About your rent

Your rent is a weekly charge for the property you occupy. You may also need to pay additional charges for any extra services you receive. These might include:

• shared heating
• sheltered housing service charges
• cleaning of shared areas, for example in blocks of flats
• Delta Wellbeing Alarm Service

If you live in a block of flats with heating or cleaning, charges are divided among all residents of the block and your share is added to your rent account.

Non collection weeks

We work out your rent on the basis that you will pay a full year’s rent in weekly payments. Every year, we will set up to four non-collection weeks when we will not collect rent from you. If you are not behind with your rent, you will not need to make any payments during the non-collection weeks.

If you are behind with your rent, you must continue to make payments during the non-collection weeks to reduce or clear what you owe. When your tenancy comes to an end, we will not refund any amount to cover the non-collection weeks. 

These are weeks when no rent will be collected. The rent accounting period for 2023/24 will be over a 52-week period from 3rd April 2023 to 31st March 2024. Your annual rent charge however will be calculated over 48 weeks because of the four “non-collection” weeks (weeks commencing 28th August 2023, 18th December 2023, 25th December 2023 and 25th March 2024) for those tenants who are up-to-date with their payments.

When is rent due?

Your rent is due on a Monday and must be paid by the end of the week. Most tenants pay their rent weekly but it may be more convenient for you to pay fortnightly or monthly. If you do wish to pay at longer intervals, these payments must be made in advance (that is, for the month ahead).

The rent we collect helps us to maintain and improve services to tenants. If you are late paying your rent you are breaking the terms of your tenancy agreement. We take rent collection very seriously because if rent is not paid then there will be less money to pay for things like repairs.

If you do not pay your rent due and on time, you could end up with a County Court Judgement which will affect your credit rating and you could lose your home. This would make it difficult for you to get credit or to be housed by the council in the future.

Changes to your rent

The amount of rent you pay is reviewed at the beginning of each year and following government guidelines. Any change in your rent will start in April and we will let you know at least four weeks before your rent is going to change.