Property Tax Abatement in Massachusetts: Deadlines and Exemptions

If you believe your assessment is too high, Massachusetts gives you one route and one window. The route is an abatement application to your town's board of assessors. The window closes, by statute, on the due date of the first installment of the year's actual tax bill, and a late application is not considered, however good the case behind it.

That is the whole reason this page exists: the deadline arrives in the middle of winter, attached to a bill most people pay without reading, and the year's chance goes with it.

The Window, as the Statute Sets It

• Applying. Under Chapter 59, Section 59 of the General Laws, the application is due to the assessors on or before the due date of the first installment of the actual bill. In towns that bill quarterly that is usually the third quarter bill, due at the start of February; in semi-annual towns it is usually the spring bill. Your own town's due date is printed on the bill itself, and the assessors' office will state it plainly if asked.
• While it pends. The bill is paid as issued. An abatement granted later comes back as a refund with interest; an unpaid bill accrues interest and can cost you the right to appeal.
• The decision. The assessors have three months to act. Silence for three months counts as a denial, by statute, not as the application being lost.
• The appeal. A denial, actual or deemed, can be taken to the state's Appellate Tax Board within three months of the decision date.

None of that is advice about whether your case is good. The case itself is a comparison between your assessment and the evidence, and the strongest evidence is what comparable houses actually sold for, which the assessors themselves work from.

What Is at Stake, Town by Town

Whether the paperwork is worth an evening depends on the dollars, and the dollars depend on where you are. The table below runs one hypothetical through every town: if a house at the town's average value were assessed 10% high, the extra tax each year would be the last column. In Longmeadow that error costs $1,091 a year. In Hancock it costs $84.

The Exemptions That Do Not Need a Case

Separate from abatement, which argues the assessment is wrong, Chapter 59, Section 5 exempts part of the tax for people the law names, with no argument about value involved: among them seniors meeting locally set age, income and asset tests, veterans with service-connected disabilities, the legally blind, and some surviving spouses. Seniors in many towns can also defer the tax outright, at interest, until the house is sold.

Each clause has its own application, its own deadline and locally adopted limits, so the list above is what exists, not what you qualify for. The board of assessors in your town is the only body that can answer the second question, and asking costs nothing.

What This Does Not Mean

An abatement does not lower your neighbourhood's taxes and it does not argue the rate; it argues one parcel's assessment. Nor is a rising assessment itself evidence of an error: assessments across this region have risen sharply because sale prices did, and the bill follows the value, not the rate. The question an abatement answers is narrower: is this house assessed out of line with the market evidence for houses like it.

For your own town's figures, every record carries the current rate, the average bill and their history. Start at the town list, or put your assessment through the calculator to see what a different figure would change.