Rent records and arrears under the 2022 Act

On the last Saturday of the month a tenant in a two-room muzigo off a murram road in Kawempe counts out her rent and hands it to the caretaker, who writes the month and the amount inside the cover of a school exercise book and signs beside it. No receipt is issued, because none has ever been issued here. Eighteen months later she gives notice and is told she is two months behind. She is certain she is not. Both reach for the same exercise book, and it settles nothing: the entries run in one hand, several are undated, and the two months in dispute sit on a page that has come loose.

Multiply that exercise book across the country. The 2024 National Population and Housing Census counted 2,654,721 households — 24.8 per cent of all households in Uganda — living in dwellings they rent, and the concentration is urban and steep: the Uganda Bureau of Statistics recorded 41.7 per cent of urban households renting against 13.3 per cent of rural ones, and in Kampala Capital City 70.0 per cent. The same census put 54.9 per cent of Kampala households in tenements, so the commonest housing arrangement in the capital is a single room let for cash by somebody who very likely owns a row of them.

What works deserves saying first: Uganda has a modern statute, and it is unusually specific. The Landlord and Tenant Act, 2022 requires a landlord to give a written receipt for rent — immediately where the money is handed over in person, and within five working days where it is not and the tenant asks for one — and, at section 25, to keep a record of all rent receipts. Where there is no written tenancy, section 3 obliges the landlord to record the parties, the premises, the rent payable and the manner of payment, and to give the tenant a copy within fourteen days. So the record the caretaker did not keep has been a statutory duty for four years, in a market where almost nobody keeps it.

NOTHING CARRIES THE OBLIGATION THE LAW CREATES

A duty must be performed by somebody holding an instrument, and for rent in Uganda that instrument was never built. The Act assigns the receipt and the ledger to the landlord personally, and that landlord is overwhelmingly an individual with a handful of units and no back office. The clearest admission comes from the state. When Parliament rewrote the rental tax in 2022 so that individuals pay a flat 12 per cent of gross rent above an annual threshold of UGX 2,820,000, with no deductions allowed, the stated rationale was that this would simplify accounting for individuals, many of whom, on the Finance Committee's own reading, had difficulty keeping records at all — reasoning set out by Mwesigye, Ochen, Waiswa and Kangave in ICTD Working Paper 226 (2025). The country chose to tax around the missing records rather than close the gap.

A REGISTER IS NOT A LEDGER

The consequence shows up in the tax administration's own numbers. The same ICTD study traces the rental taxpayer register from 10,651 taxpayers in FY2013/14 to 220,120 in FY2023/24 — a twentyfold expansion built on door-to-door drives, third-party data from the city authority and the water utility, and an instant taxpayer number. Registration was never the hard part, and the figures behind it show why.

Of the 101,770 taxpayers added to the register in FY2022/23, 0.8 per cent filed a return. Revenue did rise across the decade, from USh34.05 billion in FY2014/15 to USh279.33 billion in FY2023/24, lifting rental tax from 0.03 to 0.18 per cent of GDP, which is a real gain. But a register assembled from proxies is not a ledger of what was paid: the study notes that the compliance platform leans on Kampala Capital City Authority rateable values, that the authority's last valuation was carried out in 2015, and that Uganda has no unique identifier tying a property to an owner to a stream of payments. The state can name a great many landlords and still not see a single month's rent.

ARREARS ARE AN EVIDENCE PROBLEM

For the two people in the opening scene, none of this is about tax. Section 29 gives a landlord a route when a tenant falls behind: apply to court for the money owed, and where the default runs past thirty days, re-enter the premises with a local council official and the police present. Both remedies turn on proving what was paid and when, which an exercise book cannot do, and it runs the other way too. The Act caps the security deposit at one month's rent and requires a written receipt for it, and the Equal Opportunities Commission, in its eleventh annual report on the state of equal opportunities, takes the ordinary case of a house at UGX 200,000 a month where the incoming tenant pays three months up front. Without a record, such a dispute is settled by whoever has more standing, and in a muzigo that is never the tenant.

A category of locally built property management software has grown up in this gap: systems that issue a receipt for every payment, including those arriving by mobile money, hold a per-unit arrears position both sides can read, and price in shillings for a landlord with twelve doors. What matters is not that it digitises a notebook, but that collecting the rent produces the document the Act demands as a by-product.

KENYA LOWERED THE RATE AND BUILT THE PLUMBING

Kenya met the same market and sequenced its response differently. The Kenya Revenue Authority charges residential landlords 7.5 per cent of gross rent, cut from 10 per cent on 1 January 2024, as a final tax filed by the twentieth of each month rather than once a year, and the Finance Act 2023 let it appoint rental income tax agents, so that the party already touching the money deducts and remits it. In April 2025 it launched an electronic rental income tax system covering registration, filing and payment for landlords and agents together, as EY set out in its technical alert of September 2025. The rate came down, and the collection point moved to where the record is made.

WHAT IS THE WAY FORWARD?

Several moves would change this. The Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development should finish the Act by prescribing the receipt and record forms in a shape an ordinary landlord can use on a phone. The tax authority should make the annual return a consequence of the year's receipts rather than a separate act of memory, because a payment rate of nine per cent describes the burden of the task, not the honesty of those failing it. Urban authorities should revalue and adopt a single property identifier, since a register that cannot tell two buildings apart cannot arbitrate one arrears claim. And landlords who want their arrears recoverable can start with the cheapest discipline there is: one receipt, every payment, no exceptions.

The tenant in Kawempe will move out either way. Whether she leaves owing two months or nothing at all turns on a page that came loose from a school exercise book, and it has been answerable by law since 2022.