CO2 costs for rental apartments: How to pay for heating!

CO2 costs for rental apartments: How to pay for heating!

The federal government's climate packing aims to combat global warming by providing heating with fossil fuels such as gas and oil with a CO2 price. This measure is intended to create incentives to promote more environmentally friendly heating technologies and renovations. Since 2023, the CO2 costs for rental apartments that are heated with oil or gas have to be divided between tenants and landlords, which ensures many new challenges.

Christian Handwerk, an energy expert at the Consumer Center North Rhine-Westphalia, emphasizes that landlords can be charged in the case of floor heating: a share of the CO2 costs can be invoiced inside. Especially in the case of central heating, it is advisable to check the billing carefully to ensure that the costs have been recorded correctly.

Details for the distribution of costs

The CO2 costs apply to all rental apartments that are heated with heating oil, natural gas or district heating, but not for apartments with only two parties if the landlord lives in one of the apartments himself. Individual agreements can be made here. An important aspect is the billing period, which must match the heating cost bill. The right to the cost of costs is only if the billing period started on or after January 1, 2023.

In order to correctly calculate the costs, different information is necessary. This includes the greenhouse gas emissions of energy delivery and the total CO2 costs. The energy suppliers must identify this information on their bills. In addition, tenants need: inside the living space that can be found in the rental agreement or can be measured itself.

tenants with their own floor heating can carry out the calculation of your CO2 cost shares based on your fuel invoices. The total CO2 costs for the billing period must be passed on to the living space in order to determine the individual share per square meter. Even in central heating, landlords are obliged to calculate the shares correctly and to return the tenant: to return their share inside.

special cases and legal framework conditions

In special cases, the cost calculation can be different. If natural gas is not only used for heating, but also for cooking, the landlord's share of costs should be reduced by five percent. There are also regulations for buildings with monument protection that make energy improvements more difficult - here the landlord's share can even be reduced to half. If both monument protection and municipal usage obligations exist for district heating, the landlord cannot be involved in the CO2 costs.

If the cost calculation is not correct, landlords are obliged to show the proportion of CO2 costs in the heating cost settlement and to deduct them accordingly. If this does not happen, tenants can shorten the heating costs by three percent inside. Numerous resources are available for further information that provides a detailed overview of the CO2 costs and their calculation.

Further information on the calculation of the CO2 price when heating can be found here .