Definition
1. (Historical, English law) A written record — specifically a roll or register — listing the rents owed from a manor or estate, including the names of tenants, descriptions of the land let, and terms of tenancy. Functionally equivalent to a rent-roll, from which the term is said to derive by corruption. Used by a lord's bailiff as the operative document for collecting rents.
2. (Modern general usage) The payment made in exchange for the temporary use of property — real, personal, or intellectual — under a lease or hire arrangement. Also used to describe the property itself that is subject to such an arrangement, or the aggregate income stream generated by leasing activity.
3. (Tax and accounting usage) The gross income attributable to leased or licensed property, as distinguished from royalties, interest, or other forms of passive income. The characterization of payments as "rental income" carries specific consequences for deductibility, depreciation, and passive activity rules.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Something that is rented; the payment made to rent something; a business that rents out something to its customers; an act of renting.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A schedule, account, or list of rents with the names of the tenants; a sum total of rents, as in an estate that yields a rental of ten thousand dollars a year.
The gap matters: In historical legal sources, "rental" is almost exclusively a document — the rent-roll — not the payment itself. Modern usage has entirely displaced this meaning in most legal contexts, leaving the documentary sense stranded in pre-20th century materials. A researcher encountering "rental" in an English manorial record or early American property document should not assume it refers to a payment amount; it likely refers to the register itself.
Common Confusion
RENTAL vs. RENT: In modern usage these terms are often treated as interchangeable, but the distinction retains relevance in historical sources and in some statutory contexts. "Rent" is the legal obligation — the periodic payment owed as consideration for possession. "Rental" historically denoted the record of those obligations, and in modern usage may refer to the payment, the property, or the total income stream depending on context. Tax statutes and regulations tend to use "rental income" as a category label rather than as a precise substitute for "rent."
RENTAL vs. ROYALTY: In tax and licensing contexts, the line between rental income and royalty income is legally significant and frequently litigated. Royalties are typically paid for the use of intellectual property or natural resources extracted; rentals are paid for the use of tangible property. The distinction affects characterization under the Internal Revenue Code, passive activity loss rules, and treaty provisions in international contexts.
Why It Matters in Research
The historical and modern meanings of this term operate in almost completely separate registers, which creates real traps for researchers working across time periods.
In pre-20th century sources — English manorial records, early American conveyancing materials, and equity cases involving estates — "rental" almost always means the rent-roll document, not a payment. Bouvier explicitly equates it with rent-roll and treats the payment meaning as derivative. A researcher reading an estate inventory or a chancery bill that references "the rental of the estate" should understand this as a reference to the schedule of tenants and obligations, not simply a dollar figure.
In modern legal research, the payment and income meanings dominate entirely. The documentary meaning has effectively disappeared from American legal usage. This creates an asymmetry: historical dictionaries are reliable guides to the older meaning but offer little help with the modern tax and transactional sense; modern sources ignore the historical meaning altogether.
For tax research specifically, the classification of income as "rental" rather than some other category (royalty, interest, ordinary income) is a threshold question with downstream consequences for deductibility of expenses, depreciation treatment, net investment income tax exposure, and passive activity rules. The Law Mind Tax Encyclopedia entry on Gross Income — Rental Income and Expenses addresses this classification problem directly and is the natural next stop for researchers working in that context.
Jurisdictional variation is limited for the core concept but real in regulatory and tax contexts. State property tax regimes, commercial landlord-tenant statutes, and short-term rental ordinances all use "rental" in ways that may diverge from federal tax definitions.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement, which is itself informative: all four treat "rental" primarily as a documentary term derived from "rent-roll," and three of the four (Black's 1st, Black's 2nd, and Burrill's) reproduce nearly identical language tracing to Cunningham and Holthouse. This convergence suggests the dictionaries are largely copying a single source tradition rather than independently verifying the definition — a pattern worth noting when evaluating their authority.
Bouvier adds a practical gloss, noting that "rental" is "commonly used as synonymous with rent," which suggests that even by the time Bouvier was writing, the payment meaning was in circulation alongside the documentary one. This makes Bouvier the most useful of the four for tracing the semantic transition.
Burrill includes an incidental note — "RENTS, in a devise, will pass land itself" — which is appended to the rental entry but addresses a distinct rule of construction for devises. This is an artifact of the roll format of historical dictionaries and should not be read as part of the definition of "rental."
None of the four historical dictionaries address the modern tax or transactional meaning, which had not yet developed into its current form at the time of their composition.
Jurisdictional Note
Federal tax law (Internal Revenue Code) uses "rental income" as a defined category with specific consequences under passive activity, net investment income, and international provisions. State law definitions — particularly in landlord-tenant statutes, short-term rental regulations, and property tax assessments — may use "rental" more broadly or narrowly than federal definitions. Researchers should not assume federal tax characterizations carry over to state law contexts, or vice versa.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Gross Income — Rental Income and Expenses (The Law Mind Tax Encyclopedia)