The Department for Work and Pensions has made S.I. 2026/753, the Housing Benefit (Earned Income Disregards) (Amendment) Regulations 2026. According to the instrument on legislation.gov.uk, the change takes effect on 5 October 2026 and increases the amount of earnings that can be ignored when Housing Benefit is calculated for certain working-age claimants living in specified accommodation or temporary accommodation. The Regulations were made and laid before Parliament on 6 July 2026 and were signed by Stephen Timms, Minister of State at the Department for Work and Pensions. They extend to England and Wales and Scotland, and they sit within the Housing Benefit scheme rather than altering the main Universal Credit rules.
The legal amendment is narrow but important for administration. The instrument changes the Housing Benefit Regulations 2006 by updating regulation 36 on employed earners and regulation 38 on self-employed earners, so that a new paragraph 18 in Schedule 4 is included when net earnings or net profit are worked out. In practical terms, that means the additional disregard applies to both employment and self-employment. The drafting also imports the definitions of specified accommodation and temporary accommodation from Schedule 1 to the Universal Credit Regulations 2013, which keeps the housing categories consistent across the wider welfare rule set.
The new paragraph 18 inserts fixed disregard amounts for claimants who are in remunerative work and living in one of those accommodation types. The amounts are £61.41 for a single claimant under 25, £77.73 for a single claimant aged 25 or over, £97.33 for a member of a couple where both are under 18, £61.53 for a member of a couple where both are under 25, and £119.70 for a member of a couple where at least one has reached 25. Those figures matter because an earnings disregard is the part of income left out of the benefit calculation. A larger disregard reduces the earnings counted by the local authority and can therefore preserve entitlement or slow the rate at which entitlement falls as earnings rise.
For claimants, the effect is straightforward even if the drafting is technical. Working-age residents of specified accommodation or temporary accommodation who take up work, increase hours or move into self-employment may keep more Housing Benefit than they would have done under the previous disregard structure. That is likely to be most relevant where rent liability is high or unstable, including temporary placements and supported housing settings. In policy terms, the measure sits within one of the remaining areas where working-age Housing Benefit continues to operate alongside Universal Credit.
The scope of the change is clearly limited. The Explanatory Note states that the amendments apply to working-age Housing Benefit only, and there is no parallel amendment to the Housing Benefit rules for people who have reached the qualifying age for state pension credit. That means pension-age claimants are outside this instrument, and the Regulations should not be read as a general rewrite of Housing Benefit. They make a targeted adjustment to earned income disregards for a defined part of the caseload.
The procedural record points to a technical welfare amendment rather than a wider policy reset. The instrument was made under powers in the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, states that the Social Security Advisory Committee agreed the proposals did not need to be referred to it, and records that the Secretary of State consulted organisations considered representative of the authorities concerned. According to the Explanatory Note, no full impact assessment has been produced because no significant effect on the private sector, voluntary sector or community bodies is expected. The main implementation task before 5 October 2026 will therefore fall on councils, software suppliers and advisers, who will need assessment systems and claimant guidance to reflect the new disregard amounts from the first day the Regulations are in force.