Rent affordability is the amount you should be paying towards your rent whilst having enough left over to pay for other expenses, such as bills, council tax, food, and other essentials. This is a generic rule and may not apply to everyone as expenses can vary massively from person to person, and therefore this rule should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Our calculator will help you ask yourself the question and start planning your budget, even a breakdown of where you're spending, as a percentage of your income. This calculator is a basic version of our Mydus app, which can help you take budget planning a bit further, download our Budget Planner today and begin your budgeting journey.

You may have a good rent affordability score, but this isn’t all landlords look at when renting to you. There are other factors that may stop you from being able to rent that property, such as a poor credit score, inconsistent income, large debts, or bad spending habits.

When renting to you, landlords may ask for proof of income and references from previous tenancies to assess your behaviour as a tenant i.e. do you make your rent payments on time, are you clean and respectful, are you reliable and easy to deal with.

If you're looking to improve in these areas, a great place to start is with your credit score. This can determine how likely you are to make a payment, in this case rent, so landlords will tend to look at this. Getting a credit card can be a good way to build up your credit score as you will be paying off the debt monthly but be careful not to step outside your means with this as companies can offer large credit limits. You can request for your credit limit to be set to a more realistic limit for you just by calling the credit card provider.

Rental affordability is calculated uses a generic rule for calculating how much you should spend on rent. The rule is "Spend no more than 30% of your gross income on rent". However, as mentioned above this rule may not always be accurate.

ONS have put together a study supporting this where they state: “We deem a property “affordable” if a household would spend the equivalent of 30% or less of their total income on rent“.

Example: How much rent can I afford on £30k salary in the UK?
At £30,000 gross annual income (£2,500 gross monthly income), your rent shouldn't exceed 30% of that, so your rent should be no more than £9,000 for the year, or £750 for the month.

It's important to plan for rental spend as it tends to be a large percentage of your total income, and our calculator can help you figure out the rent portion of your spending, but we would recommend looking at the other elements of your spending. With Mydus's in app 50/30/20 calculator this is as easy as linking your salary account and Mydus tells you where you are spending and whether you can afford to.