Sharing a flat: the things to settle before you move in

Being friends and living together are two different things. Someone who is excellent company in a café may turn out to play music at two in the morning, leave the washing-up until tomorrow, or have six people round every week. The reverse is equally true: to somebody else, you are that person. So base the choice on whether your daily habits fit together, not on how much you like each other.

The simplest test is one calm conversation before you move. Get three things straight: who sleeps and wakes when, how often guests come, and how money will be handled. As the student guide on this site puts it, those same three questions account for most of the conflicts in shared flats.

If you are moving in with someone you do not know, hold the first meeting somewhere other than the flat, and invite them to a viewing with you if you can. How a person inspects a flat, what they ask and how they talk to the landlord tells you more about living with them than an hour of conversation.

The commonest way to split the rent is straight down the middle. That is fair when the rooms are the same, but in most flats they are not. A large room with a balcony costing exactly what a small one looking onto the courtyard costs feels odd, and by the second month that equality has turned into resentment. Discuss the difference openly at the outset: paying a little more for the bigger room is entirely ordinary practice.

Utilities work differently, and splitting them evenly is usually right, because you both use the water, the gas and the electricity. Agree one thing only: who collects and who pays. The arrangement that works best is for one person to pay all the bills each month and post the receipts in a shared chat, with the other transferring their share the same day. That is a great deal healthier than the fog of "we will settle up later".

Fix the payment date as well, and set it a day or two before the rent is due to the landlord. If your flatmate is paid after the rent falls due, find that out in advance: it is not an insoluble problem, but it becomes one if it is a surprise every month.

This is the question that gets overlooked most often. Usually one person signs the contract and the other simply lives there. That leaves every responsibility — payment, damage, the term — with the person who signed, and the other with no rights at all: the landlord can say at any point that this person is not on the contract.

The right approach is for both flatmates to be named. Then you are tenants on equal terms and each of you can deal with the landlord directly. Landlords know perfectly well that the contract should state who lives in the flat, and this usually meets no resistance at all.

If for some reason only one person is signing, at least get the landlord’s written consent to the second person living there, and put your own money arrangement in writing separately. That arrangement does not bind the landlord, but it makes matters clear between the two of you.

Most disputes come not from big questions but from small habits, so a handful of simple rules are worth agreeing at the start. Guests come first: is staying the night normal, how many people can be invited, can a relative from the regions stay for a week. Without an answer agreed in advance, the very first instance turns into a tense conversation.

Make a cleaning rota — written down, not verbal. Be clear who cleans the shared areas, meaning the kitchen, the bathroom and the hallway, and in which week. Washing-up works the same way: the simplest and most effective rule is that everyone washes up after themselves straight away. "I will do it later" has never worked anywhere.

Talk about quiet hours too, particularly if one of you leaves for work in the morning and the other has evening classes. After what time music and phone calls happen through headphones — that one sentence saves a great deal of sleep. And finally, food: is everything in the fridge shared, or does everyone keep their own. Say it out loud, because that is a source of arguments as well.

This is the most painful situation in a flatshare and it happens more often than people expect: a job changes, family circumstances change, a student transfers to another city. If it has not been discussed in advance, the person left behind is alone with the whole rent and has a week to find a new flatmate — on the worst possible terms.

So agree three things beforehand. First, notice: how many days ahead the person leaving has to say so. Second, who finds the replacement, and whether you both have to approve them. Third, who covers the rent on the empty room until someone is found. Those three remove most of the uncomfortable conversations entirely.

Settle the deposit here as well. If one person put the money up and that is the person leaving, how does their share come back: is it collected from the new flatmate, or set against the sum the landlord returns at the end. The general rules on deposits are covered in detail in a separate article.

Put everything you agree in one place. It does not have to be a formal document: a shared note on your phones, or a single message in the chat, is enough. What matters is that you have both seen the same words, so that six months later there is no argument about what was agreed.

This arrangement does not replace the contract with the landlord — it only governs things between the two of you. Responsibility towards the landlord still rests with the people named in the contract. Where money or liability are involved, remember that what is described here is common practice rather than legal advice, and take a lawyer’s view on your own situation.