Polish property tax will be almost 12% higher this year than a year earlier

Property tax in 2023 will be almost 12% higher for millions of Poles than a year earlier, Business Insider Polska reported. Municipalities are sending out notices on the matter to their residents, and while local governments are not required to apply maximum rates, the portal believes they will take the opportunity to shore up their budgets thanks to the tax.

The Law on Local Fees stipulates that their maximum rates are indexed based on the average increase in prices in the first half of the previous year. Thus, in this case, the key factor was the rate for the period from January to June 2022, it indicated.

And this one was at a record high of 11.8%. Prices haven't rushed so fast on a half-year basis since 1998 (then it was 13.5%), which means that this year's property tax increase is the largest in a quarter of a century. Usually, the increases were symbolic and amounted to a few percent at most, and there hasn't been a cap increase of more than 4.2% since 2001. Now, however, everything has been changed by significantly increased inflation, it was announced.

The portal stresses that all the time we are talking about maximum rates, set top-down for the whole of Poland by the government. It is the local government that later decides what rate it will apply in its area. So it may not increase the property tax at all, but practice shows otherwise.

In 2022, almost all large provincial cities applied the maximum possible rate, and this is how it has been for years. There are exceptions, of course, but these are few. Last year, Kielce, Gorzów Wielkopolski and Opole, among others, brought relief to their residents," according to an official statement.

In the worst position are the residents of: Warsaw, Wroclaw, Lodz, Poznan, Gdansk, Szczecin, Bydgoszcz, Bialystok or Olsztyn. These cities have decided to use all the maximum rates approved by the Finance Ministry for 2023. On the other hand, Kielce, Gorzow Wielkopolski, Zielona Gora and Opole are once again cities where rates have been set slightly below the upper limit, according to the Business Insider.

Property tax revenues are a very important part of municipal budgets - they account for more than 15% of all revenues, although at the beginning of the century one in four zlotys flowing into the municipal coffers came from this tax, the article concluded.

Source: ISBnews