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How to verify a tenant’s payslip and income
A payslip is a claim. Verifying it means recomputing the tax, tracing the salary into the bank statement, and reading the file itself. Convincing fakes are built to fool the eye, and the eye is not what catches them. Arithmetic is, and Tenavia runs it on every applicant automatically.
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Why fakes get past careful landlords
A bought payslip is not a bad photocopy. It carries a real employer name, a plausible layout, a tidy PDF. Landlords who pride themselves on reading documents carefully still pass them, because everything a reader checks, the seller got right. What the seller almost never gets right is the payroll arithmetic underneath, because getting it right requires actually running payroll.
The checks that work
- Recompute the deductions. From the stated gross pay, a real payroll produces one correct amount of income tax and National Insurance under the current tax year’s rules. Template fakes state a clean gross and invent the deductions; recompute them and the numbers are simply impossible.
- Follow the net pay into the bank. The payslip claims a number; the bank statement shows what actually arrived, from whom, on what date. The employer’s name against the credit, the amounts matching, the pattern repeating: that is verification. A payslip with no landing credit is your answer.
- Check the boring fields. Tax code, National Insurance number format, cumulative year-to-date figures that should grow month on month. Fakes bought one payslip at a time routinely carry year-to-date numbers that cannot follow from each other.
- Ask for the PDF, not a photo. A photographed or screenshotted payslip strips away everything checkable and should be treated as unverifiable, not waved through.
- Look at the file itself. A payslip that has been edited after export often still contains the original text underneath the change. Recovering that takes software, which is precisely the point.
If a payslip does not add up
Do not accuse. Arithmetic failures have innocent explanations often enough: an old template from a small employer, a corrected run, an unusual pay structure. Say the document could not be verified and ask for an alternative: a different month, the employment contract, or simply the bank statements doing the talking. A genuine applicant produces alternatives without friction. The other kind goes quiet.
The one-line method: a payslip is a claim. Check that the claim is internally possible (the payroll arithmetic) and externally true (the credit that lands). Fakes fail one or both.
How Tenavia runs these checks
Every payslip an applicant uploads gets the full treatment automatically, alongside the bank statements it should agree with.
The tax, recomputed
Income tax and National Insurance recomputed from the stated gross against the current HMRC tables. A £20 template fails this in seconds.
The salary, traced
The claimed pay is matched against the credits actually landing in the bank statements: employer name, amount and repeating pattern.
The file, examined
Edited PDFs give themselves away underneath. Photographs of screens are marked unverifiable, never quietly passed.
The verdict, honest
Verified, or could-not-verify with the reason named. The score never guesses in either direction.
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What Tenavia does for you
Free for one property.3 applicants a year, everything else included. No card, no expiry.
Screen the tenantsApplicants send payslips and bank statements through your link. You get a ranked list. See howClose
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47 checks on every applicant. Every warning says why. You make the choice.
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Take the photos on your phone. At the next inspection the camera shows the last photo faintly, so you line up the same shot.
Every photo is dated by us, not by the phone.
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No software makes you compliant, but nothing here gets forgotten.
Find a tradespersonTenants report a problem through a link. You request tradesperson quotes in one tap. See howClose
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Pick a tradesperson, keep the quote, and the job is on the record.
Track the moneyRent checked off each month. Receipts kept for your tax return. See howClose
Late rent gets a dated letter you can send.
Receipts are read and filed in the boxes HMRC uses.
Everything is dated and kept in one file, ready if there is ever a dispute.
Questions landlords ask
The practical edges of payslip checking.
What counts as proof of income for a rental application?
For the employed, the last three payslips and three months of bank statements showing the salary landing; for the self-employed, the statements plus their tax calculation from HMRC. A payslip alone is a claim; the statement is the proof, and the two should agree.
Does Tenavia do a rent affordability check?
Yes. Once the income is verified, the rent is shown as a share of what genuinely lands each month, on every applicant, so a tenant affordability check is part of every score rather than a separate step. The common rule of thumb is rent under about a third of take-home; Tenavia shows the actual figure and lets you decide.
How common are fake payslips really?
Common enough that sellers operate openly, and rising wherever referencing is known to be light. Most landlords never detect the ones they accepted, which is the uncomfortable part: a passed fake looks identical to a real payslip, right up until the rent stops.
Can I check a payslip by ringing the employer?
Sometimes, and it can help, but treat it carefully: the phone number on a fake payslip connects to the faker’s friend, not the employer. Look the company up independently before calling, and treat the bank statements as the stronger evidence either way.
What if the applicant is self-employed and has no payslips?
Then nothing is wrong: payslips are only expected from the employed. Self-employed applicants evidence income through bank statements and tax records instead, and Tenavia scores them on exactly that rather than marking them down for the missing payslip.
Is it rude to check documents this thoroughly?
Genuine applicants are not offended by checks they pass identically to everyone else; many prefer a landlord who plainly runs things properly. The same checks on every applicant, in the same order, is fairness, not suspicion.
Does Tenavia check anything a human could not, eventually?
In principle a human with the tax tables, a calculator and a free evening could recompute one payslip. In practice the checks run across every document of every applicant, cross-referenced, in minutes, which is the difference between possible and done.
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