How much of your income should rent take up?

Enter take-home (net) monthly pay to see it worked out against the guideline housing charity Shelter uses to define affordable and unaffordable rent. This is a general guideline, not personal financial advice — see the note below, or read the full guide to where the 30% and 40% figures come from.

£

Net pay, after tax and National Insurance — the amount that actually reaches your account.

Enter a figure above to see it worked out.

This is a guideline, not advice. The 30% and 40% figures come from Shelter's affordability research and are a widely used rule of thumb, not a personal recommendation. What is actually affordable for any one household depends on debts, dependants, other essential costs and where in the country the rent is, none of which this tool knows. It does not account for bills, council tax, or anything else in a budget — it only compares rent to take-home pay, which is the one comparison Shelter's figures are actually about.

Source: Shelter — "Shelter has used the widely accepted 30% 'affordability rule', setting an affordable level of rent as below 30% of a household's net income," with severely unaffordable defined above 40%.

Read the full guide for how common it is to be over the line, what to do if Universal Credit is part of the picture, and what the guideline does not account for.