Bedroom Tax Calculator

The bedroom tax is not a tax and takes nothing from your bank account directly. It reduces the rent figure your housing element is based on, by 14% for one spare bedroom and 25% for two or more, and you find the difference from the rest of your award.

Because it is a percentage of rent rather than a flat amount, the same spare room costs far more in an expensive property than a cheap one. This calculator works out your bedroom entitlement from your household, compares it with the property, and shows what the gap costs you each month and over a year.

Because it is a percentage of your eligible rent rather than a fixed charge, and eligible rent is rarely the number on the rent statement. Charges for fuel, water and meals are stripped out before the percentage is applied, so two identical flats on the same landing produce different reductions if one rent bundles heating from a communal boiler and the other does not. The rent is then converted to a monthly figure, weekly rent multiplied by 52 and divided by 12, which is more than four times the weekly amount. Only then does 14% or 25% come off. The consequence is that the same spare bedroom costs roughly twice as much in a property renting at twice the price, so comparing your reduction with somebody else's tells you very little about whether yours is right.

No, and a third costs nothing more at all. There are only two percentages. One spare bedroom takes 14% of eligible rent. Two or more take 25%, and that is the ceiling however many rooms the property has above your entitlement. The second spare room therefore adds 11 percentage points, and the third, fourth and fifth add nothing. Both percentages are taken from the whole eligible rent rather than from the spare room's share of it, so the size of the room makes no difference either: a box room costs the same as the largest bedroom in the house. That cuts both ways. If you are already at 25%, an extra occupier only helps once it brings you down to one spare room or none, so a household with three spare rooms that takes in one more adult sees no change. And if you are at 14% and somebody moves out, the jump to 25% is the single biggest step the reduction ever makes.

Only someone the size criteria count as part of your household: you, your partner, the children and qualifying young people you are responsible for, and non-dependants who normally live there. An adult child, a parent or a friend moving in permanently is a non-dependant and takes a room out of the spare column, although from age 21 they bring a £96.55 monthly deduction of their own. A lodger does not. Someone paying you on a commercial basis to occupy part of the home is specifically excluded from the household for these rules, so the room stays spare and the reduction stays with it. That is a real difference from Housing Benefit, and it catches people who take a lodger in expressly to deal with the reduction. The lodger's payments are still ignored as income, so that rent is yours to put against the shortfall.

It turns on three numbers, not one. The reduction you are paying now is a percentage of your current rent, so it is only as large as that rent. The smaller property usually has a lower rent, but a newly let social tenancy can be let at a higher rate than a long-standing one, which makes the saving smaller than the percentage suggests. And a move into the private rented sector swaps the under-occupancy reduction for the Local Housing Allowance cap, which for a single person under 35 can mean the shared accommodation rate and a much worse outcome. Work out the element you would get in the new home before you commit, rather than comparing rents. It is also worth checking whether the entitlement is about to change anyway: a child turning 10 or 16, or an overnight carer starting, can remove the spare room without a move at all.