Most rent on Rentor falls due every month. Student housing usually does not: a hostel charges per semester, or in three-month blocks, collected up front. This page is how that works.

Nothing here changes a monthly tenancy. If you never turn on hostel billing, your rent is invoiced exactly as it always has been.

The three cycles

On a property's Hostel tab you pick one:

• Monthly — the ordinary clock. Rent falls due every month.
• By term — one bill per semester or term, on dates you set.
• Every few months — one bill every 3, 4, 6 or 12 months, counted from the tenant's start date. No calendar to maintain.

Terms are yours to define

JKUAT runs a September–August year. KCA runs January–April trimesters. Kabarak runs a fifteen-week May semester. There is no national academic calendar, so Rentor asks for yours: a name, a start date, an end date, and the day of the starting month the rent falls due.

Two rules the form enforces:

• Terms may not overlap.
• Two terms may not start in the same month.

The second one is not fussiness. A month can carry one term's bill, so two terms opening in the same month would leave one of them unbilled and a student never asked to pay. Rentor refuses the second term at the door rather than letting that happen quietly.

What a term invoice looks like

One invoice per term, not one per month. It says the term's name — Semester 1 2026/27 — rather than the month it happens to start in.

It is issued thirty days before the term starts. A three-day warning is fine for a KES 8,000 monthly rent and no warning at all for a KES 90,000 semester, so the bill exists in good time and the reminders start a month out. If you have set your own reminder schedule under Reminders & Alerts, Rentor uses yours and does not add to it.

Letting a student pay in halves

HELB arrives late, and in tranches. A term bill can carry an instalment schedule: the invoice stays one debt with one balance, but with several due dates. Rentor chases the next unpaid instalment rather than demanding the whole semester at the first date, and the student's Payments screen shows which instalment is next.

A part payment reduces the balance exactly as it always has. Nothing about paying rent changes.

Between terms

Students go home over the long vacation. Decide once, on the Hostel tab, what happens to the bed:

• Nothing is billed and the bed is released.
• A holding fee reserves the bed for next term. One fee for the whole gap — not per month of it.
• Billed as normal, month by month.

What you will see on your dashboard

A term bill covers several months, so Rentor spreads it wherever a monthly view is the honest one:

• Expected and collected this month show one month's share of the term, not the whole thing. Without that, a term-billed property would read KES 0 for eleven months and then spike.
• Your KRA rental income statement does the same, because monthly rental income tax is monthly by law regardless of when you collected it.
• A student's trust score counts a paid semester as the months it covered, so paying by term neither builds nor loses trust faster than paying monthly.

Ending a tenancy

Unchanged, with one thing worth knowing: the deposit becomes a refund you owe the moment the tenancy ends — whether you ended it yourself or the notice period simply ran out. Hostels empty by the calendar, so that happens to a lot of beds at once.