Reviewing rent payments
When you live in public (social) housing, we'll review your rent payments. This is so we can make sure you're paying the right amount of rent.
We'll review your rent every 12 months, or sooner if you or someone in your household tells us about a change in circumstances. For example, this could be a change to your income or relationship status.
As part of your rent review we'll check your income details with you. This includes any child support you get from Inland Revenue (IR).
If your rent payment changes, we'll send you a letter to tell you how much it will be.
12 months since last review
If we haven’t reviewed your rent for 12 months, we'll send you a letter to check if your situation has changed. This includes things like income changes, or if anyone has moved out or moved in. If there are changes, it may affect how much rent you pay.
You need to check the information in the letter to see if it's still correct.
If your situation:
- has changed, you need to tell us
- You may need to provide proof of these changes - if so, we'll tell you what documents you need to provide.
- has not changed, sign the form and return it to us by the date in your letter.
If there's a change to your income
Your rent is based on your household income. You need to tell us as soon as you can if you or someone in your household has a change in income.
Some changes are only temporary, e.g:
- your hours change each week, or
- you're temporarily sick and can’t work.
You still need to tell us if this happens, but we'll check if this change is permanent before we review your rent.
A permanent change to income means any changes that last, or are likely to last, longer than 8 weeks. These could be things like:
- starting or stopping work
- going onto a benefit
- getting a pay rise
- getting board payments from someone living with you
- getting child support payments.
If you get child support through Inland Revenue
Inland Revenue (IR) will share your child support payment information with us every time they pay you child support.
We'll use the shared information from IR and treat this as income if you get one of these payments from us:
- a main benefit, e.g. Jobseeker Support or Sole Parent Support
- NZ Superannuation or Veteran's Pension and you have a partner who doesn't qualify for this but is included in your payments
- Veteran's Pension and you're under 65
- Accommodation Supplement
- Disability Allowance
- Temporary Additional Support
- Special Benefit
- Childcare Subsidy
- OSCAR Subsidy, or
- Employment Transition Assistance.
If you get one of these payments, you don't need to tell us about most types of IR child support payments. The only type of child support paid by IR you need to tell us about is if you're getting Court Ordered lump sum child support payments.
If you don't get one of the payments in the above bulleted list, you need to tell us about your IR child support payments. You also need to tell us about any other child support payments you get.
We'll send you a letter confirming your IR child support details
Before we review rent payments, we'll send you a letter to let you know the amount of child support IR has shared with us.
If you think there's an error with the child support information, you have 10 working days to let us know. We may need to contact IR to confirm your information.
What happens after we've reviewed your rent
Once we've worked out how much rent you should be paying, we check how much it will increase or decrease by.
If your rent review is based on a change in circumstances, we’ll only change your rent when there is either:
- an increase of $5 or more per week, or
- a decrease of $1 or more per week
If your rent review is a 12 month review, we'll only change your rent when there is either:
- an increase of $1 or more per week, or
- a decrease of more than $1 per week.
If your rent payment does change, we‘ll send you a letter to tell you how much this is. Your landlord will also send you a letter, to tell you when you need to start paying the new rent amount.