1. OP believes the current rent is below market value, so they would be locked in for the next 6 years at below market
2. 14k tax free is worth (say) 28k gross & zero hassle / RTB / rent cap / 6 year lease etc.
RTB registration, rent level and mortgage interest relief- owner's son living with three rent paying friends
- Thread starter AOBIRE
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2. 14k tax free is worth (say) 28k gross & zero hassle / RTB / rent cap / 6 year lease etc.
I updated my post a moment ago. I don't believe the RTB comes into the picture at all if the son is the landlord and rents out rooms in "his" house, regardless of the rent level.
But Revenue does if son exceeds the 14k limit.
Revenue comes into the picture in any case. You still have to declare the income one way or the other, it just becomes tax free under 14k.
Rent a room tax relief scheme
Rent-a-room relief makes it possible to earn tax-free rental income when you rent out a room in your home to private tenants.
www.citizensinformation.ie
Thanks everyone — I appreciate all the replies. I’m not looking to find a loophole here; I want to make sure I set this up properly and do everything above board.
Just to check that I’ve understood correctly:
3. If I register the tenancy with the RTB, I should then be able to claim the allowable mortgage interest against the rental income, subject of course to the normal Revenue rules.
And finally, I’m still keen to pay for an hour of professional advice to make sure I get all of this right. Terry Gorry has been mentioned — if anyone has any other recommendations for a solicitor or tax adviser who deals specifically with small landlords/RTB issues, I’d be very grateful.
Just to check that I’ve understood correctly:
- As I own the house and the three students pay the rent directly to me (my son lives there rent-free), I should treat this as a tenancy and register it with the RTB.
- Yes, the house is worth over €1m, and the figures are correct — each student pays €1,300 per month for the nine-month academic year, so €3,900 per month while they are there.
3. If I register the tenancy with the RTB, I should then be able to claim the allowable mortgage interest against the rental income, subject of course to the normal Revenue rules.
And finally, I’m still keen to pay for an hour of professional advice to make sure I get all of this right. Terry Gorry has been mentioned — if anyone has any other recommendations for a solicitor or tax adviser who deals specifically with small landlords/RTB issues, I’d be very grateful.
Was there some discussion elsewhere on this forum whether or not in such a scenario one tenancy is sufficient or three tenancies would be necessary/advised. Can someone comment on that?
You just don't want to get stuck in a situation where one of the tenants finishes univ and decides to stay on living there - which after 6 months they will be entitled to do for an indefinite term if it is an RTB registered tenancy.
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Correct, tenants have rights x 100, landlords have none
I would think correct again. Evaluate when your son moves out and a sale rather than a return to the PRS is very likely the best option then.
Yes, but only if they leave voluntarily at the end of May 27 when the academic term ends.
If they stay on over the summer or if even one of them stays on over the summer, you can only increase by 2% after 12 months. This gets into a thorny question of one lease or separate leases, but the RTB's view which its Tribunals will uphold, is that if you rent one house to 3 people, you have one lease. That lease remains, and the rent cannot be increased, as long as one of those original tenants remains in situ.
As @DannyBoyD said, once you enter the PRS you are setting yourself up for a world of pain, confusing rules, fines if you get things wrong, tenants will all the rights in the world. It is not as simple as just registering the tenancy. You should get full legal advice on this.
Would it be an option to have a formal tenancy agreement with the son only? Then he can take in lodgers but they would be licencees paying him, rather than tenants.
The rent could be higher than 3900/month, e.g 5000/month, and you gift the money to your son to pay the part he doesn't get from his tenants, although I suppose you'd have to pay tax on the full rent.
The rent could be higher than 3900/month, e.g 5000/month, and you gift the money to your son to pay the part he doesn't get from his tenants, although I suppose you'd have to pay tax on the full rent.
This is helpful to know - thank you.
Can’t the three then request to be added as full tenants ? If the owner knows from the start who is living there and has no issue with it, then he can’t reasonably refuse. Convoluted rules.
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It seems yes. Spin-off thread since this risks going off-topic.
A few points the thread has walked past.
1. RTB registration - read s.3(2)(h) again. bipped quoted it and it decides the OP's facts. The Act does not apply to "a dwelling within which the spouse, civil partner, parent or child of the landlord resides and no lease or tenancy agreement in writing has been entered into by any person resident in the dwelling." Nothing there requires the landlord to live in the house - that's the separate s.3(2)(g) exemption Bronte is thinking of. The OP's son (the landlord's child) resides in the dwelling. Provided nobody in the house has signed a written lease or tenancy agreement, the whole dwelling is outside the Act. This has nothing to do with whether the friends are "licensees" - on these facts they almost certainly aren't (exclusive possession of a room, for a term, at a rent, paid to an absent owner), and TR0001479 shows what happens to people who rely on labels. It's a statutory exclusion of the dwelling itself.
Consequences while the son lives there: no registration, no rent controls, no Part 4 security, no RTB jurisdiction. The students are ordinary common-law tenants and the tenancy is terminable on a written notice to quit of not less than four weeks under s.16 of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1992 (which still governs tenancies that the RTA doesn't). That Act did not disappear with the introduction of the RTA. That also answers patfert1's concern about one of them staying on indefinitely, and removes the Q2 lock-in worry entirely - there's no registered rent to be locked to.
Two caveats.
First, the exemption ends the day the son moves out (more on that below).
Second, "in writing" refers to a lease or tenancy agreement being entered into, not to any text or email that mentions rent - I think TomEdison overstates that risk - but there's no reason to test it. Take rent by standing order and keep the arrangement oral.
2. Mortgage interest. Rental income is Case V income whether or not the RTA applies; the RTA is a regulatory regime, not the tax base. The only link between the two is s.97(2I) TCA 1997, which disallows interest unless the Part 7 registration requirements have been complied with "in respect of all tenancies which exist in relation to the premises". Where the RTA Act does not apply to the dwelling, there is no Part 7 requirement to comply with, and Revenue's guidance on the restriction accepts that. So: exempt dwelling, full interest deduction. What the OP does forgo is the s.480C rented-residential-relief credit, which requires a registered tenancy.
3. The gift tax point. The son's rent-free occupation is a "free use of property" gift under s.40 CATCA 2003, but it is exempt under s.82(2) as normal support, maintenance or education of a child under 25 in full-time education. DannyBoyD is right on that.
Where the response goes wrong is the alternative structure - put the son in as the person collecting the money (#19, #29). Letting a child collect EUR 35k a year from a house you own isn't "support"; it's a gift of the use of the property valued at market rent, chipping away at the Group A threshold every year. The parent also then has no Case V income against which to set the interest. And patfert1's formal tenancy to the son would itself be the written agreement that switches s.3(2)(h) off - with the son then inside Part 4 against his own parent. JamieB's friend's structure (rent paid to the resident son, parent takes nothing, under EUR 14k) is the one case where "licensee" and rent-a-room are actually right - but that's a different arrangement, not a relabelling of this one.
4. Q2, if he does end up inside the Act. Greenbook is right: one house let to three people is one tenancy, and the rent stays until the last original tenant leaves. Registered rent is the actual rent. The way to avoid the whole question is point 1.
5. The trap when the son moves out. s.3(2)(h) works only while there is no written lease or tenancy agreement. That means the OP cannot have an occupancy cap, a no-licensees clause, or a consent-to-share clause - the clause that would protect him is the clause that switches the Act back on. Now roll forward to the day the son graduates / moves out. The Act applies from that day to whoever is still in the house, on an oral tenancy at EUR 3,900 for a house the OP says is worth EUR 11,000, with Part 4 rights and no reset while any original tenant remains. And the remaining student is free to fill the son's room and any other vacated room with paying licensees on notification alone. The Tribunals have been clear on this: in Sales Campelo v Brennan (TR0218-002857, Galway, 2018) a head tenant who rotated replacement occupants through a four-bed house, took their rent and deposits herself and merely told the landlord, was held to have done nothing wrong - no consent needed, no assignment, no sublet, no damages; TR0001287 (Enniskerry, 2026) followed it. A landlord's only defence is the lease, and this landlord by design has none. A twenty-two-year-old holding a EUR 1m Dublin house at EUR 3,900, collecting and legally keeping the other rooms rent himself, has every incentive to stay.
So the exemption is an exit route with a use-by date: serve the four-week s.16 notice in the summer before the son leaves, with the son still in residence, and let the students go with him. Don't wait for the son to move out and then discover the Act has arrived with the furniture.
6. A word on all of the above. Step back and look at what the OP actually described: a father buys a house, his son lives in it with three college friends, and the friends chip in. In 2004 the Oireachtas thought that arrangement so obviously outside the scope of tenancy regulation that it wrote s.3(2)(h) specifically to exclude it. Twenty-two years and fifteen Acts later, the same father needs to know that the exemption only survives if he does the one thing every adviser would otherwise tell him not to do - have nothing in writing; that the moment his son graduates, the arrangement flips into a regulated tenancy with security of tenure, a rent he can't reset, and a housemate who can fill the spare rooms with strangers on notification alone; that his mortgage interest hangs on a subsection of the Taxes Act cross-referring to a Part of the Residential Tenancies Act that may or may not apply; and that the safe exit is to serve a 1992 Act notice to quit in the summer before any of that happens. None of that is a design. It's what you get when a simple family arrangement is buried under small landlords and large landlords, pre-March 2026 and post-March 2026 tenancies, six-year minimum durations, CPI caps and reset rules, none of which were written with a student house in mind.
Nor is it knowable from the RTB website, and I'd caution the OP against assuming the RTB itself could tell him. Argutinski v RTB [2026] IEHC 225 turned on the date a posted notice is served - the RTB's own published guidance had told landlords for years to treat the posting date as the operative date, the High Court disagreed, and a Tribunal in TR0001481 has since acknowledged on the record that the landlord before it had "probably followed the RTB's own published guidance" into an invalid notice. Laffoy J called the 2004 Act "an extremely complex piece of legislation" in Canty v PRTB, and that was before most of the amendments. Alan Shatter, former Minister for Justice, put it more bluntly in the Irish Times in February when the 2026 Bill was going through: fourteen amending Acts since 2004 with the 2026 Bill the fifteenth, producing law that is intelligible only to specialist lawyers capable of "intellectual legal gymnastics of an Olympian standard". A father, his son and three friends in college now sit on top of that.
So: definitely get the expert advice and make sure to put s.3(2)(h), s.97(2I) and Sales Campelo in front of whoever you pay.
1. RTB registration - read s.3(2)(h) again. bipped quoted it and it decides the OP's facts. The Act does not apply to "a dwelling within which the spouse, civil partner, parent or child of the landlord resides and no lease or tenancy agreement in writing has been entered into by any person resident in the dwelling." Nothing there requires the landlord to live in the house - that's the separate s.3(2)(g) exemption Bronte is thinking of. The OP's son (the landlord's child) resides in the dwelling. Provided nobody in the house has signed a written lease or tenancy agreement, the whole dwelling is outside the Act. This has nothing to do with whether the friends are "licensees" - on these facts they almost certainly aren't (exclusive possession of a room, for a term, at a rent, paid to an absent owner), and TR0001479 shows what happens to people who rely on labels. It's a statutory exclusion of the dwelling itself.
Consequences while the son lives there: no registration, no rent controls, no Part 4 security, no RTB jurisdiction. The students are ordinary common-law tenants and the tenancy is terminable on a written notice to quit of not less than four weeks under s.16 of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1992 (which still governs tenancies that the RTA doesn't). That Act did not disappear with the introduction of the RTA. That also answers patfert1's concern about one of them staying on indefinitely, and removes the Q2 lock-in worry entirely - there's no registered rent to be locked to.
Two caveats.
First, the exemption ends the day the son moves out (more on that below).
Second, "in writing" refers to a lease or tenancy agreement being entered into, not to any text or email that mentions rent - I think TomEdison overstates that risk - but there's no reason to test it. Take rent by standing order and keep the arrangement oral.
2. Mortgage interest. Rental income is Case V income whether or not the RTA applies; the RTA is a regulatory regime, not the tax base. The only link between the two is s.97(2I) TCA 1997, which disallows interest unless the Part 7 registration requirements have been complied with "in respect of all tenancies which exist in relation to the premises". Where the RTA Act does not apply to the dwelling, there is no Part 7 requirement to comply with, and Revenue's guidance on the restriction accepts that. So: exempt dwelling, full interest deduction. What the OP does forgo is the s.480C rented-residential-relief credit, which requires a registered tenancy.
3. The gift tax point. The son's rent-free occupation is a "free use of property" gift under s.40 CATCA 2003, but it is exempt under s.82(2) as normal support, maintenance or education of a child under 25 in full-time education. DannyBoyD is right on that.
Where the response goes wrong is the alternative structure - put the son in as the person collecting the money (#19, #29). Letting a child collect EUR 35k a year from a house you own isn't "support"; it's a gift of the use of the property valued at market rent, chipping away at the Group A threshold every year. The parent also then has no Case V income against which to set the interest. And patfert1's formal tenancy to the son would itself be the written agreement that switches s.3(2)(h) off - with the son then inside Part 4 against his own parent. JamieB's friend's structure (rent paid to the resident son, parent takes nothing, under EUR 14k) is the one case where "licensee" and rent-a-room are actually right - but that's a different arrangement, not a relabelling of this one.
4. Q2, if he does end up inside the Act. Greenbook is right: one house let to three people is one tenancy, and the rent stays until the last original tenant leaves. Registered rent is the actual rent. The way to avoid the whole question is point 1.
5. The trap when the son moves out. s.3(2)(h) works only while there is no written lease or tenancy agreement. That means the OP cannot have an occupancy cap, a no-licensees clause, or a consent-to-share clause - the clause that would protect him is the clause that switches the Act back on. Now roll forward to the day the son graduates / moves out. The Act applies from that day to whoever is still in the house, on an oral tenancy at EUR 3,900 for a house the OP says is worth EUR 11,000, with Part 4 rights and no reset while any original tenant remains. And the remaining student is free to fill the son's room and any other vacated room with paying licensees on notification alone. The Tribunals have been clear on this: in Sales Campelo v Brennan (TR0218-002857, Galway, 2018) a head tenant who rotated replacement occupants through a four-bed house, took their rent and deposits herself and merely told the landlord, was held to have done nothing wrong - no consent needed, no assignment, no sublet, no damages; TR0001287 (Enniskerry, 2026) followed it. A landlord's only defence is the lease, and this landlord by design has none. A twenty-two-year-old holding a EUR 1m Dublin house at EUR 3,900, collecting and legally keeping the other rooms rent himself, has every incentive to stay.
So the exemption is an exit route with a use-by date: serve the four-week s.16 notice in the summer before the son leaves, with the son still in residence, and let the students go with him. Don't wait for the son to move out and then discover the Act has arrived with the furniture.
6. A word on all of the above. Step back and look at what the OP actually described: a father buys a house, his son lives in it with three college friends, and the friends chip in. In 2004 the Oireachtas thought that arrangement so obviously outside the scope of tenancy regulation that it wrote s.3(2)(h) specifically to exclude it. Twenty-two years and fifteen Acts later, the same father needs to know that the exemption only survives if he does the one thing every adviser would otherwise tell him not to do - have nothing in writing; that the moment his son graduates, the arrangement flips into a regulated tenancy with security of tenure, a rent he can't reset, and a housemate who can fill the spare rooms with strangers on notification alone; that his mortgage interest hangs on a subsection of the Taxes Act cross-referring to a Part of the Residential Tenancies Act that may or may not apply; and that the safe exit is to serve a 1992 Act notice to quit in the summer before any of that happens. None of that is a design. It's what you get when a simple family arrangement is buried under small landlords and large landlords, pre-March 2026 and post-March 2026 tenancies, six-year minimum durations, CPI caps and reset rules, none of which were written with a student house in mind.
Nor is it knowable from the RTB website, and I'd caution the OP against assuming the RTB itself could tell him. Argutinski v RTB [2026] IEHC 225 turned on the date a posted notice is served - the RTB's own published guidance had told landlords for years to treat the posting date as the operative date, the High Court disagreed, and a Tribunal in TR0001481 has since acknowledged on the record that the landlord before it had "probably followed the RTB's own published guidance" into an invalid notice. Laffoy J called the 2004 Act "an extremely complex piece of legislation" in Canty v PRTB, and that was before most of the amendments. Alan Shatter, former Minister for Justice, put it more bluntly in the Irish Times in February when the 2026 Bill was going through: fourteen amending Acts since 2004 with the 2026 Bill the fifteenth, producing law that is intelligible only to specialist lawyers capable of "intellectual legal gymnastics of an Olympian standard". A father, his son and three friends in college now sit on top of that.
So: definitely get the expert advice and make sure to put s.3(2)(h), s.97(2I) and Sales Campelo in front of whoever you pay.