Travis Bunn
Founder, AppealDesk · Published March 1, 2026
How Much Can Property Taxes Increase in Vermont? 2026 Complete Guide
Updated July 2026
Quick Answer
Vermont caps nothing. There is no limit on how much your listed value can rise, and there is no percentage levy cap in state law. Instead, most of your bill is a statewide education property tax, and the rate that applies to your town is adjusted every year by a state-computed factor called the Common Level of Appraisal. Three things drive what actually happens to your bill:
- Your listed value, set by your town listers at fair market value, with no annual cap and no automatic annual update.
- The education tax rate for your town, set as a homestead rate and a nonhomestead rate and then divided by your town's Common Level of Appraisal.
- Income sensitivity, which is Vermont's real homeowner protection and is based on household income, not on how long you have owned the house.
If you think your listed value is too high, the fix is the grievance process with your town listers, and the deadline is set by your town, not by a single statewide date.
Most homeowners never challenge their assessment, usually because nobody tells them they can or shows them how. That gap is the whole reason AppealDesk exists: see what your county has your home on record at, free, and if the number looks wrong we build the case for $49.
Do Property Taxes Go Up Every Year in Vermont?
Bills can go up every year, but the reason is usually not that somebody revalued your house. Vermont towns do not reappraise annually. Historically many towns went a decade or more between full reappraisals, and until recently the state relied on a trigger system rather than a fixed schedule. So in a typical year your listed value on the grand list sits exactly where it sat last year, and your bill still moves.
What moves is the rate. Vermont funds schools primarily through a statewide education property tax created by Act 60 of 1997 and reshaped by Act 68 of 2003. Every town has two education rates, a homestead rate for Vermont residents' primary homes and a nonhomestead rate for everything else, including second homes, rentals, and commercial property. Those rates are recalculated annually, and then each town's rates are adjusted by the Common Level of Appraisal to account for how far the town's listed values have drifted from current market value. That adjustment is where a flat assessment turns into a higher bill.
This is the opposite of how cap states work. In Florida or Texas, the assessment is throttled and the rate is comparatively visible. In Vermont, the assessment is uncapped but frequently stale, and the rate quietly absorbs the difference.
How Vermont's Education Property Tax Works: Homestead vs Nonhomestead Rates
The first thing to check on a Vermont tax bill is which rate you are being charged. If the property is your primary residence and you have filed a homestead declaration, you belong on the homestead rate. If you have not declared, the town has to treat the property as nonhomestead, which in most towns is the higher of the two. A missed declaration is one of the cheapest tax problems in Vermont to fix and one of the easiest to overlook, especially in the year after a purchase.
Under the current system, the homestead rate in a given town is tied to what voters in that town approved for school spending. Vote a larger school budget and the homestead rate rises. That link is why Vermont town meeting budget votes are, functionally, property tax votes. Act 73 of 2025 is designed to break that link, which is covered further down this page.
Rates in Vermont are expressed per $100 of listed value. If a town's adjusted homestead rate came out to $1.50 per $100, a home listed at $300,000 would owe $4,500 in education tax before any income-based credit, plus the municipal portion of the bill. Your town's actual rate will differ; the arithmetic is what matters here, because it shows how a rate change of even a few cents per $100 moves a bill by a meaningful amount.
What the Common Level of Appraisal (CLA) Does to Your Tax Rate
The Common Level of Appraisal is the mechanism most Vermont homeowners have heard of and few have had explained. The Vermont Department of Taxes runs an equalization study each year using three years of arm's-length sales, comparing what properties in a town actually sold for against what those properties were listed at on the grand list. The resulting ratio is the town's CLA.
If a town's listed values sit well below current market value, the CLA falls, and the town's education tax rates are divided by that lower CLA. Take the same $300,000 home and the same $1.50 per $100 rate. If the town's CLA is 0.80, meaning listed values are running about 20 percent under market, the applied rate becomes $1.875 per $100, and the bill on that unchanged $300,000 listing goes from $4,500 to $5,625. Nothing about the house changed. Nothing on the grand list changed. The state simply corrected for the gap between the town's books and the market.
This is the honest answer to why Vermont bills climb in years when the listers never touched your property, and it is also why the standard cap-state advice does not transfer here. There is no assessment ceiling protecting you, and there is no levy percentage limit to point at.
Caps and rate limits only control how fast your bill can grow. Nothing in them checks whether the number underneath is right. Assessors in Vermont set values with mass-appraisal models that price thousands of homes at once, and nobody reviews yours unless you challenge it.
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Town Reappraisals: The Six-Year Cycle Under Act 68 of 2023
Act 68 of 2023 changed the reappraisal picture statewide. Rather than leaving reappraisals to a trigger that let some towns drift for ten or twenty years, the law requires every Vermont municipality to complete a full reappraisal every six years. The cycle took effect January 1, 2025, and the first wave of municipalities must complete their reappraisals by April 1, 2027.
For homeowners, the year your town reappraises is the year to pay attention. A reappraisal after a long gap does not raise everyone's value evenly. It resets thousands of listings at once using mass-appraisal models, which means some properties land close to market and others land well above it. Homes with condition problems, awkward layouts, deferred maintenance, or site issues that a model cannot see are the ones that tend to come out high, because the model prices the neighborhood and the square footage, not your actual house.
The flip side is that a reappraisal usually pushes the town's CLA back toward 1.00, which pulls the CLA-driven rate inflation back out. Whether your own bill goes up or down depends entirely on how your new listed value compares to the town average, which is exactly the question a grievance is built to answer.
Why Vermont Property Taxes Went Up So Much in 2024
The defining recent event is Act 183 of 2024, the yield bill, which set the FY2025 education tax yields and produced an average property tax bill increase of roughly 13.8 percent statewide. It was enacted over Governor Scott's veto. The same act added a 3 percent surcharge on short-term rentals and repealed the sales tax exemption on remotely accessed software, directing that revenue to the Education Fund.
Two things follow from that. First, no assessment cap would have prevented it, because it was a rate event, not a valuation event. Second, it triggered the legislative response that is now rewriting the whole system. Here is the recent sequence, which is worth keeping straight because the news coverage runs them together.
| Law | Year | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| Act 68 | 2023 | Mandates a full town reappraisal every six years, effective January 1, 2025, first wave due April 1, 2027 |
| Act 183 (H.887) | 2024 | FY2025 yield bill, average bill increase near 13.8 percent, passed over veto |
| Act 24 (H.491) | 2025 | FY2026 annual property tax and yield bill setting that year's education rates |
| Act 73 (H.454) | 2025 | Education transformation: foundation formula, uniform statewide rate, income-qualified homestead exemption |
| H.955 and Act 170 | 2026 | Delays Act 73's foundation formula from July 1, 2028 to July 1, 2030 |
For FY2027, the Vermont Senate advanced a property tax bill in April 2026 carrying an average increase of roughly 3.8 percent. That figure reflects the bill as advanced, and final enactment terms should be confirmed against the Department of Taxes before you plan around it.
Act 73 of 2025: Foundation Formula, Statewide Rate, and the New Homestead Exemption
Act 73 of 2025 is the largest change to Vermont school funding since Act 60. It replaces locally voted school budgets as the driver of your homestead rate with a statewide foundation formula, built on a base of $15,033 per pupil, weighted and inflation-adjusted, and moves the state toward a uniform statewide education property tax rate rather than a different homestead rate in every town.
It also replaces the current income-based property tax credit with an income-qualified homestead exemption. That exemption is aimed at households with income below $115,000 and applies to housesite value up to $425,000. The structural point is that Vermont's homeowner protection remains income-tested. It is not a Proposition 13 style cap, it does not lock in a base year, and it is not lost when a property sells.
The timing has moved. Legislation in 2026 pushed the foundation formula's effective date from July 1, 2028 to July 1, 2030, which puts the real transition in the 2029 to 2030 window. Until then, the current system stands: locally voted school budgets, town-specific homestead and nonhomestead rates, CLA adjustment, and the existing property tax credit.
Vermont's Income-Based Property Tax Credit
Income sensitivity is the part of Vermont's system that genuinely protects homeowners, and it is central rather than marginal. Under the current rules, most resident homeowners can have their education property tax calculated against household income through the property tax credit, filed with the state alongside the homestead declaration. Miss the filing and you pay the full rate on your listed value.
It is worth being clear about what the credit does and does not do. It reduces what you pay against a given listed value. It does not correct a listed value that is wrong. If your house is on the grand list for more than it is worth, income sensitivity softens the consequence and leaves the error in place, and the error compounds every year the rate goes up. Eligibility rules and income thresholds change, so confirm the current year's terms with the Vermont Department of Taxes or your town clerk.
What you can do about it
How to Grieve Your Assessment in Vermont: Listers, BCA, and the State Appraiser
Vermont uses a grievance process rather than a single statewide appeal date, so the calendar depends on your town. After the listers lodge the grand list and send change-of-appraisal notices, homeowners must file a written grievance with the town listers on or before that town's grievance day. Hearings commonly fall between mid-May and early June, but dates vary, and the notice you receive is the authoritative one. Call the town clerk if you are unsure.
If the listers' decision does not resolve it, the next step is the Board of Civil Authority. You file a notice of appeal with the town clerk within 14 days of the listers' decision notice. That 14-day window is short and it is the step most people miss. The BCA holds a hearing and inspects the property, which means the condition issues that a mass-appraisal model could not see get seen by people who can walk the house. From there, a BCA decision can be appealed to the State Appraiser at Property Valuation and Review or to Superior Court.
What wins a grievance is evidence: comparable arm's-length sales that support a lower fair market value, documentation of condition or site problems, and corrections to the listers' physical record if the square footage, bedroom count, or finished basement on file does not match reality. Arguments about school spending, the CLA, or how much the bill went up do not move a grievance, because none of those are what the listers set.
A real AppealDesk order, Suffolk County, Massachusetts
In July 2026, a homeowner in Suffolk County, Massachusetts ran the check. The county had their home on record at $840,400, while recorded sales of comparable homes supported about $669,946: an over-assessment of $170,454, worth roughly $1,974 per year if corrected. Their packet laid out the comparable sales, the forms, and the filing steps. Nobody at the county was ever going to run that check for them.
Growth limits only help if the number they grow from is fair. If your assessment jumped after a purchase, new construction, or a revaluation, that new number is the one nobody has reviewed. Checking it is free and takes about a minute.
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Enter your address to pull your county record free. If it looks too high, your $49 packet gives you everything to challenge it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much can my Vermont property taxes increase in a year?
There is no statutory ceiling. Vermont caps neither assessment increases nor levy growth, so the annual change comes from the education tax rates set by the legislature's yield bill, the Common Level of Appraisal adjustment for your town, and your local municipal budget. For scale, the FY2025 yield bill produced an average bill increase near 13.8 percent statewide, and the FY2027 bill advanced by the Senate in April 2026 carried an average near 3.8 percent.
How often is my property reappraised in Vermont?
Not annually. Under Act 68 of 2023, every municipality must complete a full reappraisal every six years, a cycle that took effect January 1, 2025, with the first wave due by April 1, 2027. Before that law, towns commonly went a decade or more between reappraisals. What changes every year is the CLA rate adjustment, not your listed value.
Why did my bill go up when my assessment did not change?
Almost always the CLA and the education tax rate. When your town's listed values fall behind the market, the state's equalization study lowers the town's CLA, and the education rate applied to your listing is divided by that lower number. Local school and municipal budget decisions add to it. None of this requires anyone to have looked at your property.
Does Vermont protect long-time owners from increases?
Not on the basis of tenure. Vermont has no base-year cap, no acquisition-value system, and no protection that resets when a home is sold. The protection is income sensitivity: the current income-based property tax credit, and under Act 73 of 2025 an income-qualified homestead exemption for households under $115,000 in income applying to housesite value up to $425,000, once the new districts take effect.
What is the deadline to appeal my Vermont assessment?
Your written grievance must reach the town listers on or before your town's grievance day, which is set locally and typically falls between mid-May and early June. If you disagree with the listers' decision, you have 14 days from that decision notice to file an appeal with the town clerk for the Board of Civil Authority. Confirm your town's exact dates with the town clerk, since they differ across Vermont.
Related Resources
If you have decided your listed value is too high, the step-by-step walkthrough is in How to Appeal Property Taxes in Vermont. If you are still weighing whether the effort pays off, Is It Worth Appealing Property Taxes? runs the math on time versus likely savings. And before your grievance hearing, What Evidence Do I Need for an Appeal? covers the comparable sales and property records that actually persuade listers and a Board of Civil Authority.
This article provides general information about Vermont property tax law as of July 2026. Tax laws change frequently and town practices vary, including grievance dates and reappraisal timing. Consult your town listers, town clerk, the Vermont Department of Taxes, or a tax professional for advice specific to your situation.