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The Daily Insight

Can you depreciate rental property in a trust?

Author

Michael Gray

Updated on March 31, 2026

You can only depreciate the cost of the building and not the land, you must determine the value of each to depreciate the correct amount. To determine the value, you can use the fair market value of each separately at the time the trust acquired the property.

Can you rent out a house in an irrevocable trust?

Since family members or trust beneficiaries cannot use trust-owned property as a personal asset and live in trust rental property rent-free, they also cannot be involved in rent collection. Family members or trust beneficiaries cannot assume the trustee’s duty in this regard.

Can a trust pass through a rental loss?

Your trust can offset capital gains and up to $3,000 of standard income with capital losses. Any losses in excess may be pushed forward and used in future tax years. However, they may not pass through to the beneficiaries prior to the year that the trust concludes.

Can a trust deduct rental losses?

For federal income tax purposes, rental real estate losses are usually treated as passive activity losses (PALs). According to the general rule, individual taxpayers and trusts can only deduct PALs to the extent they have passive income from other sources.

What happens to passive losses in a trust?

If an estate or trust distributes a passive activity to a beneficiary, the suspended losses attributable to the activity are not deductible at such time. Rather, they must be added to the basis of the activity |IRC Sec. Therefore, the beneficiary will never be able to deduct those losses as such.

What happens if a simple trust does not distribute income?

If you are the beneficiary of a simple trust, you pay tax on its income each year, whether or not you receive it. Usually, though, you will receive the income, if not during the year, then after it ends. That doesn’t distribute amounts allocated to the corpus of the trust.

Is trust income passive income?

In the case of a grantor trust, to the extent that the grantor or beneficiary is treated as the owner for tax purposes…the material participation of the person treated as the owner is relevant to the determination of whether income or loss from an activity owned through the grantor trust is treated as passive in the …