Vacant Homes Tax as a multiple of your LPT charge.
Vacant Homes Tax
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Your breakdown
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What the Vacant Homes Tax is trying to do
Vacant Homes Tax, usually shortened to VHT, is a behavioural tax, not a revenue tax. The State is not really trying to collect money from it. The goal is to nudge owners of empty homes to either let them, sell them, or move back in, so that habitable housing is not sitting idle during a supply crisis. That intent shapes every part of how it works. The charge is deliberately set high enough to sting, it sits on top of the Local Property Tax you already pay, and it is self-assessed, meaning the owner has to declare a property vacant rather than waiting for Revenue to find it.
The 30-day test that decides everything
A home falls into the charge if it was lived in as a dwelling for fewer than 30 days during the chargeable period, which runs from 1 November to 31 October each year. Thirty days is the whole game. A house used for 29 nights is vacant for VHT purposes; the same house used for 31 nights is not. Those days do not have to be consecutive and they do not have to be the owner staying there. A genuine short letting, a relative living in it for a month, or your own scattered weekends all count toward the 30 days. The practical takeaway is that getting a property over the line is not difficult if you plan for it, which is precisely the behaviour the tax is designed to encourage.
Working out the bill on a typical band
The charge is a flat multiple of your basic Local Property Tax liability, currently seven times the base LPT. Take a mid-band home with a basic LPT charge of €405, the calculator’s default. Multiply by seven and the Vacant Homes Tax is €2,835. Add back the LPT you owe anyway and the property costs €3,240 in property taxes for the year. The table sets it out.
The chart shows how small the LPT is next to the VHT once a home is declared vacant. The seven-times multiple is the whole point.
Exemptions and the trap of forgetting to file
Plenty of empty homes are not caught, because Revenue allows specific exemptions even where the property was vacant. A home left empty because the owner died, a property actively for sale or recently sold, a house undergoing significant structural repair or refurbishment, and a dwelling left vacant because the occupier moved into long-term care are the main reliefs. The trap is procedural rather than financial. Because VHT is self-assessed, you must file a VHT return for any property within the charge, and you must claim an exemption on that return for it to apply. An owner who assumes an exemption applies automatically and files nothing can end up facing the full charge plus interest and penalties. If your property was vacant for any reason, file the return and claim the relief rather than staying silent. This tool is built for the owner of a single empty house weighing up the annual cost, but the same arithmetic scales to anyone holding several vacant units who needs a quick read on the exposure.
Common questions
Is the Vacant Homes Tax the same as the Derelict Sites Levy?
No, they are separate charges run by different bodies. VHT is a Revenue tax on habitable homes that are simply not being lived in. The Derelict Sites Levy is charged by the local authority on sites in genuinely derelict condition and is based on market value, not LPT. A property can in principle be exposed to one or the other depending on its state, but they are not the same regime and you do not pay both on the same logic.
Does a holiday home or a property I rent out short-term get caught?
A holiday home you use yourself is fine as long as it clears the 30-day occupancy test across the year, and personal use counts. A property let on the short-term market is also outside the charge if it was genuinely occupied by guests for at least 30 days. The risk sits with the lightly used second home that nobody stays in for a full month, which is exactly the kind of property the tax is aimed at.