Current treatments for renal cell carcinoma have a high complication rate due to the invasiveness of the treatment. With the MRI-linac it may be possible to treat renal tumours non-invasively with high-precision radiotherapy. This is expected to reduce complications. To deliver a static dose distribution, radiation gating will be used. In this study the reproducibility and efficiency of free breathing gating and a breath hold treatment of the kidney was investigated. For 15 patients with a renal lesion the kidney motion during 2 min of free breathing and 10 consecutive expiration breath holds was studied with 2D cine MRI. The variability in kidney expiration position and treatment efficiency for gating windows of 1 to 20 mm was measured for both breathing patterns. Additionally the time trend in free breathing and the variation in expiration breath hold kidney position with baseline shift correction was determined. In 80% of the patients the variation in expiration position during free breathing is smaller than 2 mm. No clinically relevant time trends were detected. The variation in expiration breath hold is for all patients larger than the free breathing expiration variation. Gating on free breathing is, for gating windows of 1 to 5 mm more efficient than breath hold without baseline correction. When applying a baseline correction to the breath hold it increases the treatment efficiency. The kidney position is more reproducible in expiration free breathing than non-guided expiration breath hold. For small gating windows it is also more time efficient. Since free breathing also seems more comfortable for the patients it is the preferred breathing pattern for MRI-Linac treatments of the kidney.