Housing Benefit Calculator

Housing Benefit helps with rent costs for people on low incomes who have not yet moved to Universal Credit. The amount you receive depends on your eligible rent, household size, income and savings. If your savings exceed £16,000 you are generally not eligible, and for working-age claimants savings between £6,000 and £16,000 are treated as generating £1 per week per £250 (tariff income). Over State Pension age the tariff only starts at £10,000 and counts £1 a week for every £500.

New claims are now narrow. Working-age claimants have almost all been moved across to the Universal Credit housing element, leaving Housing Benefit to cover people over State Pension age, people in temporary accommodation and those in supported or specified accommodation. The UC housing element follows much the same rules, the difference being that it arrives inside a single monthly UC payment rather than separately. This calculator estimates entitlement using current LHA rates and income rules, with separate personal allowances for working-age and State Pension age claimants.

For private tenants, the maximum Housing Benefit is capped at the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rate for your area and property size. LHA rates are set at the 30th percentile of local rents and vary significantly by postcode. You are entitled to one bedroom per adult couple, per person over 16, and per pair of children under 16 of the same sex. Where the rent sits below the LHA figure, the full eligible rent can be met, and where it sits above, the tenant covers the difference out of other income. A 2-bedroom property in London zone 2 shows the scale, with an LHA figure of roughly £350-£450 a week for 2026/27.

The sum itself starts from an applicable amount. Picture a single tenant paying £150 a week where the local one-bedroom LHA rate is £160, so the eligible rent is the lower of the two at £150. The applicable amount, which is the personal allowance the rules say the household needs to live on, is £95.55 a week for a working-age single person aged 25 or over in 2026/27 (£238.00 over State Pension age). Income above that line is tapered at 65%, so £200 a week of income leaves £104.45 of excess, costs £67.89, and leaves £82.11 of Housing Benefit.

Two policies shrink awards further. LHA rates were frozen from 2020 to 2024, uprated to the 30th percentile in April 2024, then frozen again from April 2025, so 2026/27 is the second frozen year and the cap drifts behind asking rents between reviews. Separately, working-age tenants in social housing meet the under-occupancy penalty, better known as the bedroom tax, which cuts the award by 14% for one spare bedroom and 25% for two or more. Pensioners and private tenants sit outside it, and exemptions cover a disabled person who needs a separate bedroom, foster carers, children of armed forces personnel temporarily away, and children who cannot share a room because of a disability.

Where the gap becomes unmanageable, the council may be able to bridge it. In England, Discretionary Housing Payments were replaced in April 2026 by Housing Payments from the council's Crisis and Resilience Fund, while councils in Scotland and Wales still award Discretionary Housing Payments. Councils run these top-ups themselves and consider applications for bedroom tax shortfalls, LHA shortfalls, rent arrears, moving costs and deposits. Awards are discretionary, succeed in roughly 40-60% of cases, and usually run for 3-6 months before needing renewal. Demand exceeds the budget in most councils, so a clear account of why the shortfall cannot be met from other income tends to matter more than the size of the gap itself.