The EOFY checklist for self-managing landlords (2025–26)

When you manage your own rental, there’s no property manager who emails you a tidy end-of-year statement with every dollar of rent and every expense already added up. There’s no agent quietly filing the receipts. At tax time, that job is yours.

That’s not a reason to panic — plenty of landlords do it themselves and do it well. But it does mean the few weeks before 30 June matter more for you than they do for someone with a manager doing the paperwork. Get organised now and you’ll claim everything you’re entitled to, lodge without the late-June scramble, and stay well clear of the mistakes the ATO looks hardest at.

Here’s the EOFY checklist for landlords doing it themselves, in plain English.

Quick note before we start: this is general information, not tax advice. Rental tax has genuinely fiddly edges, and your situation is your own. For anything you’re unsure about, talk to a registered tax agent. Where we mention rules below, we’ve linked the ATO’s own guidance so you can check the detail.

First, the things you can still act on before 30 June

Most of your tax outcome for the year is already locked in by the rent you collected and the bills you paid. But a few levers are still in your hands for the next couple of weeks.

Bring forward genuine repairs and maintenance. If something at the property genuinely needs fixing — a leaking tap, a broken fence panel, servicing the heating — and you were going to do it anyway, having the work done and paid for before 30 June means the deduction lands in this year’s return rather than next year’s. The key word is genuine. Don’t invent work to manufacture a deduction; do bring forward what was already on the list.

Prepay where it makes sense. Some expenses — landlord insurance, interest, council rates — can sometimes be paid in advance. Whether prepaying actually helps you depends on your income this year versus next, so this is exactly the kind of thing worth a quick word with a tax agent before you do it.

Get a depreciation schedule sorted. If you’ve never had a quantity surveyor prepare a depreciation schedule for the property, this is the single most commonly missed deduction for DIY landlords. It lets you claim the decline in value of the building and its fixtures for years to come, and the cost of the schedule itself is deductible. (More on how depreciation works below.)

Pull your records together now, not in October. Rent received, every expense, loan statements, the lot. We’ll cover what to keep further down — the point here is that assembling it in mid-June while it’s fresh beats reconstructing it the night before you lodge. If you’ve been logging expenses as you go, this is the easy part; if you haven’t, now’s the time to catch up the last twelve months.

Start with the income side: what actually counts as rental income

It’s easy to focus on deductions and treat the income half of the return as “just the rent.” It isn’t. Your assessable rental income is the rent you received during the year, plus a handful of things landlords routinely forget — and forgetting them is exactly the kind of thing the ATO data-matches against. Declare:

Rent received — the obvious one, counted when you actually receive it, not when it falls due.
Letting and booking fees you keep, including any you retain when a renter cancels.
Bond money you become entitled to keep — for example, because a tenant defaulted on rent or because you kept part of the bond to cover damage. (Bond you simply hold and later refund isn’t income; bond you’re entitled to retain is.)
Insurance payouts for lost rent — a payment compensating you for rent you didn’t receive is itself rental income.
Reimbursements and recoupments — if a tenant pays you for a repair and you also claim that repair as a deduction, the amount they paid you is income. So can some government rebates on depreciating assets.

(ATO — rental income you must declare)

Know your “days rented” and “days available”

When you lodge, you’re asked for the number of days the property was genuinely rented or available for rent during the year — not just the dollar figures. There are really two counts that matter:

Days it produced income — days it was occupied and rent was being paid (this includes paid days even if no one was physically in the property).
Days it was available — days it sat unoccupied but was genuinely on the market for rent at a commercial rate.

This number is what your deductions are measured against. If the property was only available for part of the year — you moved a relative in, lived in it yourself for a stint, or it was off the market being renovated — your expenses have to be apportioned to the income-producing period (more on that in “what you can’t claim”). So as you pull your records together, note the dates the tenancy started and ended and any period the place was off the market. A self-manager who tracks rent payments through a platform has this in the ledger already; if you’ve been doing it on paper, reconstruct the dates now while you remember them.

What you can claim straight away

These are the bread-and-butter deductions — expenses you incur in earning your rent that you can claim in full, in the same year. The big ones:

Loan interest — the interest on money you borrowed to buy the property. This is usually the largest single deduction. Important catch: you can only claim the portion that relates to the rental. If you redrew on that loan to pay for something private — a car, a holiday — the interest on that slice isn’t claimable, and it has to be apportioned for the life of the loan. (ATO on interest)
Council rates, water rates and land tax (land tax has its own quirks — see below).
Landlord insurance.
Repairs and maintenance during the tenancy — fixing wear and tear and damage that happened while the place was rented.
Advertising for tenants — the cost of getting your property listed and finding a renter.
Body corporate administration fees — the regular fund, deductible in full the year you pay it. (Special-purpose or capital levies are treated differently — see the “over time” section.)
Property management or subscription fees — if you pay for a management service or a platform to help run the tenancy, that’s a deductible management expense.
The everyday rest: pest control, gardening and lawn mowing, cleaning, phone and stationery for managing the tenancy, and travel — though note travel to inspect or maintain a residential rental is generally not deductible for individual investors.

What you claim over time, not all at once

This is where DIY landlords most often trip up. Some costs are real and deductible — but spread across years, not claimed in one hit.

Capital works (the building itself). Structural improvements, extensions and alterations are claimed as a capital works deduction — generally 2.5% of the construction cost each year, for 40 years from completion. So a $40,000 renovation isn’t a $40,000 deduction this year; it’s roughly $1,000 a year. If a previous owner did the work, ask them for the construction-cost details so you can claim correctly; if you can’t get them, a qualified quantity surveyor can estimate. (ATO on capital works)

Depreciating assets (the stuff inside). Removable items — oven, dishwasher, carpet, blinds, hot water system, air con — decline in value over time. Anything costing more than $300 is claimed as decline in value over its effective life, not immediately; items $300 or less can be claimed in full that year. One trap worth knowing: if you bought the property after 9 May 2017, you generally can’t claim depreciation on second-hand plant and equipment that came with it — that deduction is mostly limited to new assets you buy.

Borrowing expenses. Loan establishment fees, title search fees, mortgage document costs and the like. If they total more than $100, you spread the deduction over five years; if they’re $100 or less, claim the lot in the first year. Note this is borrowing expenses — not the stamp duty on the property title, which is a different beast (see below).

What you can’t claim (the honest list)

Just as important as knowing what to claim is knowing what you can’t — because over-claiming here is exactly what gets returns flagged. Two slip-ups our team sees most often are not realising what is and isn’t claimable in the first place, and claiming expenses for stretches when the property wasn’t genuinely available to rent.

Initial repairs. Fixing damage that already existed when you bought the place — a cracked window, damaged floorboards you inherited — is not an immediate deduction, even if you fix it while it’s tenanted. It’s treated as capital. The repairs deduction is for wear and tear that happens on your watch.
Improvements, immediately. Replacing a whole roof when only part was damaged, or renovating a bathroom, is an improvement, not a repair. It goes into capital works at 2.5% a year, not straight off this year’s income.
The cost of buying (and selling). Stamp duty (everywhere except the ACT) and conveyancing fees on the purchase aren’t deductible against your rent. They’re not lost — they go into your property’s cost base and reduce the capital gains tax when you eventually sell.
Periods the property wasn’t genuinely available to rent. If you let family or friends stay at mates’ rates, or left it vacant without genuinely trying to rent it, you have to apportion your expenses for that time. To claim deductions while a place sits empty, you need to show a real intention to rent — advertised at a market rate, no unreasonable conditions.

Land tax: the one state-based piece

Almost everything above is federal — the ATO rules apply the same whether your rental is in Perth or Parramatta. Land tax is the exception. It’s levied by each state and territory’s revenue office (Revenue NSW, the State Revenue Office in Victoria, the Queensland Revenue Office, and so on), it’s assessed separately from your income tax return, and the thresholds and rates differ from state to state.

The good news for your return: land tax you pay on an investment property is a deductible rental expense. The catch is timing — you claim it for the income year the liability relates to, not simply the year you paid it, which matters if an assessment arrives covering an earlier period. Your state or territory revenue office is the place to check your own threshold and liability.

If you co-own the property

Owning a rental with a partner or family member? You declare the rental income and claim the expenses according to your legal ownership share — not according to who actually paid the bill or who earns more. Joint tenants split it equally; tenants in common split it by their respective shares. You can’t shift the whole deduction to the higher earner because it’d save more tax — the ATO is clear that it follows the title. (ATO on co-ownership)

Records: your job, your safety net

With no managing agent producing a statement, your records are the audit trail. Keep evidence of all your rental income and every expense you claim — rent records, receipts, invoices, loan and bank statements, your depreciation schedule, body corporate notices.

How long? The ATO asks you to keep these for five years. And because capital gains tax may apply when you sell, hang on to the purchase, improvement and selling records for five years from the date you sell — that can be well over a decade of paperwork for the cost-base items. A simple folder (digital is fine) per property, updated as bills come in, turns next June from a scramble into a five-minute export.

This is the bit a property manager would otherwise handle for you, and it’s exactly the gap PropertyNow’s Tax & EOFY Reporting is built to close. If you collect rent through the platform, every payment, your subscription fee and any expenses you’ve logged are captured and mapped to standard ATO categories as they happen — so at year-end you generate an Income & Expenditure Report (and a line-by-line rental ledger) and export it as a PDF straight to your accountant, rather than rebuilding a spreadsheet in July. The subscription itself is, as noted above, a deductible expense.

After 30 June: lodging your return

Once the financial year closes, you can lodge from 1 July. A couple of practical notes:

If you’re lodging yourself through myTax, your return is generally due by 31 October 2026. It’s usually worth waiting until late July, though — by then your pre-fill data (bank interest, etc.) has landed and there’s less to enter by hand.
If you use a registered tax agent, you typically get a later deadline — but only if you’re on their books before 31 October. Leave it past then and you’ve missed that extension.

If your deductions add up to more than your rent — a rental loss — that loss can offset your other income, like your salary, and any excess carries forward. That’s the mechanism people mean by “negative gearing,” and it’s unchanged for 2025–26.

When is it worth paying an agent? If you’ve got a depreciation schedule to set up, a co-ownership split, a loan with a private-use portion, or you just want the peace of mind on a property that’s a big chunk of your wealth, the fee is itself deductible and usually pays for itself. And it’s not just any accountant — the right one knows investment property inside out.

What our team sees “The biggest and costliest mistake, in my opinion, is not having a great accountant who specialises in investment properties. If they’re not genuinely invested and experienced in property, there can be huge savings and tax cuts missed. And I’d highly recommend getting a depreciation schedule.” — Chenelle Moothedom, PropertyNow

Set yourself up for 2026–27

The best EOFY is the one you barely notice. Going into the new financial year, start a fresh records folder for the property, log expenses as they happen rather than in a June heap, keep your depreciation schedule handy, and diarise any prepayment decisions for next June rather than scrambling again. Future-you will be grateful.

The bottom line

Self-managing your rental means the EOFY admin is on you — but none of it is beyond you. Act on the handful of things you can still influence before 30 June, claim the full set of deductions you’re genuinely entitled to (interest, rates, insurance, repairs, management costs and more), get the spread-over-time items right rather than claiming them all at once, and keep clean records so you can prove it. Where it gets genuinely tricky — depreciation, co-ownership, a part-private loan — a registered tax agent earns their (deductible) fee.

Do that, and tax time becomes one more part of self-managing you’ve quietly got the measure of.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I claim the cost of managing the property myself?

You can’t pay yourself a wage for your own time, but the genuine costs of self-managing are deductible — advertising for tenants, a rental management subscription, phone and stationery, and the like. What you can’t deduct is the value of your own labour.

Do I have to declare a bond I kept, or an insurance payout?

Yes. If you become entitled to keep bond money — because a tenant defaulted on rent or to cover damage — that retained amount is rental income. So is an insurance payout that compensates you for lost rent, and letting or booking fees you keep. Bond you simply hold and later return to the tenant isn’t income.

Is the interest on my whole home loan deductible if I borrowed against my own home to buy the rental?

Only the portion of the borrowing that actually went towards the rental property. If part of the loan was used privately, the interest must be apportioned, and that split has to be maintained for the life of the loan. It’s a common audit flag, so keep the loan purpose clear.

I renovated the kitchen this year — is that a deduction?

Not an immediate one. A renovation is an improvement, so it’s claimed as capital works at 2.5% a year over 40 years, and the appliances inside it are depreciated separately. Genuine repairs to existing wear and tear, on the other hand, are deductible the year you pay for them.

Do I need a depreciation schedule?

You don’t need one, but without it you’re likely leaving money on the table — depreciation is the most commonly missed deduction for DIY landlords. A quantity surveyor prepares it once and it serves for years, and the cost is deductible.

What records do I need to keep, and for how long?

Evidence of all rental income and every expense you claim — receipts, invoices, loan and bank statements, your depreciation schedule. Keep them for five years, and keep purchase, improvement and sale records for five years after you sell, because of capital gains tax.

When do I have to lodge?

If you lodge yourself, generally by 31 October 2026. Through a registered tax agent you usually get longer, but you need to be on their client list before 31 October to qualify.

Is land tax the same everywhere?

No — land tax is set by each state and territory, with different thresholds and rates, and it’s assessed separately from your income tax return. Check your state or territory revenue office. The land tax you pay on an investment property is a deductible rental expense

Make next EOFY a two-step job

PropertyNow logs your rent, fees and expenses into ATO-ready reports all year — so tax time is just download, hand to your accountant, done.

See EOFY reporting