Ms Clare Costello:

The way the personal tax system works is that your residential rental income would just be a subset of your overall income. We have discussed the matter with Revenue. It is not possible for us to extract or disaggregate residential rental income in order to be able to calculate an effective tax rate on that residential rental income. We were able to discuss and get data from the Revenue Commissioners. As the Deputy outlined, the way the rental income calculation works is that people pay a gross amount rent and then deductions or capital allowances are taken from that to give a net rent. Taxes are then calculated on the basis of that net rent. The data we got from Revenue shows that between 2016 and 2021, which is the most recent year for which the data is available, the proportion of net rent relative to gross rent has increased. In 2016, taxpayers, on average, had a gross-net ratio of 61%. In 2021, it was broadly around the same figure, but it is now at 66%. We cannot actually tell what the overall effective tax rate is but we can look at what their gross rent was and their net rent, and that has increased over the past couple of years.