Ministerial housing allowance
Every housing dollar you cannot document is a dollar you pay tax on.
MHA Tracker is a ministerial housing allowance (MHA) app for pastors and ministers. Log expenses, keep the receipts with them, and see all year whether you are on pace to use what your board designated.
Free plan, no card needed. Takes two minutes.
2026 board designation
Sample accountExpenses and receipts together
Categorize as you go, and attach the receipt to each one. No scattered photo folders.
Nothing to reconstruct in April
Records made as life happens, not dug up months later when the details have faded.
Answers from IRS Publication 517
Plain-English rules, with every source cited.
Built for ministry leaders
Not a generic expense tracker: pastoral pay, parsonages, and fair rental value are the whole subject.
What it looks like once you are in
Real screens from the app, filled in with a sample account. Every payee, date, and amount is invented, and the receipts attached to them are the same sample documents shown just below.
Know where you stand today
The usage bar shows how much of the allowance your board designated has actually been spent, with what is left, your monthly pace, and where the money is going. The lighter run is what your usual monthly costs still expect before December, so you can see where the year is heading without it counting as money spent.
New here? Read the three-minute getting started guide.
What a supporting document looks like
Bills, statements, and store receipts that show who you paid, when, how much, and what for. Photograph one with your phone or upload the PDF, and it stays attached to the expense.
See these documents laid out with notes on what each one proves.
Not sure what to keep? Print the free housing allowance expense checklist, try the housing allowance calculator, or read the housing allowance DOs and DON'Ts.
Why it matters
Why the paperwork is the whole game
For most pastors the ministerial housing allowance is the single largest tax benefit they receive, and it depends entirely on numbers set in advance and expenses you can actually show. Three things decide how much of it you keep.
Next year's number is set in advance
Your church designates the amount before the year begins, and it can never be applied backward. A year of real expense data turns that guess into a number you can stand behind.
How the designation worksUnspent allowance becomes taxable
Anything designated but not spent on your home is taxable income at year end. Knowing where you stand in September leaves time to act. April does not.
What happens to unspent allowanceThe records are yours to keep
The exclusion covers what you actually spent, and the burden of proof sits with you. Receipts saved as you go are ordinary bookkeeping. Receipts reconstructed years later are a bad weekend.
What records to keep
The full explanation, with every source cited, is in the housing allowance guide.
Before and after
The difference between a bad weekend and quiet order
Tracking it the usual way
- Receipts spread across a photo roll, a drawer, a shoe box, and email folders
- Next year's designation is a guess built on last year's guess
- No idea whether you are on pace until the year is already over
- Hours of reconstruction every spring, usually at the worst time
- Nothing organized to hand your board or your tax preparer
Tracking it with MHA Tracker
- Every expense in one place, on your phone, tablet, or computer
- A running total that shows exactly where you stand today
- Next year's number built from what you actually spent
- Receipts attached as you go, and flagged when one is missing
- A designation worksheet, filled in and ready for your board
- Year-end reports and a receipt archive your tax preparer can use
What it does for you all year
Know where you stand
A live usage bar shows how much of your designated allowance you've used. Spot a gap mid-year and your board can still amend the designation for the months ahead, rather than finding out at tax time when the number is already settled.
Snap it, AI files it
Photograph a stack of receipts and let AI read the dates, amounts, and payees, ready to review and add in one tap. The record gets made in seconds, which is why it actually gets made.
Year after year
Track each year's designation and running total, and flip between years anytime. The same records matter in retirement, when distributions from a church-sponsored retirement account can be designated as housing allowance too.
Designate with confidence
Reports and a designation estimator turn your real spending into next year's housing allowance number, plus a plain-English FAQ built from IRS Publication 517.
Three steps, then it runs itself
By year end you have organized records for your tax preparer, and real numbers to set next year's designation with confidence.
No card required. Takes about a minute.
- 1
Create your account.
Free, and no card required. It takes about a minute.
- 2
Enter this year's designated amount.
That is the housing allowance figure your church board approved for the year. Not sure what yours is? Read how a housing allowance gets designated.
- 3
Add expenses as you go.
Snap the receipt, pick a category, done. Your running total updates right away.
Pastors don't stop tracking because they don't care. They stop because typing in receipts gets old.
Paul McWilliams, CKA
Founder's note
Built by a pastor's kid who became the advisor his parents needed.
I grew up as a pastor's kid. I watched my parents carry the paperwork side of ministry: the shoe box of receipts, the rules nobody explained, and the worry every spring that something important was missing.
I have spent more than 12 years advising pastors, churches, and ministry organizations, and the problem I kept seeing was never a lack of care. It was the weight of keeping the records year after year. MHA Tracker exists to make that part light enough that it actually gets done.
Paul McWilliams, CKA
Founder, MHA Tracker. Certified Kingdom Advisor®.
Simple pricing
Steward is genuinely free and genuinely useful. It keeps everything on the device you are using, which is private, and also fragile: clear your browser or lose the phone and the records go with it. Steward+ is for when those records are worth more than that.
Steward
Free forever$0
Your records stay on your device.
- Full expense tracker with categories & filters
- Dashboard with allowance usage bar
- Receipts saved on your device
- Printable year-end reports (PDF, CSV, receipts ZIP)
- Multi-year history, with each year's designation
- Designation estimator built from your real spending
- Board-ready designation worksheet, filled in for you
- Housing allowance FAQ
- Records stay private on your own device
Worth knowing: because we keep no copy, we cannot recover free records. On iPhone and iPad, Safari also deletes a site's saved data after about a week without a visit, so add MHA Tracker to your Home Screen (we show you how) or export a CSV now and then.
Start tracking freeSteward+
$70 / year
That works out to $5.83 a month, and paying for the year saves you three months.
Organized records your tax preparer can use, kept in the cloud and with you on every device.
- Everything in Steward, plus:
- AI receipt scanning: snap a stack, it reads & files them
- Secure cloud storage: receipts safe if your device isn't
- Sync across phone, tablet & computer
Create your account first, then checkout. Cancel anytime.
Housing allowance records are worth keeping for years, which is a long time to trust a single device. And the scanning is the part that matters most day to day: the reason pastors stop tracking is almost never that they stopped caring, it is that typing in receipts got old. Photograph them instead and the habit survives.
Exclude even a few hundred dollars you would otherwise have missed, and the year has paid for itself.