HMO licensing in Doncaster: what landlords must know

A mandatory HMO licence is needed where a property is rented to five or more people who form more than one household, some or all of them share a toilet, bathroom or kitchen, and at least one of them pays rent. That is the national test, and it is the one behind most questions about an HMO licence in Doncaster. All three limbs have to be met. Miss one and the mandatory scheme does not bite, though something else still might.

Landlords get tripped up less by the threshold itself than by what sits either side of it. Councils have the power to require licensing below five occupiers. And a property can fall inside a selective licensing area and meet the HMO test at the same time, which means two separate licences rather than one.

Working through the test properly

Take the three limbs in order, because they are easy to skim past.

Five or more people. Count occupiers, not tenants and not bedrooms. Children living in the property count towards the number. A four bed house let to four sharers who then have a partner move in permanently is a five person property, whatever the agreement says.

More than one household. A household is broadly one person, or members of the same family living together as a family. Four unrelated professionals sharing are four households. A couple with two children are one. This is the limb that decides whether a large family let is an HMO at all, and usually it is not.

Sharing a toilet, bathroom or kitchen. Some or all of the occupiers, not necessarily every one of them. A house where two rooms have their own shower but everyone uses the same kitchen still meets this limb. Fully self contained flats with their own facilities are a different question again, and the answer there depends on how the building was converted and whether it meets building standards.

The government's page on a house in multiple occupation licence sets out the national position. Read it alongside the council's own pages rather than instead of them.

Councils can go below five

This is the part landlords most often assume away. The five person threshold is the floor for mandatory licensing across England. It is not a ceiling on what a council can require.

A council can designate an additional licensing scheme covering smaller HMOs, three or four person shared houses for example, either across the whole borough or in defined areas. It has to consult and designate formally, and schemes run for a fixed period before they lapse or are renewed.

So the honest answer to "does my three person share in Doncaster need a licence" is that you have to check with the council rather than reason it out from the national threshold. Do not take a figure from an article, including this one, as confirmation that a smaller property is outside licensing. Ask the licensing team about the specific address and keep their answer.

Selective licensing is a different regime

The two get confused constantly, so it is worth separating them cleanly.

HMO licensing is about the property and who lives in it. Five or more occupiers, more than one household, shared facilities. Applies anywhere in the country regardless of postcode.

Selective licensing is about the area. A council designates a boundary, and every privately rented home inside it needs a licence, whatever its size and whoever lives there. A one bedroom flat let to a single tenant is caught if it sits inside the line.

In Doncaster the only active selective licensing scheme is in Hexthorpe. It was designated on 15 November 2021, became operational on 1 March 2022, and runs for five years to 1 March 2027. The council publishes the boundary and the process on its Hexthorpe scheme page, and its wider selective licensing information covers which areas are designated. We have gone through that scheme in more detail in our post on how selective licensing works in Doncaster.

The regimes stack. A house in Hexthorpe let to five sharers from different households can need a selective licence because of where it is and a mandatory HMO licence because of who lives in it. Holding one does not excuse the other. Neither does the council telling you about one of them and not mentioning the other, though in practice they usually will.

Room sizes and amenity standards

Licensed HMOs have minimum room size requirements, and the licence itself will specify how many people may sleep in each room. Rooms below the minimum cannot be used as sleeping accommodation. Councils also set standards for how many toilets, bathrooms and kitchen facilities a property needs for a given number of occupiers, and for the size and layout of the kitchen itself.

We are not going to put numbers on any of that here, because the mandatory minimums sit in national regulations and councils apply their own published standards on top, and the two together are what your particular property gets measured against. Get the council's HMO standards document before you buy, convert or advertise. That is a genuinely different exercise from checking whether a room feels big enough.

The practical consequence is a commercial one. A property that looks like a six bed HMO on the floor plan may only license as a five bed once the small room fails the size test, and that changes the rent roll the purchase was based on.

Fire safety and management duties

Fire safety in an HMO goes well beyond the alarms you would fit in a single family let. Councils typically look at detection throughout the property, protected escape routes, fire doors, and the fire resistance of the construction between rooms. What is required depends on the size and layout of the building and on the risk assessment for it, so a three storey house is treated differently from a two storey one.

Separate management regulations also apply to HMOs, and they apply whether or not the property is licensed. In broad terms they put duties on the person managing the house covering things like maintaining the water and electrical installations, keeping shared areas in repair and clean, keeping fire equipment in order, dealing with waste, and displaying your contact details in the property so occupiers can reach you. Breaching them is an offence in its own right, separate from anything to do with a licence.

Everything ordinary still applies as well: gas safety, electrical inspections, EPC, deposit protection, right to rent. HMO obligations sit on top of the general compliance work a landlord in Doncaster has to keep on top of, not instead of it.

The penalty for getting it wrong

Renting out an unlicensed HMO carries an unlimited fine. That is the headline, and it is not the only exposure.

Rent repayment orders are available to tenants and to the council where a property should have been licensed and was not. Under the Renters' Rights Act the maximum has increased from one year's rent to two years' rent, so on a five bed share the sum involved is not trivial.

None of that depends on the house being in poor condition. The offence is letting it without the licence it needed.

Where you have to ask the council

Some of this is national and settled. The rest is local, changes, and is not safe to assume. Ask Doncaster Council directly about:

• whether any additional licensing scheme applies to smaller HMOs at your address
• what an HMO licence Doncaster Council issues currently costs, and how the fee is structured
• how long an application takes and what happens to your position while it is being processed
• the council's published room size and amenity standards
• what the fire safety expectations are for your building type
• whether the address also sits inside a selective licensing designation

Ask about the address, not about the street or the area. Get the answer in writing. If you are buying, ask before exchange, because the answer occasionally changes what the property is worth to you.

Before you let a shared house

Work out the licensing position first, then price the deal, then advertise. Doing it in that order costs a phone call. Doing it in the other order can cost a licence application on a property that will not license, or a tenancy you have to unpick. The same sequencing applies to the whole job of letting a property in Doncaster, where the checks belong at the front.

If you already let a shared house and you are not certain the HMO licence Doncaster Council granted you is current, in your name and matched to the number of occupiers actually living there, check all three. Licences are granted for a fixed period and for a stated maximum occupancy, and both are easy to drift past without noticing.

Licensing, inspections and the paperwork that goes with them are part of our managed lettings service in Doncaster, for one all-in fee with no hidden fees. If you want a second opinion on whether a property meets the HMO test, call the office on 01302 244104 and we will go through it with you.