IWANUS: How the new 2025 assessment valuation date affects you

Don’t be fooled into thinking your property tax bills won’t increase this year

Jerry Iwanus’ first Tax Talk column of 2025 explains why the new property assessment valuation date matters. (SERVICE NEW BRUNSWICK PHOTO)

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A new valuation date

Starting this tax year (2025), the valuation date for your property assessment will be Jan. 1 of the previous year – 2024, in this case – instead of the current year. This means that your assessment will be based on market activity, not during the past year, as was the case up to this point, but during the year before that.

The previous provincial government started tinkering with improvements to the property tax system, and this was one of them. They didn’t undertake anything fundamental, of course, as former premier Blaine Higgs didn’t believe the system was as broken as it is, but they made some changes nonetheless.

I’ve argued that the province badly needed to change the date to a year in the past. This would bring it in line with the best practices elsewhere in Canada, as it would incorporate a whole year’s worth of sales instead of using those from part of a year to determine assessed value.

Let’s look at what that means and how it affects you.

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To this point

Before 2025 in New Brunswick, assessments supposedly reflected “real and true value” (interpreted as market value) as of Jan. 1 (the valuation date) of the current tax year. So, for the 2023 tax year, for instance, your assessed value would have been based on sales that theoretically occurred in the 12 months before Jan. 1, 2023, i.e., all of 2022.

The problem was that your assessment did not reflect market activity in all of those 12 months. In fact, assessors were lucky to obtain, analyze, and incorporate sales from January to May of the previous year due to data availability and time constraints. That’s only five months. This meant that any market activity occurring from June to December 2022 was not part of the Jan. 1, 2023, assessed value.

In a jurisdiction whose assessments are supposedly based on “real and true value” as of the valuation date, there was nothing “real” or “true” about assessments that were missing seven months’ worth of data.