These are 5 last-minute tax savings tips to help you pay less and keep on the right side of Revenue. If Revenue owe you money, you have to assume they’ll look for proof before you get it back. That means getting your numbers right and having the paperwork as evidence. I’ll look at the five areas below because we have seen a lot of this in the last few weeks. And helped save clients plenty of money.
- Medical Expenses
- Mortgage Interest Credit
- Medical Insurance
- Rent Tax Credit
- Rental Income
Medical Expenses
Claiming tax relief for medical expenses is a no-brainer. You get tax relief on most medical expenses at 20%. Typical expenses are doctors, consultants, prescriptions and non-routine dental care. You can’t get tax relief on routine dental or eye care.
I’ve had a root canal and a crown over the last two years and paid for my daughter’s braces. All these are non-routine dental costs. You just need a Med 2 Form from the dentist or orthodontist to claim. Other less common expenses that we’ve claimed for clients in the last few years include
- A wheelchair
- Coeliac foods
- IVF
- Heart surgery
- Laser eye surgery
Talking to a client yesterday, he mentioned that he spent €5,000 on hearing aids for his dad a few years ago. Once he sends the invoice to us, we’ll claim this for him, and he’ll get €1,000 back.
If you get money back from VHI, Laya or Irish Life, then you can’t claim the same cost twice. But you can claim the amount they don’t refund to you once the expense is qualifying.
Nursing home costs are tax-deductible at 40%. To get the tax relief, you must incur the cost. If you pay €2,000 nursing home fees for your mother each month, but she gives you €1500, then you can only claim €500 per month.
Medical Insurance
Keeping on the medical theme, you can claim a medical insurance credit if your employer pays that for you. We have a few clients where the employer pays the medical insurance for the employee only. In other cases, the employer pays the medical insurance costs for the employee and his/her family.
That is a benefit in kind, and the employee pays BIK on the gross premium. You’ll see this on your payslip every week or month. The max credit is €200 per adult and €100 per child. Once your child is over 18, they are on adult rates, which means the credit can increase to the higher amount. There is a cap on the credit, too. It is the lower of the €200, €100 or 20% of the gross premium. Once the gross premium for an adult is over €1000 and over €500 for a child, then you get the maximum credit.
In 2024, Tom’s employer paid the medical insurance for Tom, Nuala his wife, Paul, aged 20, and the twins who are 14. Tom didn’t pay anything. The total cost was €5,200 as follows
| Tom | €1,650 |
| Nuala | €1,650 |
| Paul | €1,100 |
| Noel | €400 |
| Conor | €400 |
The tax credit that Tom can claim in his 2024 tax return for each family member is
| Tom | €200 |
| Nuala | €200 |
| Paul | €200 |
| Noel | €80 |
| Conor | €80 |
| Total | €760 |
Mortgage Interest Credit
The mortgage interest credit is a pretty new tax credit. We first claimed it for clients in the 2023 tax year. The purpose of the credit was to help out homeowners with a mortgage that would face higher repayment costs. These higher costs were due to a large number of increases in interest rates. The base year was 2022. It applies to homeowners who had a mortgage balance between €80,000 and €500,000 on the 31st of December 2022.
If that is you, then you’ve cleared the first hurdle. The second part is whether you paid more mortgage interest in 2023 compared to 2022. If you are on a variable rate, you likely did. If you’re on a fixed rate, then not so likely.
Tom’s mortgage balance on his family home was €300,000 on the 31st of December 2022. That year, he paid €5,000 in mortgage interest. In 2023, there were 4 mortgage interest hikes from his bank. He was sick getting letters in the door informing him of the extra amount he’d pay every month. In 2023, he paid €9,000 in interest, and he gave us the interest certificates for both years.
| 2023 Interest | €9,000 |
| 2022 Interest | €5,000 |
| Increase | €4,000 |
| Tax credit X 20% | €800 |
The credit is still in place for 2024 and 2025 and will be reduced in 2026. For 2024, you compare the interest you paid that year to the interest paid in 2022. In 2024, Tom paid mortgage interest of €10,000, so his credit is
| 2024 Interest | €10,000 |
| 2022 Interest | €5,000 |
| Increase | €5,000 |
| Tax credit X 20% | €1,000 |
There is a cap on the credit of €1,250 for 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Rent Tax Credit
You can get the rent tax credit if you pay rent to rent your home, for work, or for a child in college. We claim this for home rent and children in college, but haven’t claimed for a work property. For 2024, a single person can claim a rent credit of up to €1,000. For a jointly assessed couple, the max credit is €2,000. Once a single person pays rent of €5,000 or more, they will get the maximum credit. For a jointly assessed couple, if they pay €10,000 or more, they’ll get the max credit.
Anne and her husband Pat rent a house for €1500 a month in Tramore from Fred. They paid €18,000 in 2024. As they are jointly assessed, they can claim the rent tax credit of €2,000. They would claim the credit on a tax return and would give the following details
- Amount of rent paid
- Address of the property
- Eircode of the property
- Name and address of the landlord
- The date the tenancy started
- Date tenancy ceased in 2024
Third Level
We’ve also made plenty of claims for clients who have kids going to third level. The same max credit applies of €1,000 and €2,000 for rent for kids in college. If your child started college in 2024 and you are paying rent, you can claim for 2024 rentals. These would usually be for September to December 2024. Your child must be doing a full-time course and be under 23.
Paul and Tammy’s daughter Meghan, started in UL in September 2024. They paid €1,000 per month for student accommodation for the 4 months September to December, so €4,000 in total. Their rent tax credit for 2024 is
| €4,000 x 20% | €800 |
They will claim this in their 2024 tax return. Apart from the information above, they will also need Meghan’s date of birth and PPS number.
It’s also possible to claim for Digs. In that case, the payment is for rent and food. Your landlord will need to split the costs into rent and food, and you can claim for the rent part.
Rental Income
There have been two main changes for your 2024 taxes in the rental income space. The first is the introduction of the new landlord tax credit called RPRIR. The second is the availability of tax relief for retrofitting expenditure. While these are new, there are a few old reliables that taxpayers should box off to minimise their taxes.
RPRIR
RPRIR stands for Residential Premises Rental Income Relief. Our experience with this relief has been nothing short of painful so far. I need to stop giving out about it as it’s going over old ground. Over 4 years, it’s worth up to €3,400 to you. When I say up to, that will depend on your rental profit. In the four years 2024 to 2027, the maximum credit is
| 2024 | €600 |
| 2025 | €800 |
| 2026 | €1000 |
| 2027 | €1000 |
The credit is the lower of the above cap for each year or 20% of your net rental profit. To get the full credit, that means your rental profit must be
| 2024 | €3.000 |
| 2025 | €4,000 |
| 2026 | €5,000 |
| 2027 | €5,000 |
It suits those who have one property and who will continue to let that property until the end of 2027. If you let two or more residential properties, you would take the most profitable one and claim it on that. A few key points
- All residential properties must remain qualifying properties from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2027.
- You can’t let a property to a person related to you or your spouse.
- If you sell a property in the timeline, you are out and will suffer a clawback
- If you put it into a short-term letting such as Airbnb, you are out.
Being out means you can’t claim the credit for the year in question, and there’s a clawback of the prior years. For 2024, we’ve claimed this for most of our clients, but not all. We didn’t claim it for some because they sold their property in 2025. We could have claimed it for 2024, but in 2025, there would have been a clawback of the 2024 credit. Another client put their property into the ARP scheme, so we didn’t claim it for them either.
Two other essentials are that you are LPT compliant and have tax clearance when you claim RPRIR.
Registered with the RTB
To get a deduction for the mortgage interest, the tenancy must be registered with the RTB. Revenue will know if it is or isn’t registered by looking at their computer screen. The cost of the registration of €40 is tax-deductible too. I’m no expert in dealing with the RTB, but I believe you can go back a few years to register for earlier years. This will be vitally important if you have rental income and a mortgage on the rental property.
Mortgage Interest
Often, the mortgage interest will be the largest deduction from your gross rental. Interest rates have been rising over the last few years. One client was using an interest rate calculator to estimate his interest figure. We asked him to call his bank and get the correct figure. When he did that, the interest he paid in 2024 and in 2023 was a lot higher than his original estimate. As a result, he saved thousands over the two years.
The increase in repayments and interest has been especially high for buy-to-lets. In a few cases, the interest paid has been more than the rental income, resulting in losses.
Pre-letting expenses
Usually, most pre-letting expenses aren’t tax-deductible. But, if the property was vacant for 6 months before the first letting, they can be. The common types of expenses that qualify are repairs, interest and insurance. For an expense to qualify, it must be a normal deductible expense, like a repair.
An example of a repair is putting a new pane of glass in an existing window. But if you put in a new window, that’s not a repair but an enhancement. You get a deduction for enhancement expenditure when you sell the property. Big ticket items we have claimed this deduction for include repairs to electrics and plumbing. You can claim up to €10,000 in your first year per rental property. Often, the costs would result in a rental loss in year one. You can carry that loss forward against future rental income or offset it against other Irish rental profits.
Retrofitting Expenses
Retrofitting expenses are like pre-letting expenditure. You can claim this once you get an SEAI grant for the retrofitting works. The max claim is €10,000 per property, and you can claim for up to two properties. If you incurred retrofitting works in 2023, you can claim these in 2024. So, you claim in the tax year after you incurred the costs.
You claim the lower of the actual costs incurred after the SEAI grant or €10,000.
Billy does retrofitting work to a rental property in 2023 that costs him €25,000. He gets an SEAI grant of €12,000, so the net cost to him is €13,000. He can claim retrofitting expenses in 2024 of €10,000 for this property. This will be a deduction from his gross rental income in 2024. To get the relief, Billy must be LPT compliant and have tax clearance, plus the property should be registered with the RTB.
To avoid any clawback, Billy must continue to rent the property for 2024 and 2025.
I hope these 5 last-minute tax saving tips will help you. There are lots more out there. Make sure you keep quality records to support your claim. Revenue will ask for them at some stage.
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