Working Paper Series Congressional Budget Office Washington, D.C. Taxation of Owner-Occupied and Rental Housing Larry Ozanne Congressional Budget Office
[email protected] November 2012 Working Paper 2012-14 To enhance the transparency of the work of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and to encourage external review of that work, CBO’s working paper series includes both papers that provide technical descriptions of official CBO analyses and papers that represent independent research by CBO analysts. Working papers are not subject to CBO’s regular review and editing process. Papers in this series are available at http://go.usa.gov/ULE. The views expressed in this paper are the author’s and should not be interpreted as CBO’s. This paper is preliminary and is circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment. David Splinter and Theodore Figinski helped design and implement the calculator used in the paper and provided many helpful suggestions, for which the author offers thanks. The author also thanks Janet Holtzblatt, Frank Sammartino, and Steven Weinberg for helpful comments and suggestions. Abstract This paper illustrates how the different tax treatments of owner-occupied and rented houses affect the relative costs of owning and renting. In the examples, a representative landlord computes the rental rate (the ratio of the rent to the value of the house) required to break even on an investment in a house. Potential homeowners compare that market rental rate as a tenant with an implicit rental rate that reflects the cost of owning a home. The tax advantages tend to make owning more advantageous than renting for higher-income households, but lower-income households can find renting cheaper than owning.