Rent Calculators by Irish County

Pick the right tool

Five free calculators covering social housing, HAP, cost rental, and affordable purchase across Ireland's 31 local authorities.

Differential rent calculator by council

Each council has its own differential rent scheme. Pick yours to use the calculator with the right rates, disregards, and rent caps.

How the 31 councils actually compare

Every Irish local authority publishes its own differential rent scheme, and the variation across the 31 schemes is much wider than most tenants assume.

A working household on €450 a week net income pays roughly €23 in Wicklow, around €60 in Mayo, €71 in Dublin City under the new April 2026 rate, and €90 in Longford.

The figures below pull the same comparison apart across the headline scheme parameters using the official 2026 rules.

Primary rate, lowest and highest

The published primary rate is the percentage applied to assessable income above any disregard. The lowest single-tier primary rate in Ireland is Wicklow at 3%, although the structure carries a €30 base and a high €188 disregard which together produce a higher effective rent than the headline suggests.

The lowest rate after Wicklow is South Dublin at 10%, applied as an aggregated calculation across all earners with no separate subsidiary tier. The highest primary rate is Longford at 22.5%, followed by Laois, Offaly, and Westmeath at 22%, and Cork County at 21%.

Dublin City moved from 15% to 18% in April 2026, the largest single rate change in the 2025 to 2026 review cycle.

Minimum and maximum weekly rent

Donegal holds the lowest minimum at €17 a week, followed by Kerry which can go as low as €10.50 a week for the smallest properties at the lowest incomes.

The highest minimum rents are Galway City and Monaghan at around €46, each calibrated to 20% of the standard social welfare payment. Kerry also operates the lowest binding maximum at €83 a week (varying by bedroom count), with Carlow capped at €180 and Meath at €195.

Sixteen of the 31 councils operate no maximum at all, which means rent rises linearly with income; Dublin City, Galway City, and most Midlands councils fall into this group.

Subsidiary earner treatment

The treatment of subsidiary earners (working adults in the household beyond the principal tenant) is the single largest source of variation across the 31 schemes and the most common reason a council rent letter differs from a household's own estimate. Subsidiary models fall into four categories.

Flat-charge models (used by Kildare, Meath, Longford, Louth, Wexford) apply a fixed weekly amount per subsidiary earner regardless of their income, with Louth's €19 the highest and Kildare's €10 the lowest.

Percentage-capped models (used by Dublin City, Cork County, Kerry, Mayo, Cavan, and many others) apply a percentage rate up to a weekly maximum, with caps ranging from €10 in Cork County to €40 in Tipperary.

Uncapped percentage models (DLR's new 2026 scheme, Waterford, Limerick, Clare, Leitrim) apply a rate with no upper limit, which can produce surprisingly high rent letters for households with high-earning adult children.

Aggregated models (South Dublin and Galway City) pool every earner into a single income figure and apply the primary rate to the total.

2025 to 2026 scheme changes

The 2025 to 2026 review cycle saw more rate changes than any year since 2018. Dublin City raised its primary rate from 15% to 18% with effect from 6 April 2026, with a partially offsetting increase in the income disregard.

Galway City rewrote its scheme in October 2025 to an aggregated model and removed the per-child deduction in favour of a discretionary hardship clause. DLR adopted a revised scheme in January 2026 that removed the cap on subsidiary earners.

Monaghan halved its subsidiary rate from 10% to 5% in September 2025. Leitrim and Laois moved to revised schemes in May 2026. Fingal approved an increase from 12% to 14.5% in November 2025 but elected members paused implementation pending further review.

Cavan retained its unusual cliff-edge rate structure in its November 2025 review, against submissions from the local Public Participation Network for a smoothed transition above the €260 threshold.

Worked comparison: single earner on €500/week

A single tenant on €500 a week net income with no dependants pays approximately the following under each scheme: Wicklow €36, South Dublin €53, Fingal €60, Mayo €80, Dublin City €80 under the April 2026 rate, Donegal €83, DLR €74, Tipperary €80, Cork County €93, Kildare €88, Longford €131.

The 3.6-times spread between cheapest and most expensive across these eleven councils is roughly typical and arises almost entirely from the interplay of the primary rate and the disregard, with the minimum and maximum rules rarely binding for a single-earner household at this income level.

Once child deductions, subsidiary earners, and OAP allowances are factored in, the relative ordering can shift considerably. Use the per-council calculator on each LA page above for a figure that reflects your specific household.

All 31 Irish local authority rent schemes at a glance

Every Irish local authority differential rent scheme in a single comparable table, sorted by region. Click a council name to open its full calculator and detailed scheme rules. Figures reflect the 2026 published rates.

Rates current to 2026. Primary rate shown is the headline percentage applied to assessable income; some schemes use graduated bands or two-tier rates, in which case the range or both tiers are shown. Subsidiary earner column shows the contribution model applied to working adults beyond the principal tenant.

How Irish rent calculators work and which one you need

Ireland operates one of the most fragmented social housing rent systems in Europe. The legal framework comes from Section 31 of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2009, which authorises every local authority to write its own differential rent scheme.

The result is 31 separate schemes, each with its own percentage rate applied to assessable income, its own income disregard, its own treatment of subsidiary earners and dependent children, and its own minimum and maximum weekly rent.

A household earning €500 a week net will pay materially different rent in Dublin City than in Donegal, and different again in Cork, Galway, or Waterford, even when the underlying tenancy type is identical.

The differential rent calculators on this page apply each council's own published rules so the figure you see reflects the scheme that will be used to assess your tenancy, not a national average.

The differential rent calculator is the right tool when you are a tenant of a local authority property, an Approved Housing Body tenant whose rent is set on the differential basis, or a HAP tenant making a differential contribution to your council.

Pick the council that holds your tenancy from the list above.

The calculator will ask for the principal earner's weekly net income, any subsidiary earners, the number of dependent children, and any specific deductions that apply, then it will run the council's logic — including band breaks, two-tier rates, base rents, subsidiary caps, and minimum and maximum rents — and produce a weekly figure that should be within a few euro of what the council itself calculates.

The same methodology underpins the calculator embedded on each county page so you can see worked examples for sample incomes before entering your own.

The HAP calculator is a separate tool because the Housing Assistance Payment scheme adds extra layers on top of the differential rent contribution.

HAP tenants live in private rental accommodation; the council pays HAP to the landlord under the rent limit applicable to the household size and area, and the tenant pays a differential contribution to the council based on income.

Where the agreed rent exceeds the HAP limit the tenant may pay a top-up to the landlord directly, subject to local discretion in Dublin and other high-rent areas.

The HAP calculator surfaces all three numbers — the HAP limit, the differential contribution, and any top-up — so the household can see the true weekly cost of taking on a particular tenancy.

It is updated to reflect the discretionary HAP uplifts available in Dublin, Cork, Galway, and other pressure zones.

Cost rental is a different scheme entirely and the calculator for it does not use the differential rent logic at all.

Cost rental homes are delivered primarily by Approved Housing Bodies and the Land Development Agency, with rent set on a cost-recovery basis rather than as a percentage of income.

To qualify a household must fall below a defined net income ceiling — €66,000 in Dublin and €59,000 in the rest of the country at current thresholds — and must not be in receipt of social housing support.

The cost rental calculator on this page checks income eligibility against the current thresholds and shows the typical rent ranges advertised for new cost rental schemes by city and region.

The advertised rent is the rent paid; there is no further means-test reduction once a household is allocated a tenancy. Cost rental rents typically sit 25% below open-market rates for an equivalent property.

The affordable purchase calculator covers the Local Authority Affordable Purchase Scheme (LAAPS), under which a council takes an equity share in the property to bridge the gap between what the household can afford to borrow and the open-market price of the home.

The calculator runs the full LAAPS financial means test: gross income, the four-times income mortgage limit applied by Irish lenders, the Help to Buy refund where applicable, the household contribution, and the resulting council equity stake.

It is the most complex of the four calculators because the rules pull together income tax, mortgage capacity, savings, and the Central Bank's macroprudential rules into a single eligibility determination.

Use it before applying to your local authority's affordable purchase scheme so the application form is supported by realistic figures.

A few details apply across all four calculators and are worth keeping in mind. Net income, not gross, is what the differential and HAP calculators use; if you have your gross figure to hand, run it through a payslip tool first so the rent estimate is meaningful.

Where you receive multiple welfare payments, only the assessable ones are counted — Child Benefit and a number of disability-related supports are excluded across most councils, although Maintenance, Working Family Payment, and One-Parent Family Payment are included.

Subsidiary earner rules vary widely and are the single largest source of surprise on a council rent letter; if you have a working adult child or a partner with separate income in the household, the rent will be materially higher than the simple primary-earner calculation suggests.

And every calculator on this page produces an estimate; the council's own letter remains the legal source of truth and the calculator output is for planning purposes only.

For local authority and Approved Housing Body teams who administer these schemes in production, Rentalize is the platform that handles the calculation, the household record, the rent review cycle, the HAP integration, and the reporting to the Housing Agency and the Department of Housing.

The same logic that powers the calculators on this page powers the production rent engine used by housing teams across Ireland.

If you administer tenancies on behalf of a council or AHB, the local authorities and government section of the site has more detail on how the platform handles differential rent at scale.