Rent arrears: proving — or disputing — the figure.

An arrears case looks like the simplest dispute the RTB hears: one number, owed or not owed. In practice, the number is exactly where these cases are won and lost. Decided cases show two recurring battlegrounds — whether the figure itself survives scrutiny, and whether the statutory sequence around it was followed to the letter. This guide covers both, for whichever side of the figure you stand on.

1. Whoever asserts the figure must prove it

The party claiming arrears must prove and quantify them. No decision-maker can award what cannot be quantified — and a round number asserted from memory is not quantification. What proof looks like is a dated statement of account: each period's rent as it fell due, each payment as it was received, and a running balance — reconciled line by line against bank records. A rent book or dated receipts serve the same purpose where payments were made in cash.

Decision-makers work in daily rates — the annual rent divided by 365, so a monthly rent of €1,500 is €49.32 a day — and compute part-periods exactly. A statement built the same way, to the day, speaks the decision-maker's own language.

2. Check the foundations of the number

An arrears figure is only as sound as the rent behind it. If any rent increase feeding the figure was not lawfully made — set outside the applicable cap, or by a defective review — then arrears calculated at the higher rent overstate the true position, and the figure can be challenged at its foundation. It makes no difference that the tenant paid the increased rent for a time: payment does not make an invalid review valid.

Where a local authority pays part of the rent — HAP or similar — both sides should obtain the authority's own payment records before the hearing. When three parties are paying and receiving money, the honest answer to "who paid what, and when" lives in those records, and arrears disputes with a HAP element regularly turn on them.

3. The moving-figure problem

The statutory warning states one figure. The termination notice follows weeks later. By the hearing, months have passed. Some movement in the figure is normal — further rent falls due, payments are made. What damages a case is unexplained movement: a warning that said one amount and a claim that says another, with nothing to bridge them. The answer is a reconciliation table showing exactly how the figure travelled from the first document to the last — and every payment made along the way, including after the warning or the notice, credited in it. An arrears figure that cannot explain its own history invites doubt about everything else.

4. The sequence that protects both sides

A tenancy cannot lawfully be terminated for arrears on the figure alone. The Act requires a sequence. First, a written warning notification of the arrears must be given to the tenant and to the RTB, stating the amount. Second, the tenant has 28 days to pay — and the window runs from the later of the two receipts, the tenant's or the RTB's. Arrears cleared in full inside that window stop a termination on this ground; cleared after it, the payment generally comes too late to save the tenancy. Third — only if the stated arrears remain unpaid when the window closes — a Notice of Termination may be served, giving 28 days' notice whatever the length of the tenancy, meeting every formal requirement, with a copy to the RTB on the same day as service on the tenant.

Each step must be provable, not merely done. For landlords, the sequence and its proof are where arrears terminations fail, whatever the money position. For tenants, the same sequence is the checklist for testing the notice you have received.

5. The clock on challenges

A dispute about an arrears termination notice must be referred to the RTB within 28 days of receiving the notice — one of the shorter referral windows in the Act. A tenant who means to challenge the notice cannot wait to see how things develop: the window closes quickly, whatever the strength of the challenge.

6. If you are the tenant: this week

Check every line of any figure put to you against your own records before accepting it anywhere — in conversation, in correspondence, or at a hearing. Gather your bank statements, transfer receipts and rent book, and if HAP is involved, request the authority's payment records now; they take time to arrive. If a warning notification comes, date-stamp it and treat the 28 days as the moment that matters most in the whole process. And whether or not you dispute the figure, do not ignore the paperwork — the referral window does not wait.

7. If you are the landlord: this week

Start the statement of account today, not the week before the hearing — the exhibit that decides the case is the ledger kept as the tenancy runs, reconciled to bank records as you go. Serve nothing until the arithmetic is exact: the figure in the warning follows you through every later document, and a figure that has to be corrected is a gift to the other side. Then follow the sequence in order, and keep proof of every service.

The practical point

For both sides, an arrears hearing is decided on documents assembled long before anyone speaks. The side that arrives with a dated, reconciled account of the money — and proof of each statutory step — has usually done the deciding already.