You’ll still hear it called a “DSS tenant,” even though the Department of Social Security stopped existing in 2001. The benefit that replaced housing benefit for most working-age tenants is Universal Credit, and whether to let to someone receiving it is a question every landlord ends up asking sooner or later. Here’s where things actually stand.
What “DSS” actually means now
“DSS” is shorthand from a government department that hasn’t existed for over two decades. What people mean when they say it is housing benefit, or its replacement, the housing element of Universal Credit. Most tenants on Universal Credit are working, or looking for work, and receiving the housing element alongside it. It isn’t a category of tenant, it’s a description of how part of the rent gets paid.
Can you say no, just because someone’s on benefits?
No, not as a blanket policy. Two County Court cases in 2020, one in York and one in Birmingham, found that “No DSS” policies count as indirect discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, because they disproportionately affect women and disabled tenants, who are more likely to rely on housing benefit. Those were county court judgments rather than binding precedent, but from 1 May 2026 the Renters’ Rights Act puts this beyond doubt: blanket bans on letting to tenants on benefits are now a civil offence, and councils and Trading Standards can fine landlords and agents who advertise “no DSS,” “no benefits” or “no children.”
What you can still do is assess every applicant, benefit tenant or not, on whether they can actually afford and sustain the tenancy. That’s not discrimination, that’s referencing.
How we actually assess a Universal Credit application
We don’t treat Universal Credit as a red flag. We treat referencing as non-negotiable, for every tenant, on benefits or not. In practice that means the same checks as anyone else, plus a guarantor where the affordability calculation is tight, which for a Universal Credit household is very often the case. If referencing doesn’t come back clean, the tenancy doesn’t proceed. That’s not about the benefit, it’s about the same standard applying to everyone.
Landlords who’ve been burned in the past by a “benefit tenant” can almost always trace it back to referencing that wasn’t actually done properly, not to the benefit itself. Skip that step for anyone and you’re taking a real risk.
What changes under the Renters’ Rights Act
Beyond the ban on blanket bans, the wider point is that from 1 May 2026 you can’t advertise a preference against benefit income at all, and enforcement no longer depends on the tenant bringing their own discrimination claim. It’s an active offence a council can act on. If you’re a landlord who’s still filtering applicants by income source rather than affordability, that approach is now against the law, not just bad practice.
Our position
We assess every applicant the same way: full referencing, a guarantor where the numbers need one, and a decision based on whether the tenancy will actually work, not on where the rent is coming from. If you’d rather someone else handled that referencing properly rather than skip it under pressure to fill a void, that’s what our fully managed service and tenant find service both cover, referencing is included, not optional. See our full fee list for what that costs.
Owner of HTG Property Group and HTG Mortgages, based in Winchester.
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