There are 52 weeks in a year, everybody knows that. Right?

Wrong. There are actually 52.14 weeks in a year; 52 weeks and one day. Unless of course it is a leap year, like 2024, when the extra day means there are 52.28 weeks in a year.

Most of the time, nobody minds the custom of rounding down to 52. But it turns out, when it comes to how the government calculates benefit entitlements, we really should.

Out of time

To explain, we need to dive into the deepest crevices of the benefits system.

There are always 12 months in a year. There is no need for a decimal point, because months vary in length to fit the 365 day calendar, and we add a day to February every 4 years to stop the calendar getting out of sync with the universe.

Universal Credit is a monthly benefit, so if you’re eligible for housing cost support, ordinarily your Universal Credit payments would cover the cost of your monthly rent payments (in practice: the portion of your rent costs that you are eligible for help with). 12 benefit payments for 12 rent payments.

What if you pay your rent on a weekly basis, like most people in social housing?

Remember that Housing Benefit — one of Universal Credit’s predecessors — was a weekly benefit. It didn’t matter how many weeks there were in a year, you were simply paid Housing Benefit for every week that your rent was due. Housing Benefit is no longer available to new claimants, and most existing claimants will be transferred to Universal Credit this year.

The mismatch between monthly benefits and weekly rent requires an annualisation calculation. The Universal Credit system works out the amount of rent due each year by multiplying your weekly rent amount by 52. It then divides this annualised figure by 12 to make monthly payments.

I don’t like 53 Mondays

As a matter of principle, this leaves claimants who pay rent each week 0.14 or 0.28 weeks short, every year.

But this rarely makes any material difference. There may be slightly more than 52 weeks a year, but you only pay rent 52 times. Perhaps this is just one of the unavoidable anomalies, almost comical, that arises because life — and the space-time continuum — is infinitely more complex than any benefit system can capture.

Except sometimes it does make a material difference. Because every few years you will pay rent 53 times, not 52 times. (1 extra day would mean this is every 7 years, but it’s more often because of leap years.)

Grace* is in social housing and has her weekly rent paid directly via Universal Credit every Monday. She recently received a letter from her landlord to let her know that she needs to pay an extra week of rent this year. Grace didn’t understand why and assumed that she had somehow built up rent arrears that needed paying back. This caused a lot of confusion and distress. Grace could try to apply for a Discretionary Housing Payment to cover the extra week of rent. However, she has applied and been rejected previously, so she doesn’t want to go through the process again. This puts her in a difficult position — she’s already struggling financially and doesn’t know how she can afford the extra rent payment.

Just as monthly rent payments are typically due on the 1st of every month, weekly rent payments are typically due every Monday. In the financial year 2024/25 — as a direct result of the calendar year 2024 being a leap year — there will be 53 Mondays.

But you will only receive housing cost support for 52 rent payments: (rent × 52) ÷ 12 = less than a year’s actual rent costs. When the 53rd Monday rolls around on 31st March 2025, there will be nothing left.

Monthly benefit payments never align with weekly rent payments, since the number of Mondays each month varies between 4 and 5. But the deficits and surpluses usually balance out.

In contrast, the deficit created by the 53rd Monday never clears by itself. The Universal Credit system’s ignorance of the temporal reality of human life — words you probably never expected to find in a Citizens Advice blog! — means that rent arrears build up.

Marta* lives with her son in a housing association property, paying rent weekly on Saturdays. In the last financial year her landlord told her that she would need to pay an extra week of rent, because there would be 53 Saturdays. This was very difficult for Marta, as she was already paying extra rent each month to try and clear her historical rent arrears. When she talked with her landlord about this they threatened to evict her.

And it’s not only individual claimants who experience the consequences. Local authority budgets are hit when their tenants go into rent arrears, and/or demand for discretionary housing payments (to prevent evictions) rises.

Best intentions

Is this what the government intended when it decided that a Universal Credit year should be shorter than everybody else’s? Possibly, yes: Universal Credit was conceived during a period of severe austerity, when policy-makers were looking to cut spending in imaginative ways.

But this was probably not the case. The expectation would have been that rent schedules would eventually come to align with benefit payments, so the mismatch disappears. But this has not happened, in part because it has taken so much longer than expected to implement Universal Credit.

Hardship is the inevitable consequence. It’s also clearly unfair, with claimants paying rent weekly receiving less housing cost support than those paying rent monthly. For no good reason. It’s about time Universal Credit operated in the same timezone as the rest of us.

*Names have been changed.

This post is co-authored by Craig Berry and Victoria Anns