Rental income

What is this?

If you own a rental property or are renting out a room, you can use some of the rent money for certain expenses without it affecting your benefit. These expenses include:

• interest payments earned on the money borrowed to buy the property
• rates
• house insurance
• fees and commission if a property manager or agent is used
• repairs and maintenance
• other fees eg bank administration fees for the mortgage, tenancy agreement costs, any valuation required by your bank, accounting fees.

How to tell us

The easiest way to tell us about your rental income payments is online, using MyMSD.

• If you've already told us about your rental income, it will show in MyMSD and you can change this from the home screen.
• If you haven't told us about your rental income yet, you need to select 'Declare wages' and then 'Change other income'.

You need to tell us:

• how much the payment is before tax
• when you're paid
• how often you get this payment.

The amount you declare will continue every week until you let us know it has stopped or changed.

Keep us up to date

If you don't tell us, we'll keep paying you the same benefit week after week. This could be too little or too much, and you could get into debt.

How your benefit will be affected

You can check how your income will affect your benefit using the income deduction tables.