Is it safe to give a landlord a copy of your ID?

A letting agent emails after a viewing: “Please send a copy of your passport or ID to start referencing.” It is one of the most common requests in renting — and one of the easiest to comply with in a way that still protects you.

Why landlords and letting agents ask

Referencing exists to confirm you are who you say you are, match your income and history to your application, and reduce fraud on both sides. In many places landlords or agents are also expected to carry out some form of identity or right-to-reside check before signing a tenancy. None of that requires them to hold a complete, unprotected scan of your passport or national ID sitting in an inbox or a filing cabinet — it requires proof that matches your name, photo and application.

What a landlord actually needs to see

• Your full name, to match the tenancy agreement.
• Your photo, to confirm you are the applicant.
• Your nationality or right to reside, where that’s part of referencing.

They do not need your document number, your machine-readable zone, your date of birth or your signature sitting permanently in a folder — those fields are for border control and government systems, not a landlord’s records.

What to redact before you send it

Cover these on the copy:

• The document or passport number.
• The machine-readable zone — the code lines at the bottom of a passport or the back of an ID card.
• Your date of birth.
• Your signature.

If a specific field is genuinely needed — for example, your date of birth to run a credit check — reveal only that one and keep the rest covered, rather than sending the whole page unprotected.

Add a watermark before it leaves your phone

A copy marked “For [Agency name] referencing — [date]”, tiled across the image, stays useless if it is ever forwarded beyond the file it was meant for, breached from an inbox, or kept longer than it should be. It costs nothing and takes a few seconds.

Do it on your phone, not in an email attachment

The safest way to produce this copy is entirely on-device, with no upload: photograph the document, cover the fields above, add a watermark naming the request, and send that instead of the original. That is exactly what Anonymize my ID does. If the agent asks for it over WhatsApp or email, the same redacted copy is safe for either — see is it safe to send your ID over WhatsApp or email for what happens to the image after you hit send. For the mechanics of covering each field, see how to redact a passport or ID card.

One habit worth keeping across every landlord, agent or reference check you go through: send the redacted copy, never the original, and you only ever have to protect one document — the one still in your pocket.

Frequently asked questions