Hesse: State has deadline, some municipalities are lagging behind

The deadline for filing the property tax return expired on Tuesday.

Hesse: State has deadline, some municipalities are lagging behind

The deadline for filing the property tax return expired on Tuesday. The public administration also had a duty. While the state of Hesse delivered on time, some municipalities need more time.

Wiesbaden/Kassel (dpa/lhe) - Deadline for property tax returns: Real estate and property owners should submit their information to the tax office by Tuesday. According to the Ministry of Finance, the tax rate in Hesse was around 74 percent by Tuesday afternoon. "More than 2.1 million statements were made," said a spokesman in Wiesbaden. The final figures at the end of the period will therefore be announced this Wednesday.

In addition to the citizens, the public administration also had a duty. According to the state of Hesse, the declarations were submitted punctually for all taxable properties. "We did everything we could to meet this deadline and we did it," said Finance Minister Michael Boddenberg (CDU) in Wiesbaden. According to this, 5,415 economic units were formed from over 80,000 parcels of land owned by the country, for which information was due - including forests, state domains, museums, theaters, authorities, residential buildings or roads.

The situation is different in some municipalities in the country. The city of Kassel, for example, is lagging behind and has applied to the tax office for an extension of the deadline. A spokesman said that not all municipal properties had made corresponding statements by the end of the period. He couldn't count how many. The city's specialist departments managed the properties on a decentralized basis.

"In the administration of the property office alone there are 1,600 taxable and 11,000 tax-exempt parcels," he explained. So the effort is immense. “The specialist offices had to deal with the challenges and effects of the pandemic and the Ukraine war until the very end, more urgent tasks,” the spokesman explained the delay.

In Wiesbaden, too, the deadline could not be met for all taxable properties. As the city announced, around 300 of around 400 property tax returns have been submitted to the tax office so far. An application for an extension of the deadline was made to the tax office for the outstanding declarations. They should therefore be submitted by March 31st. In Gießen, on the other hand, the deadline was met. A city spokeswoman said the statement had been made for all of the 204 properties currently known.

The City of Frankfurt cannot make any statement as to the extent to which the necessary property tax returns have already been submitted for the City's properties. Due to the decentralized structure in Hesse and thus in Frankfurt, the property management offices are responsible for submitting the property tax returns, a spokesman explained. "Therefore, we cannot make any general statements for the entire city of Frankfurt am Main, nor whether individual offices need extensions of deadlines." In Frankfurt, a number of offices managed the municipal properties. These included in particular the Office for Construction and Real Estate, but also the Office for Green Spaces and the Office for Road Construction and Development, he explained. In addition, for around half of the approximately 45,000 municipal properties, no property tax return has to be submitted (yet) because they are exempt from property tax.

From 2025, property tax in Germany is to be recalculated. As part of this reform, almost 36 million properties nationwide have to be revalued with the help of owner information. The federal government had once extended the deadline for submitting the documents from October 31, 2022 to January 31, 2023. Nevertheless, millions of property tax returns are still missing nationwide. Bavaria announced on Tuesday that it would unilaterally extend the deadline by another three months, i.e. until the end of April.

Hessen should take this as an example, says the real estate owners association Haus

Property tax is one of the most important sources of income for municipalities. How much property tax the individual owners will actually have to pay from 2025 will remain open for a while. Because that depends crucially on the so-called assessment rates of the municipalities.