Apartments: setting up maintenance? Landlords have to spend money first

House owners and landlords may not remove the tax saved for the maintenance before they have actually been issued. The Federal Finance Court (BFH) decided that. A Franconian landlord has thus suffered a defeat before the highest German finance court. The spouses rent several apartments and wanted to deduct their deposits in the reserve provided for maintenance as advertising costs. After their local tax office refused, they went to court. But the Nuremberg Finance Court had already rejected the lawsuit in the first instance. Now they failed in front of the BFH.

Judgment with broad effect

The legal background: As soon as there are several owners in a house, the law prescribes the formation of a homeowners’ community (WEG). A path is legally obliged to save a preservation reserve in order to cover the inevitable costs of maintenance. Between 50 cents and 1 euro per square meter of living space are common, as judge Jens Reddig explains. The couple were only 1,300 euros, but the judgment has a broad impact: According to figures from the Federal Statistical Office, there are around 43 million apartments, a considerable part of which is located in apartment buildings with owner communities.

BFH: Equal treatment of all owners

Owners and landlords can no longer reclaim money that has once been paid into the conservation reserve. The justification of the plaintive couple is strikingly simple: “The money is gone,” said Richter Reddig. After all, they would no longer have access to it. But the 9th Senate of the BFH rejected the lawsuit because the deposit in the “savings stocking” is not yet an output for the maintenance of the apartment.

And apart from that, the same principle also applies to owners and landlords who do not have to be members of a community of owners: housing companies, for example, or owners of single -family houses. These can also only deduct maintenance costs from the tax if it actually arises, as Reddig explained.