"Fair wear and tear" is the phrase that decides more deposit disputes than any other — and it's also the most misunderstood. Landlords tend to see damage where adjudicators see normal use; tenants tend to see normal use where adjudicators see damage. Here's where the line actually sits.
What Fair Wear and Tear Actually Means
The long-standing definition is deterioration from the reasonable use of the premises by the tenant, and the ordinary operation of natural forces — in other words, the passage of time. A tenant pays rent to live in a property, and living in a property inevitably wears it. That wear belongs to the landlord as a cost of doing business, not to the tenant.
Two factors stretch or shrink what counts as "fair":
- Length of tenancy. More wear is reasonable after three years than after six months.
- Type of occupancy. A family of four with young children will reasonably wear a property faster than a single professional. Adjudicators explicitly take this into account.
The Practical Line
Some everyday examples of how the line tends to fall:
- Carpet pile flattened in walkways — wear and tear. A wine stain or an iron burn — damage.
- Faded curtains from sunlight — wear and tear. Torn or missing curtains — damage.
- Minor scuffs to walls from everyday living — wear and tear. Unapproved screw holes, crayon, or large gouges — damage.
- Worn tap chrome — wear and tear. A cracked basin — damage.
- A property returned domestically clean when it was let domestically clean — fine. Returned below the cleanliness standard recorded at check-in — chargeable cleaning.
The test isn't "is the property worse than it was?" — it always will be. The test is "is it worse than reasonable use over this tenancy would explain?"
New-for-Old Never Applies
Even where damage is proven, landlords don't get replacement cost. Deposit schemes apply apportionment: the tenant compensates for the value the item lost, judged against its age and expected lifespan — otherwise the landlord would end up better off than before the damage, which schemes call "betterment" and never allow.
Worked example: a carpet with an expected ten-year life, already five years old at check-in, is ruined by a stain two years into the tenancy. The landlord doesn't get a new carpet. They get compensation for the roughly three years of remaining life the carpet lost — about 30% of replacement cost, not 100%.
This is why professional checkout reports record an item's age and condition so carefully: apportionment can only be argued with evidence of what the item was worth at the start.
What This Means for Your Evidence
Every one of the judgements above depends on comparing two points in time. Adjudication is a paper exercise — the adjudicator never visits the property and won't chase missing evidence. They see the check-in inventory, the checkout report, the tenancy agreement and whatever photographs come with them. If the check-in record doesn't establish the starting condition, the wear-and-tear argument is over before it starts.
The strongest position is an independent inventory at check-in, mid-term inspections that log emerging issues with dates, and a checkout report that describes the property exactly as returned — with the damage-versus-wear assessment made item by item against the original record.
The Bottom Line
Fair wear and tear isn't a loophole for tenants or a trap for landlords — it's a predictable standard, applied consistently by every scheme. Landlords and agents who document both ends of the tenancy properly almost never lose on it. Those who rely on memory and a handful of phone photos almost always do.