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Tax Department briefing: landlord-certificate report shows coverage gaps and data limits for renter credit
Summary
Tax Department officials told the House Committee the 2025 landlord-certificate data set includes about 8,400 certificates covering roughly 75,000 renters and 60,000 units but has unit-count gaps and incomplete participation; officials emphasized the form’s primary purpose is administering the renter credit, not comprehensive housing inventory collection.
Tax Department staff told the House Committee on Federal and Housing that the landlord certificate provides useful but incomplete information about rental housing statewide.
Jake Dahlman and Kathy Magnus of the Tax Department briefed the committee on the certificate’s history and current use. Dahlman said reforms in 2021 changed the renter program into a renter credit and simplified filing, which made administration easier for landlords and renters but increased back-end matching work for the department. Dahlman told members the certificate’s primary statutory purpose is to administer the renter credit, not to serve as a comprehensive housing inventory.
Kathy Magnus summarized the 2025-derived dataset: "we received about 8,400 landlord certificates reflective of roughly 75,000 tenants and 60,000 units," she said, and added that about 24% of those renters reportedly receive subsidized rent. Magnus also said the department identified roughly 4,000 landlords in that submission and that 87% reported a Vermont mailing address. Dahlman said the state currently spends "about 11 plus million on it right now," referring to renter-credit payments, and that the maximum individual credit is "2,500."
Committee members pressed on the dataset’s limits. Tax staff said the unit-count field is unreliable in places: landlords sometimes leave fields blank or enter imprecise values (including LLC names or property-management contacts rather than owner names), and the department typically does not have capacity to chase confirmations for survey-style fields that do not affect a credit claim. Officials estimated the certificate-based unit tally may undercount the true rental stock by roughly 15–20% compared with census-derived rental estimates; they said the census is a more complete (but less frequent) benchmark.
The department noted a planned form change: an ADA-accessible-unit field will appear on the next report (expected in December of the next reporting cycle), which should improve accessibility data. Tax staff told the committee they could not reliably determine ownership type (investor vs. local owner) from the current dataset without additional verification.
Why it matters: The landlord certificate is a recurring administrative tool that helps deliver renter credits to low-income households. The dataset can inform policy and local planning, but committee members were warned not to treat the certificate as a complete inventory of rental housing because participation and data-quality issues leave meaningful gaps.
Next steps: The committee did not adopt policy changes at this hearing; staff offered to return for follow-up questions or deeper data dives if members request them.
