My property manager sent the annual statement — can I just copy those numbers into my tax return?

The statement lands in the inbox some time in July and it looks like it was built for exactly this job. Rent collected at the top. Management fees, water, council rates, a plumber, an electrician through the middle. A net figure at the bottom that reconciles, to the cent, with what actually arrived in your account across the year. Treating that page as the rental section of the tax return — already done, already added up — is the natural thing to do, and it is what most owners do.

In late July 2026 the ATO said publicly what it has been putting to tax agents for a while: the report is a useful starting point, but it is information, not tax treatment. Owners were told to check it against invoices, receipts and other documents before lodging, and reminded that the owner remains responsible for what goes in the return even when the numbers came from a property manager. The categories on that page were designed for a property management system, not for tax law, and three parts of it usually need work.

The income line is almost never the number you report

The ATO's position, on guidance updated 21 May 2026, is that you report the gross rent you earn — before it is reduced by management fees and any expenses the property manager paid on your behalf. The net figure at the bottom of the statement is the one number on the page that definitely does not belong in your return.

It sounds like a distinction that washes out, because gross rent minus expenses gets you back to net. It only washes out if every expense the manager netted off is deductible in full this year, and the rest of this article is about why several of them are not. Report net, and you have silently claimed every one of those expenses at 100%, in this year, in the immediate-deduction category — including the ones that should have been spread over forty years or not claimed at all.

The timing rule catches people too. Rent is declared in the year your tenant pays your agent or property manager, not the year it is transferred to you. The ATO's own worked example runs on a bond released to the property manager on 30 June 2026 and paid into the owners' account on 4 July: it belongs in the 2026 return. Bond money retained in place of rent, or kept because of damage, is income as well.

And the statement is addressed to whoever signed the management agreement, which is not necessarily how the property is owned. Income and expenses are reported according to legal ownership — a 50% owner declares 50% of the rent and claims 50% of the expenses, regardless of whose bank account the money went into.

"Repairs" on the statement is not always repairs in the return

This is where the real money is, and the ATO publishes a quick reference table for it (updated 22 May 2026). Replacing something that was worn out, damaged or broken while the property was rented — a fence panel after a storm, a plumber for a leaking tap — is a repair, claimed immediately. Preventing or fixing deterioration that happened while it was rented — repainting faded interior walls, re-oiling a deck — is maintenance, also immediate.

Then the table turns. Repairing damage that already existed when you bought the property — whether or not you knew about it at the time — is an initial repair. It is not deductible this year at all: the construction expenditure is written off as capital works at 2.5% over 40 years. Worse, initial repairs to depreciating assets in the property attract no deduction at all. Replacing an entire structure rather than part of one — the whole fence, not the storm-damaged panel — is capital works. So is renovating, or adding something new like a carport.

And installing a brand-new appliance or window covering — a dishwasher, new blinds — is neither. It is a depreciating asset, claimed as decline in value over its effective life. The property manager, meanwhile, has one field for all of it, and will often write "repairs and maintenance" across every line.

Two rules sit underneath that are worth knowing before you assume a small item is fine. Depreciating assets costing $300 or less can generally be claimed immediately where they produce non-business assessable income — but not if the item was part of a set costing more than $300 that you started to hold that year, and not if it was one of a number of identical or substantially identical assets that together cost more than $300. Four matching blinds at $250 each are not four immediate deductions.

The second is second-hand assets. For a residential rental you generally cannot claim decline in value on second-hand depreciating assets — including everything that was already in the property when you bought it — unless you purchased the asset before 7:30 pm on 9 May 2017 and installed it in the rental before 1 July 2017. The same applies to the appliances already in your own home if you turned it into a rental on or after 1 July 2017.

"Sundry", "other", and the expense you claim twice

The ATO's July 2026 warning named the vague labels specifically: expenses grouped under headings like "sundry" or "other", with nothing on the page to show what the money was actually spent on. A line item that cannot be identified cannot be categorised, and a line item that cannot be categorised should not be claimed until you have the invoice that explains it.

Two related problems came up in the same warning. Private expenses — costs relating to the owner's own use of the property — get swept into the statement along with everything else. And the same expense gets claimed twice: the property manager pays the plumber out of the rent, includes it on the statement, and posts you a copy of the invoice for your records. That is two pieces of paper and one expense. The ATO made the point directly in a June 2024 media release: owners can only claim amounts they actually incur, so even where there are two records for the same expense, it can only be claimed once.

None of this makes the statement useless — it is the best record most owners have, and reconstructing a year of rent and outgoings without it is far worse. It just is not a tax return. The workable version is three questions per line: what was actually bought, when was it incurred, and did you incur it. Anything that cannot be answered off the statement alone needs the invoice behind it, which is easiest to obtain in July and hardest to obtain two years later when a data-matched query arrives.

This is general information current as at 4 August 2026, not advice about your property. How a particular expense is categorised depends on the work that was actually done and the state of the property when you bought it, and it should be worked out on your own documents. Reconciling a property manager's statement to invoices and sorting the repairs from the capital works is a large part of what we do on a rental return — our property investor tax service is built around it, and the investment property calculator shows what the holding cost looks like once the deductions are categorised properly rather than optimistically.