Pension age claims
If you, or your partner, are of state pension age your Housing Benefit and Council Tax Support will be backdated up to 3 months before the date you claimed.
If you are only qualify for benefit for part of the 3 months, we can only pay you for the period you are eligible.
We will do this automatically, but we cannot go back further than 3 months, if you are a pensioner.
Working age claims
If you, and your partner if you have one, are of working age we will normally pay your benefit from the Monday after we receive your claim.
In some cases Housing Benefit can be backdated from before the date you claimed. The longest time we can consider backdated benefit is one month.
There is no provision to backdate claims for Council Tax Support for working age applicants.
To pay backdated Housing Benefit we need to know what prevented you from claiming earlier. We may consider paying backdated benefit if:
- you were ill
- you were in hospital
- you had a family crisis
- you were unavoidably away from home
- you thought you didn't need to claim - you will need to tell us why
- you were advised not to claim - you will need to tell us who advised you
- you thought you were not allowed to claim, or would not get benefit - you will need to tell us why you thought this
- you didn't understand you could claim, perhaps because of your age, your lack of experience of the benefits system, difficulties with language or understanding documents - you will need to tell us what and how this affected you.
You can ask for backdated Housing Benefit when you make your claim. If you wish to ask for your benefit to be backdated after you have applied contact us by email stating the date you wish to claim from and provide as much information as you can to help us to consider your application.