The shared-house move-in checklist

Before you sign, or in the first few days

Some paperwork is the landlord's legal duty, and its absence is a warning sign. In England you should be given, or be able to see, the following.

• A gas safety record. Under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 a landlord must have every gas appliance and flue checked annually by a Gas Safe registered engineer, give new tenants a copy of the record before they move in, and give existing tenants a copy within 28 days of each check.
• An electrical installation condition report. The Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020 require the fixed wiring to be inspected at least every five years, the report to be given to new tenants before they move in, and any remedial work to be done within 28 days.
• An Energy Performance Certificate. Since April 2020 a home in England or Wales generally cannot be let with an EPC below band E unless an exemption is registered.
• Deposit protection. If you pay a deposit, the landlord must put it in one of the three government-approved schemes within 30 days and tell you which one. The GOV.UK deposit guide names the schemes and explains how to check.
• Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. There must be a smoke alarm on every storey with living accommodation, and a carbon monoxide alarm in any room with a fixed combustion appliance other than a gas cooker. Test them on day one.
• If five or more of you live there from more than one household and share a kitchen or bathroom, the house is a large HMO and needs a council licence. You can ask the landlord for the licence number or check the council's public register.

Record the state of the place

Take dated photographs of every room, including the inside of cupboards, the oven, the bathroom sealant and any existing marks on walls or carpets. If the landlord provides an inventory, go through it line by line and send back your corrections in writing within the first week. A deposit dispute a year from now is decided almost entirely on what can be shown about the state of the house at the start.

Note the meter readings for gas, electricity and water on the day you move in, and photograph the meters with the readings visible. Find out who the current suppliers are; the previous residents' final bills should not become yours.

Get the practical facts in one place

These are the questions every new housemate asks in their first fortnight, usually one at a time and usually in the group chat, where the answers vanish by the following week. Collect them once.

• The Wi-Fi network name and password, and where the router is.
• Door codes, key safes, and what to do if somebody is locked out.
• Where the stopcock, fuse box and gas shut-off are, and where the fire extinguisher, fire blanket and first-aid kit are kept.
• How the heating and hot water work: the boiler, the timer, the thermostat, and what pressure the boiler should sit at.
• The bin day, which containers go out when, and where the bins live. The council's own page, found through the GOV.UK collections lookup, is the authority.
• Who to call: the landlord or agent, the emergency repairs line, and the number for a gas leak (0800 111 999 in Great Britain).
• Parking rules, permits, and where visitors can park.

Agree how the house runs

Most friction in a shared house is about small recurring jobs rather than big decisions. The bins, the recycling, the cleaning of shared spaces, the replacing of shared supplies. The mistake is to leave these to goodwill, which is unevenly distributed, or to a rota with names on it, which breaks the moment somebody moves out.

A rota attached to rooms rather than people survives change. Room 2 is responsible this week whoever lives in it. When a resident leaves, the rota does not need rewriting, and the newcomer inherits a turn rather than negotiating one. It also makes swaps explicit: if you cannot do your week, you ask another room to take it and they take one of yours later.

Agree where shared money lives and how it is tracked. Agree quiet hours if the house has early starters. Agree how guests work. None of this needs to be formal, but all of it needs to be written somewhere everyone can find.

Choose one route for problems

Decide in the first week where repairs get reported and by whom. In a house managed by an agent that is usually a portal or an email address; in a house managed by a live-in lead tenant it may be one person's phone. Whichever it is, the same problem should not be reported three times by three people, and the report should carry the facts a contractor needs: what, where, since when, and a photo.

Urgent safety issues bypass all of this. A smell of gas means leaving the house and calling the emergency number. Sparking sockets, water near electrics and a broken external lock are the kind of problem Shelter says it is reasonable to expect fixed within 24 hours, and they should go straight to the emergency contact, not into a queue.

Separate notices from chat

A group chat is good at conversation and bad at record-keeping. "The plumber is coming Tuesday between 8 and 12" is a notice: everyone needs it, it matters for a week, and by Tuesday morning it is forty messages up. Agree that anything of that kind goes somewhere it stays visible until it stops being relevant, and that the chat is for everything else. Houses that make this distinction early argue less about who was told what.

If you are not in England

The safety duties above are set by England-specific regulations, though Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own broadly similar rules on gas, electrical and alarm safety. Deposit protection applies in England and Wales through the three schemes named above; Scotland and Northern Ireland run separate schemes. Check the housing advice service for your nation before assuming a rule carries across.