Minnesota Certificate of Rent Paid: Eligibility, Filing, and Deadlines

Minnesota’s Certificate of Rent Paid, known as the CRP, is the form your landlord must give you each January showing how much rent you paid the year before. You use it to claim the Renter’s Credit on your Minnesota income tax return. For the 2025 tax year, renters with household income below $142,490 can claim the credit, and the refund arrives with your regular state tax refund.¹

When Your CRP Should Arrive and What It Should Show

Landlords and managing agents must deliver a CRP to every adult renter by January 31 for the previous year’s rent. Delivery can be on paper or electronic.² Mobile home park owners have a parallel deadline of before February 1 under Minnesota Statutes Section 290A.19.³

When it comes in, read it before you file. The certificate should show your name, the rental address, the dates you occupied the unit, the total months rented, and the total rent paid.⁴ Check the rent figure against your bank statements or payment records. A total that’s too low will shrink your credit; one that’s too high can trigger penalties for your landlord and complications for you. If something is off, ask the landlord for a corrected CRP in writing.

Who Qualifies for the Renter’s Credit

You need to meet all of the following:

You rented and lived in a Minnesota property during the tax year.
Your household income for 2025 was below $142,490.¹
You have no ownership interest in the property where you lived.
The rental is subject to Minnesota property taxes. Certain tax-exempt buildings, such as some government-owned housing, may not qualify.

Household income here is broader than wages. It includes taxable and certain nontaxable income from everyone in the household. If you’re near the cap, work through the M1PR instructions to see what counts.

What Counts as Rent on the CRP

The rent figure on your CRP is not always the same as what you wrote on your checks. Rent for CRP purposes includes your base payment plus amounts paid for a garage, parking space, or storage locker provided as part of the rental agreement, along with utilities or pet fees included in the right to occupy the unit. It also includes certain government assistance payments such as Medical Assistance and Minnesota Housing Support vendor payments.⁴

Rent does not include:

Security deposits, unless the landlord applied them toward rent
Late fees and other charges beyond occupancy costs
Rent paid after December 31 of the tax year
Utilities billed separately from the lease payment
Federal housing assistance such as Section 8 vouchers or HUD payments
Emergency rental assistance payments
Payments by charitable organizations or by people not living in the unit
Charges for food, laundry, or medical services not part of the rental agreement

Residents of nursing homes and adult foster care facilities have monthly rent caps on their CRPs. For 2025, the cap is $650 per month for nursing home or intermediate care facility residents and $1,010 per month for adult foster care residents.⁴

How You Claim the Credit

Starting with the 2024 tax year, Minnesota moved the Renter’s Credit onto the regular income tax return. You no longer file a separate Form M1PR as a renter, and there is no separate filing deadline for the renter’s portion; the credit comes to you as part of your ordinary state tax refund.⁵

The credit amount depends on how much of your rent is treated as property tax compared with your household income, using a sliding scale under Minnesota Statutes Section 290A.04. Lower-income households keep a larger share of the credit; higher-income households absorb more of the cost before the credit applies.⁶

If Your Landlord Doesn’t Give You One

Start by asking your landlord in writing and keeping a copy of the request. If the landlord still refuses, or gives you a CRP with errors they won’t fix, you can request a Rent Paid Affidavit (RPA) from the Minnesota Department of Revenue. The RPA substitutes for the CRP and lets you claim the credit. Call the department at 651-296-3781 or 1-800-652-9094 to start the process, and be ready with information about yourself and your landlord.⁷ If you stayed in short-term housing like a hotel or motel and the operator refuses to complete a CRP, the RPA is available there too.⁴

Reporting matters. The department can assess a $100 penalty for each CRP a landlord fails to issue. If a landlord overstates the amount of rent attributable to property taxes, the penalty is $100 or 50 percent of the overstatement, whichever is greater. Landlords also must issue CRPs based on rent actually paid, even if the renter owes back rent.⁴

Do You Owe Federal Tax on the Credit

For most renters, no. If you claim the standard deduction on your federal return, you don’t need to report a state tax refund or credit as income.⁸ Roughly 90 percent of individual taxpayers use the standard deduction.⁹

If you itemized in the prior year and deducted state taxes, you may have to include part or all of the credit in federal income the following year, but only to the extent the deduction actually reduced your federal tax. The $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions means some itemizers still won’t owe anything on the credit.⁸

Key Dates

January 31: Deadline for landlords to deliver your CRP for the previous year’s rent.²
Minnesota income tax filing season: Claim the Renter’s Credit on your Minnesota income tax return, no separate form required beginning with the 2024 tax year.⁵
August 15: Deadline for homeowners filing the separate Property Tax Refund return on Form M1PR. Renters follow the standard Minnesota income tax filing deadline instead.⁵

1
Minnesota Department of Revenue. 2025 Property Tax Refund Return (M1PR) Instructions
2
Minnesota Department of Revenue. Create a Certificate of Rent Paid (CRP)
3
Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code 290A.19 – Park Owner To Furnish Rent Certificate
4
Minnesota Department of Revenue. Certificate of Rent Paid (CRP) Instructions
5
Minnesota Department of Revenue. Filing for a Property Tax Refund
6
Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Statutes 290A.04 – Refund Allowable
7
Minnesota Department of Revenue. What Renters Should Know about their Certificate of Rent Paid
8
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 525 (2025), Taxable and Nontaxable Income
9
Internal Revenue Service. IRS Issues Guidance on State Tax Payments