Landlord Rental Income Expenses

3rd June 2019

If you are a landlord or have a portfolio of properties, you can claim ‘wholly incurred’ expenses against your property income. Expenses must follow the standard HMRC guidance and the expenses must be exclusively for the purpose of renting out the property.

HMRC provide a number of examples of allowable expenses including:

If you buy a new vacuum cleaner for your own home, and also use it to clean your rental property between tenants, you can’t claim the cost of the vacuum cleaner as an expense against your rental income.

However, you could claim the cost of any cleaning products you bought specifically for cleaning the rental property.

Where costs are incurred partly for your rental business and partly for some other purpose you may be able to claim a proportion of that cost if that part can be separately identified as being incurred wholly and exclusively for the purposes of the property rental business. More information on this is in the next section.

Allowable expenses include:

Mortgage interest – a proportion of this cost is now limited to basic rate Income Tax relief,
General maintenance and repairs to the property, but not improvements (such as replacing a laminate kitchen worktop with a granite worktop)
Water rates, council tax, gas and electricity
Insurance, such as landlords’ policies for buildings, contents and public liability
Costs of services, including the wages of gardeners and cleaners
Letting agent fees and management fees
Legal fees for lets of a year or less, or for renewing a lease for less than 50 years
Accountant’s fees
Rents (if you’re sub-letting), ground rents and service charges
Direct costs such as phone calls, stationery and advertising for new tenants
Vehicle running costs (only the proportion used for your rental business) including mileage rate deductions for business motoring costs

Expenses you can’t claim a deduction for include:

the full amount of your mortgage payment - only the interest element of your mortgage payment can be offset against your income
private telephone calls - you can only claim for the cost of calls relating to your property rental business
clothing - for example if you bought a suit to wear to a meeting relating to your property rental business, you can’t claim for the cost as wearing the suit is partly for your rental business and partly to keep you warm - no identifiable part is for your property rental business
personal expenses - you can’t claim for any expense that was not incurred solely for your property rental business