Of the six organisations that legally need your new address within weeks of a move, how many have you told so far? Most renters handle the physical move — keys, boxes, meter readings — and then let the paperwork drift for months, sometimes never finishing it before the next move starts the whole list again. Here is what needs doing after you’ve picked up the keys to a London rental: what’s free, what costs money, what’s legally required, and what helps your credit file without anyone telling you it would.
Register to Vote: The London Moving Checklist Item Everyone Skips
Most renters treat voter registration as optional admin for people who care about the specific election on the calendar. That misses the actual reason to do it the week you move in: being on the electoral roll can add up to 50 points to an Experian credit score, because it’s one of the ways credit reference agencies verify your identity and address. If you’re rebuilding a thin or damaged credit file — the situation covered in our guide to renting with bad credit or a CCJ — this is one of the few actions that’s both free and directly useful.
Register online at gov.uk in about five minutes. The update shows on your own credit file within roughly 30 days, but there’s a gap worth knowing about: it can take considerably longer for your council to pass the new entry on to Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, so don’t expect an instant score jump. If you do want to vote in a specific election, the registration deadline is a hard 12 working days beforehand — miss it and there’s no late exception, whatever the reason.
Redirect Your Post Before You Lose Anything Important
The tenant before you is not obliged to forward your mail, and won’t, once they’ve moved on themselves. A missed bank statement, a DVLA reminder, or a court letter about a debt you don’t yet know exists is a worse outcome than the redirection fee. Royal Mail’s redirection service runs £45 for three months, £66.50 for six, or £95 for a full year for one adult, with concessionary rates from £22.50 if you receive Universal Credit or Pension Credit.
Apply online, by post, or in person at a Post Office branch — the online route is the fastest and takes a few days to activate once submitted. Three months covers most of what arrives late — the odd subscription renewal, a birthday card, a bank sending something to the wrong address out of habit — but it won’t catch everything. Some organisations, banks especially, treat a redirected address as a fraud flag and will simply refuse to act on anything until you’ve updated the address directly with them, which is exactly why the smaller updates further down this list still matter even once redirection is running.
Register With a GP Near Your New Address
Registering with a GP costs nothing and doesn’t require proof of address or immigration status, whatever a receptionist might imply on a busy Monday. Find a practice accepting new patients on the NHS website, fill in the registration form, and you’re usually confirmed within about a week nationally — though inner London boroughs with dense, high-turnover rental populations sometimes run slower, since the same handful of local practices are absorbing a much higher volume of moves than the national average assumes. Areas with a high share of short-let and flatshare housing, rather than any particular borough, see this most: the practice’s patient list keeps churning faster than its capacity grows.
Do this even if you’re young, healthy, and not expecting to need a doctor. Registering after you’re already ill means finding a practice, waiting for confirmation, and then booking an appointment, in that order — all while unwell. Registering the week you move means the appointment is the only step left when you actually need one. If you’re on repeat prescriptions, keep enough medication to cover the transfer gap — records can take a couple of weeks to move between practices even after registration is confirmed, and a pharmacy can’t always bridge that on its own.
Update Your Driving Licence and Vehicle Details With the DVLA
If you drive, this one carries a real penalty attached, not just inconvenience. Under the Road Traffic Act 1988, failing to tell the DVLA your address has changed is an offence that can carry a fine of up to £1,000 — there’s no grace period, whatever forum threads and well-meaning friends might suggest. The update itself is free, takes about five minutes online, and is typically processed within a week.
Update both the driving licence and the vehicle log book (V5C) if you own a car, since they’re separate records with separate address fields. Anyone leasing a car through work or a family member’s name should double-check whose responsibility the V5C update actually is before assuming it’s been handled — a surprisingly common gap. Car insurance follows from this rather than sitting separately: insurers price partly on where a car is kept overnight, so an unchanged address on your policy is the same problem as the unchanged one on your contents cover — a claim risk, not just an admin loose end.
Sort Your TV Licence Before It Becomes a Problem
A TV Licence belongs to an address, not a person, which catches out renters who assume the previous tenant’s licence simply carries over or that their own follows them automatically. It does neither. Check directly with TV Licensing whether your new address is already covered — some landlords maintain a licence for furnished properties with a set on-site — and if not, buy or transfer one before you first switch on a device covered by the rules.
This is a low-effort, low-cost item compared with everything else on this list, but it’s also the one most likely to generate an unpleasant letter if skipped, since TV Licensing cross-references address records more actively than most renters expect.
The Quieter Updates: Bank, Employer, HMRC and Insurance
Several updates matter without needing their own section. Your bank needs the new address for statements, card replacement, and fraud checks — do this promptly, since a mismatched address is one of the more common reasons a bank flags an otherwise normal transaction as suspicious. HMRC needs it to keep your tax code and any correspondence about Self Assessment or PAYE correct; get this wrong and a tax code error can sit unnoticed for months, costing or overcharging you in every pay packet until someone catches it. Tell your employer directly rather than assuming HR updates automatically from a payroll system — the two systems often aren’t linked the way people assume.
Contents insurance deserves more care than the others. An address change is a genuine risk reassessment for an insurer, not paperwork to file — a flat above a takeaway on a busy high street and a quiet mansion block round the corner can carry meaningfully different premiums for identical contents. Don’t assume an existing policy simply follows you to the new address; check it explicitly, because an insurer who later discovers you moved without updating them can void a claim entirely, which is a far worse outcome than the ten minutes it takes to tell them upfront.
What Belongs in Week One vs What Can Wait
Not everything on this list carries the same cost of delay, and treating it all as equally urgent is how renters end up doing none of it for a month. Electoral roll registration and the DVLA update belong in week one specifically because they’re free, take minutes, and carry either a credit-file benefit or a legal penalty for delay — there’s no version of “later” that makes either one cheaper or easier.
Royal Mail redirection and GP registration are next, ideally inside the first fortnight — redirection because every day without it is a day of mail going to a stranger, and GP registration because London practices are slower than the national average and starting early avoids being unregistered when you actually need an appointment. The bank, HMRC, employer and TV Licence updates can genuinely wait two to three weeks without real consequence, as long as they’re not forgotten entirely — set a single reminder for week three and clear the whole group at once rather than trickling them out one email at a time.
Add up the actual cost of getting all of this right and it comes to, at most, £95 — the price of a full year’s mail redirection. Everything else on this list is free: registering to vote, updating the DVLA, registering with a GP, and telling your bank, employer, HMRC and insurer are all no-cost admin, which makes the real barrier time and memory rather than money. If you’re moving on a short-term contract and won’t be near an election, the electoral roll registration still earns its place purely for the credit-file benefit; if you’re a settled renter planning to stay several years, the same list matters just as much, just with less urgency behind the redirection cost, since fewer people will still be sending mail to your old address by month three.
Settled In, Sorted — FTR London
Landlords: tenants who’ve done this list properly tend to be the ones who stay organised through the rest of the tenancy too — the same discipline that gets a TV Licence sorted in week one usually shows up in how a deposit and inventory get handled at the end. List your property on FTR London and reach renters who take the admin seriously.
Renters: once the paperwork trail is sorted, the bigger admin items are worth locking down too — our guides to council tax and utilities setup and the physical move-in day checklist cover the rest of what this one doesn’t. Browse your next London rental on FTR London when the time comes to do all of this again.
