Whether to pay tax if the apartment is owned for less than 5 years.

If the apartment has been owned for less than 5 years and you decide to sell it, you will need to pay income tax.

How to calculate the tax amount correctly?

According to the current legislation of the Russian Federation, two types of deductions are provided for when selling an apartment:

Fixed-the tax that you will have to pay when selling an apartment can be calculated using the formula: income from the sale of an apartment, minus 1 million rubles, multiplied by 13 %.

The calculation is general. The amount of 1 million rubles remains unchanged regardless of how many apartments you have sold within one year.

Deduction in the amount of expenses that are associated with the purchase – the tax is charged only on the profit that you received from the sale of a particular property. For example, if an apartment was bought for 4.5 million rubles, and sold for 5.5 million rubles within five years, the tax will have to be paid only from 1 million rubles, which are considered profit. In some cases, this calculation option is more profitable. Especially if the value of the property has not changed significantly.

To use the deduction in the amount of expenses for an apartment, you must confirm everything with documents. You need to provide all the acts, contracts, cash and commodity receipts, receipts and other documents that can serve as confirmation of your expenses for the purchase of an apartment.

How to reduce the amount of tax when selling real estate?

There are exceptions in which it is possible to sell real estate without mandatory payment of tax in three years after ownership:

Housing is the only one – you do not have any other real estate, including shares in other residential premises or rooms.

Also, the housing sold within 90 days after the purchase of a new property will be recognized as the only one.

The property was purchased from close relatives.

The housing was inherited or under a contract of lifelong maintenance.

Also, the tax is not paid if the property was sold for less than it was bought. But this amount should be at least 70 % of the cadastral value.

It will not be possible to specifically underestimate the value of real estate in order to reduce the amount of tax. Such actions may be considered illegal. If the value specified in the purchase and sale agreement is less than the cadastral value reduced by × 0.7, then the income from the sale will be calculated according to a special formula-the cadastral value × 0.7. The cadastral value is updated every year after January 1 and remains valid until December.