The ESRI have produced a report outlining possible ways of bringing in a property tax in Ireland.
Property tax was hinted at in Budget 2010 – and could still be on the agenda for Budget 2011.
The ESRI report says that there is potentially an important role for property taxation in Ireland. It could raise substantial revenue, and income related reliefs could ensure that the losses among those with the lowest incomes were small in scale.
A simple property tax, with no reliefs or income exemption limits, at a rate of 0.4 per cent of a property’s value would result in an average charge per household of €950. It would be expected to raise revenue of about €1.1 billion per year.
Introducing an income exemption limit and marginal relief would mean that income losses for less well off households would be much more limited than under a simple tax.
The report also mentions that property tax could be made fairer if stamp duty payments were treated as a pre-payment of property tax and homeowners were given a waiver from property tax until this pre-payment had been fully used up.