The flat in Ukraine: renting it, selling it, or just keeping it safe

Two very different people arrive at this question. One left a flat they lived in and cannot get back to. The other has inherited something they have never seen, in a town they could not find on a map. The mechanics turn out to be nearly identical, because both come down to the same problem: almost everything that matters legally happens in front of a Ukrainian notary, in person.

This guide explains the shape of it. It is not legal, tax, or investment advice — a Ukrainian notary and a tax adviser are the right people for your case, and property is a subject where one detail changes the answer.

The mechanism: you do not have to be there, but someone does

A sale, and most registry actions, need a notary and a physical person in front of them. When that person cannot be you, it is a representative acting on a notarially certified power of attorney — either certified at a Ukrainian consulate, or by a local notary and then apostilled or legalised and translated.

Two things about that document decide how the whole thing goes:

• Scope. A power of attorney lets your representative do what it says and nothing else. “Sell the apartment” and “sign the sale contract, receive the money, and file the registration” are not the same instruction. Drafting is the notary’s job, and worth their time.
• Who you give it to. This is the real decision. You are handing someone the ability to dispose of an asset while you are a time zone away. Whatever it costs to involve a lawyer as well as a relative, it costs less than the alternative.

Our guide on signing a power of attorney from abroad covers making one that will actually be accepted.

First, check what the register says about you

Everything downstream depends on what the State Register of Property Rights to Immovable Property records, and people abroad are routinely surprised by it. You can pull the information yourself through Дія with a qualified electronic signature (there is a small administrative fee, and the service goes offline now and then); a notary or any ЦНАП can pull the same thing for you. Three things to look for:

• Is the right registered at all? The electronic register dates from 2013. A flat bought, privatised or inherited earlier may exist only in the paper records of the old БТІ. The right is valid, but it will have to be entered in the electronic register as part of any transaction — ask the notary about this before a buyer is waiting.
• Is the owner’s name spelt the way your passport now spells it? A register entry from the 1990s and a 2020s passport can disagree on a single letter, and that letter is a week.
• Are there encumbrances — a mortgage, a seizure, a ban on alienation — that you do not know about? The same extract shows them.

If you inherited it, that comes first

You cannot sell, rent, or register what is not yet yours. Inheritance has its own six-month clock, and until that process has run, decisions about the property itself are premature. People occasionally try to arrange a sale before accepting the inheritance and discover they have spent months on the wrong step.

Renting it out

The appeal is obvious: the flat stops being a pure cost and someone is in it keeping an eye on things. What people underestimate is that a tenanted property abroad is a small ongoing responsibility — someone has to handle the utilities, the building, the repairs, the tenant. It needs a person on the ground you trust, and usually a paid one, not a favour from a cousin.

The tax side has a rule written specifically for people in your position, and almost nobody knows it. Under Tax Code art. 170.1.3, a non-resident individual may let out Ukrainian real estate only through a Ukrainian sole trader (ФОП) or company acting as their representative and tax agent under a written contract — a non-resident who lets directly “is deemed to be evading tax”. Whether you are a non-resident is the tax-residency question in tax in two countries, and for someone settled abroad the answer is often yes. Residents, for their part, pay personal income tax (18%) plus the military levy (5%) on rent, withheld by the tenant if the tenant is a business, or declared annually if the tenant is a private person. Either way the income very possibly needs declaring where you live too.

Just keeping it

A perfectly reasonable choice, and the most common one. What it still requires:

• Someone who can get in. A flat nobody has entered in two years is how a burst pipe becomes a structural problem.
• The bills paid. Utilities and building charges do not pause because the owner left, and arrears attach to the property.
• Your ownership documents findable. If the paperwork exists only in a drawer in Kyiv, that is a problem waiting for a moment when you cannot travel.

Selling

The thing to understand early is that the money does not automatically follow you. Getting sale proceeds out of Ukraine and into an account where you live is a separate question governed by currency rules that change, and it is worth asking a Ukrainian bank before agreeing a sale rather than after. A sale that completes into an account you cannot use is not a completed sale. See moving money out of Ukraine legally.

The questions worth putting to the notary, to both banks and to your representative before you name a price are collected in before you agree a price — a sheet you can print with room to write the answers in.

The tax on the sale is computed and collected by the notary at signing, and the rules are in Tax Code art. 172:

• The first sale in a calendar year of a house, flat, room or dacha that you have owned for more than three years is not taxed — and the three-year condition does not apply to inherited property, which is the case for half the people reading this.
• A second sale in the same year is taxed at 5%; a third and beyond at 18% (except, again, inherited property).
• For non-residents (art. 172.9) the taxable cases are taxed at 18% instead of 5%. Whether the first-sale exemption applies to you is precisely the question to put to the notary before agreeing a price — not after.
• The military levy (5%) applies on top wherever the sale is taxable.

A notary will also want an appraisal and your tax number; a buyer will want the register entry in order (see above). Sort those before the buyer appears, because a “quick sale” that stalls on paperwork tends to lose its buyer.

The question underneath all of it

Most people asking about the flat are not really asking a property question. They are asking whether they are going back.

That is allowed to be unresolved. But it is worth noticing which decision you are actually making, because “keep it for now” is a real choice with real costs, and it is much better made deliberately than by default for six years.

Where to check

A Ukrainian notary is the authority on what a given transaction requires, and the tax service on what it costs. Free legal aid can help where the case is not standard — see where to look. If something here has gone out of date, tell us.