Selling your home: main-home relief explained

Main home relief can take your whole gain out of Capital Gains Tax. If you let it or moved out, relief is shared out by time, plus the final 12 months.

Selling a house or apartment that is your only or main home? If it was your home the whole time you owned it, the gain is free of Capital Gains Tax (CGT). The relief also covers up to an acre of garden around it.

When you didn't live there the whole time

Relief is shared out by time. The share of your ownership that it was your home is exempt. So are the final 12 months, even if you had moved out by then. That's because people often buy their next home before selling the last.

The final 12 months only count if it was your main home at some point. A property you only ever let gets no main-home relief at all. (Some calculators get this wrong and give a year of relief anyway.)

Absences that count as living there

• working abroad, where all your duties were outside Ireland
• up to four years where your employer required you to live elsewhere
• time in hospital, a nursing home or a care setting, while the home stood empty

Part used for business

If part of the house was used only for business, relief is reduced by that share. Renting a room under rent-a-room relief does not reduce main-home relief.

Exact months, not rounded fractions

The law gives relief for the proportion of ownership the property was your home. Revenue's own examples sometimes round that fraction to two decimal places. Our calculator uses the exact months, so figures can differ by a few euro from a rounded example.

Work it out

• Capital Gains Tax on property →

Sources

• Revenue: How to calculate CGT (checked 25/10/2026)

General information, not tax advice. HeyPenny is not a tax agent.