What to include in a rental application form

Most rental application forms are built by copying the last one, and the last one was built by copying an agency PDF from about 2011. That is why so many still ask for marital status, religion, or the name and age of every child, none of which decide anything and all of which now sit on some regulator’s list of things to stop asking. Build one instead by writing down the decisions you have to make, then letting each field earn its place against one.

The four decisions a rental application makes

There are four, plus a fifth thing that is not a decision.

Identity. Is this person who they say they are, and can you reach them? Name, date of birth, one identity document, an email, a phone number.

Affordability. Can they pay this rent, from income you can verify? Employment, income, the evidence for it, and the rent they pay now.

History. Have they rented before, and what did the last person who let to them think? Current address, how long, the agent or landlord, a contact number, one previous address.

Consent. Have they agreed, in writing, to the checks you will run and to how you will handle what they send?

The fifth is scope: which property, from when, for how long. It is the label on the application, not a judgement about the applicant, and it belongs first because it is the easiest block to answer.

NSW Fair Trading’s guidance for agents lands in almost the same place. It names three purposes for collecting anything at all: confirming identity, establishing that the applicant can pay the rent, and showing they are likely to look after the property. Its own test is worth running over your draft: am I requesting multiple forms of evidence when I only need one?

The field list, group by group

The table at the end of this article is the full field list from the example application on this site, with the decision each field feeds and a note where it needs care. The shape is the point: five fields do identity, seven do history, six do affordability, three cover occupancy, two do consent, four are scope.

The required flags are sparser than you would expect. Only ten of the 27 are mandatory, and they all sit in scope, identity and consent. Everything in the history and income blocks is optional, so an applicant between jobs or moving out of home still submits rather than abandoning the form at a question they cannot answer.

The employment and references blocks are table fields, not repeated text boxes. A table with named columns takes as many rows as the applicant has jobs and exports as one column rather than sprawling across your spreadsheet. It is the right shape for anything you would otherwise label “Employer 1, Employer 2, Employer 3”.

Questions you should not ask

This is general information, not legal advice, and tenancy law is state by state, so settle your jurisdiction before copying anything.

In NSW, the Fair Trading Commissioner’s guidance is direct. Charging a prospective tenant for a credit check or other background check is described as a breach of the Residential Tenancies Act 2010, and application fees beyond the costs specifically allowed must not be required or received. Best practice on identity is to sight the documents and note the details without storing them. An applicant offering a bank statement in place of payslips should be encouraged to redact the daily transactions and show savings only. Employment details should not be collected from household members who are not on the lease.

Under the Australian Privacy Principles, APP 3 applies a higher standard to sensitive information, APP 5 requires you to tell people what you collect and why, and APP 11 obliges you to protect what you hold and destroy or de-identify it once you no longer need it. The OAIC’s tenancy guidance adds one that catches most application forms: a driver licence or Medicare number is a government related identifier, and an agent must not use or disclose it, blanking it out on any copy taken. If your form has a licence number field, ask what it is for.

In the United States, the Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful to publish any notice, statement or advertisement about the rental of a dwelling that indicates a preference, limitation or discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin. An application form is such a statement. That is why “how many children” deserves a second look, and why a general disability question has no place on a screening form even though a specific accessibility need is reasonable to discuss later. Many states and cities add protected classes of their own.

Proof documents and how to collect them

Uploads are where applications go wrong, because people attach whatever their phone gives them. The file upload field takes 1 to 10 files, with a per file size cap between 1 and 100 MB, defaulting to 10. Allowed types are two toggles, images and PDF, with no way to allow an arbitrary extension. For payslips that is the right constraint: a photograph and a PDF both arrive, a password protected spreadsheet does not.

One quirk to know before writing helper text. On a published classic form the description under a field is rendered for file upload and photo fields only, and every other field drops it. Across the 39 classic examples on this site, 30 field descriptions are written but never shown to the person filling the form. Put instructions on the upload field, where they do appear, and anything else into a paragraph block. The maker page for the file upload field lays out the settings.

Consent and privacy wording

Name each thing separately. The example uses a checkbox group with two ticks, one consenting to a tenancy database and credit check, one confirming the privacy notice has been read. A single “I agree to everything” tick is bundled consent, and it is hard to defend later.

Then say what happens to the file. APP 5 covers the point of collection: who you are, why you collect it, who you give it to, how to complain. APP 11 covers the other end, destroying or de-identifying what you no longer need. An unsuccessful application is the clearest case, and “we keep applications for 30 days and then delete them” is a sentence worth putting on the form.

Then sign it. An inline signature is drawn or typed while filling the form and prints into the response PDF, which is enough for a declaration. A full e-signature field that emails a named signer and returns a certificate belongs on the lease.

A finished example, and what is conditional in practice

The example below is a working 27 field application built on this list. Treat it as a starting point, not a template to publish unchanged.

Two things it does not do, because the product does not. There is no conditional logic hiding the previous address block from someone who has lived at one address for five years, so those fields stay visible and optional. And a respondent cannot save a half finished application and come back to it, so it has to be completable in one sitting.

Settle the co-applicant question before publishing. One application per adult beats one form with four sets of fields, because income, history and consent are personal to each person.

Adapting it for a room, a commercial lease or a co-applicant

For a single room in a shared house, drop the occupancy block, keep identity and affordability, and add one question about the household being joined. That lands around 12 fields.

For a commercial lease, the four decisions hold but the subject changes from a person to an entity: the registered entity and its directors, financial statements and a guarantee, trading history and previous premises. For co-applicants, publish one form, ask each adult to fill it in, and group responses by the property address field on export.

Building from scratch, describe the form in plain sentences, let the form builder draft the fields, then fix the required flags by hand against the four decisions. The same discipline applies to hiring, where the list of questions to leave out is longer still: job application form questions.