October the 1st, 2024 – After years of back and forth, property tax is set to come. Here’s how Croatian property tax introduction is set to be carried out.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, whoever installs an air conditioner on the facade of their building by the end of this year or gets the green light to start running short-term rentals in residential buildings will manage to avoid complications and fines. Those fines would be brought by the new housing regulations set to come into force from the beginning of next year.
One thing that won’t pay off, though, is the fictitious filing of unoccupied residential property addresses to avoid paying the new tax. About sixty interested citizens have already expressed their objections to the changes in the law on local taxes in the e-consultation process. They have complained about Croatian property tax introduction and warned of a number of illogical points in the new rules. For example, there can be so-called shantytowns and luxury villas in the same street, and the owners of both such houses will need to pay similar tax.
If Parliament accepts the law in its proposed form, property owners will find out how they fared in the new tax mix-up only when and if the tax decision arrives at their home address. The tax authorities will start sending them out, ex officio, as of April next year. Everyone who thinks they should be exempt from Croatian property tax introduction and can prove it, must submit all the necessary documents to the municipality or city where the property is located by the end of March 2025, reports Večernji list.
The drafter of the law has pointed out that the registration of residence at the address of the property for which the tax would be charged isn’t considered “an established fact of permanent residence in the property”. This is “because the registration in itself doesn’t mean that the property is actually being used as a place of permanent residence.” In determining the amount of tax to be charged, the tax authorities will rely for the most part on the database from which the utility fees are currently collected.
First of all, all properties to which the new Croatian property tax introduction will apply will be put in the same basket. Following that, the apartments and houses that are used for permanent residence or are excluded from the obligation to pay taxes for one of the dozen described reasons will be excluded from it.
