How To Fill Out The Housing Benefit Form

Hello, my name's Lee Healey, and I'm the Managing Director of Income Max, the Entitlement Experts. We help people to make sense of, understand the benefits, and tax credits system. Today, we're going to tell you a lot about the tax benefits that are available.

Hazard benefit is obviously a benefit that you'll claim when you need help with your rent. Pretty much, you'll need to have some kind of low income because housing benefit is a means tested benefit so it's obviously comparing your income and resources, your wages, and your savings to see if the local authority can actually help you about paying money towards your rent. Housing benefit can sometimes cover most of your rent or all of what's called "Maximum Housing Benefit” or it can help you in part so sometimes, you still need to make a contribution towards your rent.

Anyway, the fact that it's a means tested benefit obviously means that the form that you complete will normally have to have the relevant details about your income. There are two types of form. First, some people will fill out a more basic form for housing account or tax benefit.

That generally will be for people on income support, job seeker's allowance, employment support allowance, and the income related versions of those benefits. That's quite straightforward. There's another form though that a lot of people will fill in, which you would normally get from your local authority, this will actually have much more data on your income and your savings.

To fill out a housing benefit form, you are going to have to have a really, good idea of what your income is. You're going to have to have a really good idea of what your wages are if you work, and the different benefits that you've got coming in. You need to have a really good idea of those, any savings that you've got coming in, and also obviously the basic information like what your rent's made up of.

Perhaps you have water charges involved in your rent, included in your rent or heat, whatever. All of those things are quite important to the form and obviously the kind of information the Housing Benefits Department is going to need. You've got a much more straight forward one for certain benefit claimants, but if you're filling out the local authority form, you're going to need lots of information on your type of rent that you pay, and also your income and resources.

Obviously, you just need to fill that form out as best as you can, get it back to the local authority as accurately as you can, and then wait for a decision. That's pretty much a basic guide to claiming housing benefit and the forms that you'll need to complete. .