The 5% rate on residential rent comes with one condition — you claim nothing against it

An individual letting residential space for residential use — to a person, an organisation or a legal entity — may be taxed at 5% personal income tax on the rental income, provided no deductions are made from that income. The condition is the substance of the rule, not a footnote. A landlord who wants to deduct the cost of a new boiler, agency commission, or the interest on a loan is not in the 5% regime; the alternative treatment involves deductions against a higher rate. For most small landlords here, where costs are modest relative to rent, the 5% with no deductions is the better arithmetic — but it should be a calculation, not an assumption.

The low rate attaches to residential space let for residential purposes. Letting a flat to a company that uses it as an office is a different fact pattern, and short-stay holiday accommodation is a different activity again — closer in character to hospitality than to tenancy. Owners who switch a unit between long tenancy and nightly letting through the year are moving between treatments as they do it, which is the point at which casual bookkeeping becomes expensive. If a unit does both, the sensible practice is to keep the two income streams separately recorded from the start of the year rather than reconstructing them afterwards.

There was a separate fixed personal income tax rate available for short-stay accommodation activity, set out as applying from 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2025, and available only to individuals who applied to the tax office, were not voluntarily registered for VAT and stayed below 100,000 lari of income. Anyone who structured a short-let business around that provision should confirm what applies to the current year before filing on the old basis, because a regime written with an end date in it is exactly the kind of rule that quietly stops applying while the advice articles keep repeating it.

Profit on the sale of an apartment or house together with the attached land is charged at 5%, the same headline rate as residential rent. The figure that matters is the gain rather than the sale price, so the documented purchase price is what protects the position — which is a reason to keep the registration extract, the purchase contract and proof of payment together for as long as the property is held, not only until the keys change hands. Owners deciding between selling and letting this year are choosing between two 5% exposures with very different timing, and the decision usually turns on the cost side rather than the rate.