule is harder to read on a phone, poorly read by search engines, and goes out of date because updating it means finding the file.
- Give it a URL a landlord would click — fees, or landlord fees — rather than burying it under a menu item called Information.
- Separate landlord fees from tenant fees clearly. They are different readers with different questions and the combined table serves neither.
- Put the client money protection and redress statements beside the fees, with the scheme named, as the Act requires — and explain in a line what each scheme actually does for the reader. To a landlord weighing up who to trust with an asset, that is reassurance rather than compliance text.
- Add the thing the Act does not require: what the management percentage includes, what happens during a void, what happens on arrears. That is the content a landlord is actually comparing, and almost nobody publishes it.
The last point is where the commercial argument sits. Four agencies in a town all publish a bare fee table because they have to. The one that explains what the fee buys is the only one answering the question the landlord came with.
Why this page in particular
There is a specific reason to put effort into the fee page rather than the homepage, and it comes out of our own research.
Going straight at "letting agent website design" and its relatives is the hardest route available in that whole dataset.
What that leaves is the content nobody else is publishing — a fee page that actually explains itself, and landlord-facing pages about voids, arrears, compliance and what management covers. Those are not contested, because the competition is busy satisfying section 83 with a table and stopping there.
