The free Scottish tenancy agreement: what it covers, and what it does not

Let us be plain about this before anything else, because a page like this on a paid product's website usually is not.

The mygov.scot tenancy agreement generator produces the Scottish Government's own model private residential tenancy agreement, and it hands you the Easy Read Notes with it as a single document. That pairing is not a nicety. The model agreement is the one the Easy Read Notes were written for, and serving the correct notes is a legal requirement with a real penalty attached. Getting both from the same tool in one go removes the most common way Scottish landlords fall foul of section 16 of the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016.

The notice tools are just as sound. The Notice to Leave generator routes through the prescribed form and calculates the notice period for you, which is exactly where landlords make mistakes that cost them a tribunal hearing. There is also a subtenant version, which almost nobody else provides.

If your letting is one property, one tenancy, running quietly, and you need an agreement and occasionally a notice, the honest advice is to use the free tools and keep your money.

A tenancy generates a great deal more paper than four documents, and none of the rest is on mygov.scot. There is guidance on deposits, arrears, repairs, registration and HMO licensing, but guidance is not a document.

The gaps that come up first, in roughly the order a landlord hits them:

• Deposit prescribed information. Required under the Tenancy Deposit Schemes (Scotland) Regulations 2011. No generator.
• The inventory and schedule of condition. The single document that decides deposit disputes. No generator.
• Arrears letters, first warning through formal demand. No generator.
• A breach notice for a tenancy term. No generator.
• Checkout and deposit deduction documents. No generator.
• A guarantor agreement, a pet consent letter, a rent statement, a maintenance log, a landlord reference. None of them.

None of this is a criticism. mygov.scot is a public information service, not a document platform, and it does not claim to be one. But "the government does it for free" is only true of four documents, and a landlord who plans on that basis will be writing the rest themselves in Word at the point they need it most.

Every one of the four tools says the same thing: your details are not stored, and you cannot save and return to a part-finished form.

For privacy that is the right design, and it is a genuine advantage over any account-based product including ours. Nothing about your property or your tenant sits on anyone's server.

The cost is that there is no such thing as a second document. Every form starts blank. Your address, your tenant's name, the rent, the deposit, the start date: typed again, in full, every time, with a fresh chance to mistype something that then contradicts what you served last month. Serve an agreement in March and a rent-increase notice in November and the two are unrelated documents that happen to be about the same tenancy.

That is the actual trade. Not free against paid — free against re-entering everything, and against having no record of what you served and when.

Use mygov.scot if you have one or two properties, you need an agreement and the occasional notice, you are comfortable writing the other documents yourself when they come up, and you would rather nothing about your tenancy sat in a company's database.

Use something else if you have more than a couple of properties, or you want the deposit paperwork, the inventory and the arrears letters to exist without writing them, or you want the documents to agree with each other because they came from one record of the tenancy.

Use both if that suits you, and plenty do. The Scottish Government model agreement is a perfectly good agreement. Nothing stops you using it and getting the other thirty documents elsewhere. If you go that route, remember the notes rule: the model agreement pairs with the Easy Read Notes, and it is only a landlord-drafted agreement that takes the Statutory Terms Supporting Notes. Mixing them up is the same failure as serving neither.