600,000 homeowners still haven’t paid the household charge

Have you paid the €100 household charge yet? 600,000 Irish homeowners still haven't paid up.

At the beginning of last month many of you would have received an angry letter in the door telling you to pay the household charge, or else you could face paying a penalty. Surprisingly, less than 40,000 of the 103,000 people who received one of these ‘final notice’ letters paid up. The other 63,000 have some cojones…

If you haven’t paid up you might be thinking, “sure what can they do? Send another angry letter?” Well, that’s exactly what they’ll do, but if you still decide to ignore their calls for the €100 household charge then you could be facing court proceedings – which is probably the last thing anyone wants.

If you’re brought to court then you could face fines of up to €2,500 and an extra €100 charge per day will be added if you still refuse to pay the charge after a conviction is made.

So far, almost 990,000 homeowners have forked over the €100 charge so the total amount that has been collected from the household charge currently stands at €99.8m.

So why are 600,000 homeowners still not paying if almost 990,000 have already forked over the cash? Seems like a loosing battle really…