If you are renting out a portion of your home, you can claim an appropriate percentage of home maintenance costs such as utilities, mortgage interest, property taxes, insurance, and repairs against your rental income. Because you have to pay for most of these costs already, you get the benefit of a deduction without spending additional money.
Don’t get too aggressive by charging very low rent to children or other relatives just to write off a portion of your home maintenance expenses. CCRA may review your rental schedule and adjust your rental revenue to their interpretation of fair market value. This means you will have to report revenue that you did not collect, which is much worse than not claiming the home expenses in the first place.
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