Fair wear and tear: the four questions an adjudicator asks

“Fair wear and tear” is the phrase both sides reach for and neither defines. It has a legal meaning, and adjudicators use it: the reasonable operation of natural forces. Which sounds abstract until you turn it into the questions that actually get asked, in order, about the item in dispute.

One: what was it like at check-in, and can you prove it?

Not the room. The item. A claim about a carpet is decided on what the record says about that carpet on the day the tenant took the keys, and a report that graded the whole room as good has not said anything about the carpet.

If there is no usable check-in evidence, the analysis usually stops here, because the landlord carries the burden and there is nothing to carry it with.

Two: what is it like now, recorded the same way?

The comparison has to be like for like. The same item, photographed from a comparable position, graded on the same scale. A check-out that is a fresh description of the property rather than a response to the check-in forces the adjudicator to do the matching themselves, and they are not obliged to do it generously.

Three: is the difference beyond the reasonable operation of natural forces?

This is where length of tenancy and occupancy do their work. The same scuffed paintwork is wear after four years with a family and something else after four months with one professional tenant. The same applies to carpet compression in a hallway, limescale in a shower, and the general dulling of a kitchen worktop.

Two useful rules of thumb from how these are decided in practice. Redecoration claims after five years or more are rarely awarded, because five years of ordinary living is what paint is for. And a single distinct event — a burn, a tear, a broken hinge — is much easier to argue than a general decline, because natural forces do not usually produce one hole.

Four: what is the remedy worth, after betterment?

The rule is that the landlord should not end up better off, financially or materially, than at the start of the tenancy. So the arithmetic is not the price of the replacement. It is the value of what was lost.

A worked example, because this is where claims are quietly halved. A carpet with a reasonable life of ten years, fitted two years before the tenancy began, damaged beyond repair. Eight years of its life remained, so the tenant is responsible for the loss of those eight years, not for a new carpet. On a £600 carpet that is £480, less anything attributable to ordinary wear over the tenancy. Claim the £600 and you have asked for a new carpet at somebody else’s expense, and an adjudicator who notices will look harder at everything else you claimed.

You will need the age of the item to run this. Which is a documentation problem, not a legal one, and it is solved at check-in rather than at the end.

What this means for how you record a property

The four questions want four things, and they all exist before the dispute does: itemised condition rather than room summaries, photographs that carry their own dates, a check-out that answers the check-in item by item, and enough about the age of the expensive items to apportion a claim honestly.

The last one is the most commonly missing and the cheapest to add. Recording that the flooring was fitted in 2024 takes a moment at check-in. Reconstructing it three years later, with the deposit in dispute, takes an afternoon and an invoice you may no longer have.

As ever: adjudicators decide on the evidence in front of them, and nothing here is legal advice. But nothing above is really about law. It is about whether the record you kept can answer four questions it was never written to answer.

Sources: The Deposit Protection Service, common dispute questions.