For homeowners across the State, Friday is Local Property Tax (LTP) day. The owners of more than 2.2 million properties are required by close of business to file an updated valuation for their homes. That will determine how much LPT they will pay each year from 2026 to 2030.
The process has not been helped by a glitchy online portal that has been locking users out at random times as the deadline loomed.
For most people, an increase in the value of their properties since the last revaluation date in 2021 means they will face a modest increase in their LPT charge.
Wider valuation bands and a tax “rate” that is now just half what it was up to 2022 means no nasty surprises for homeowners, despite a near 30 per cent average rise in property prices since the 2021 revaluation exercise.
As Trinity College economist Barra Roantree puts it, the effect of these reforms has been to gut the LPT as a meaningful contribution to the public finances.
A tax that raised almost €500 million per year after its introduction in 2013 is now forecast to raise just €600 million next year, despite a near doubling of house prices in that time and the addition of more than 100,000 homes to the tax base.
Revenue has contacted homeowners with an “estimated” new valuation band that will be applied if the property owners do not submit their own valuation as of November 1st, last Saturday. And they will still chase you for a formal return.
Which would be fine if the online systems Revenue insists people use for their LPT return worked reliably. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Technical issues have locked many homeowners out of Revenue’s local property tax portal on several occasions over the past week.
On Wednesday of last week, Revenue insisted that any issues had been resolved, promising to monitor its systems in the run-up to the deadline.
On Monday, Revenue conceded there were further “intermittent issues with the portal” frustrating taxpayers trying to comply with their obligations. At that stage, the owners of fewer than half the residential properties had managed to file their returns.
With a system quite clearly not sturdy enough to handle the traffic it has been designed for and upwards of a million returns due in the final days, a more open and transparent Revenue engagement would be welcome rather than the “nothing to see here” approach adopted to date.
Cantillon, named after Irishman Richard Cantillon who was known as the “Father of Political Economy”, is a column in which Irish Times business journalists offer analysis and comment on business and economic issues of the day.
