Free tool
What is your rent worth?
Twenty per cent of the rent you pay in a year comes off your taxable income, up to ₦500,000. Nobody applies it for you. Put in two numbers and see what claiming it is worth.
Assumes pension at 8 per cent and National Housing Fund at 2.5 per cent. An estimate, not tax advice.
How to actually claim it.
The money is not automatic. Three steps, and the first one is the only hard one.
Find the document
A tenancy agreement, or rent receipts for the year. A photograph on your phone is enough to start.
Give it to whoever runs payroll
Your employer, the finance person, or the accountant. They apply the relief for the rest of the year.
Check your next payslip
The PAYE line should fall. If it does not, ask, because it means the relief was never applied.
You still file a return
Rent relief applied through payroll does not remove the individual return due by 31 March. It changes what you owe, not whether you file.
If your employer will not apply it
Some payroll setups genuinely cannot handle it. The person running your payroll may be doing it in a spreadsheet at ten at night and may not have heard of the change at all. That is not hostility, it is capacity.
Send them something rather than arguing with them. There is a message written for exactly this on the employees page, framed from their side rather than yours, and it takes them thirty seconds to read.