Just 3,000 properties liable for Vacant Homes Tax

Just 3,000 homes across the State have been found liable for Vacant Homes Tax (VHT), a fraction of the 25,000 homes that were initially identified as potentially liable by Revenue.

Introduced in the Finance Act 2022, the VHT was set at three times a property’s Local Property Tax (LPT) charge, and applies to residential properties that have been lived in for less than 30 days in a year.

After the first chargeable year of the tax, running from 1 November 2022 to 31 October 2023, the rate of VHT was increased to five times a property’s base LPT charge in Budget 2024, which applies to the current period running from 1 November 2023 to 31 October 2024.

An update published by the Department of Finance on Tuesday has shown that as of 20 November, more than 50,000 properties have been reported through Revenue’s Vacant Home Tax portal.

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About 5,000 properties were declared as vacant, while 45,000 were declared as occupied.

As close to 2,000 of these vacant properties have availed of a number of exemptions, this leaves a total of around 3,000 properties that are liable to pay the tax.

This is a fraction of the number of properties expected to be subject to the tax, as Revenue issued correspondences to around 25,000 property owners which it had identified as being potentially liable.

Of the 1,965 properties that claimed exemptions from the tax in the 2022/2023 reporting period, around half were undergoing structural work, while other properties were exempted as they were actively for sale or rent, or unoccupied due to illness of the owner.

Smaller numbers of properties were exempted where the property owner had died, where a grant of representation had been issued or where the property was subject to a court order.

The Department of Finance said that the key objective of the tax is “to increase the supply of homes available for rent or purchase, by encouraging the owners of vacant residential properties to bring those properties back into use”.

The tax does not apply to derelict or uninhabitable properties, or residential properties that were sold or subject to a qualifying tenancy during a chargeable period.