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With fatter budget and flat property values, tax rate set to rise nearly 5%

At this year’s annual tax classification hearing, held at this week’s Select Board meeting Tuesday night, Nov. 19, the town’s regional assessor, Michael Saltsman, estimated that the tax rate on residential property this fiscal year would need to increase from $14.90 per $1,000 of assessed property value to $15.65, an increase of approximately 5% over last year’s rate.

Saltsman said the average value of a single-family parcel had remained more or less the same during fiscal 2025, dropping slightly from $875,968 in fiscal 2024 to $875,152 in the current fiscal year due to a slowing housing market. He said that with property values mostly flat and a larger municipal budget, this year’s tax increase will be higher than in previous years. Saltsman estimated that the tax bill for an average home would increase by 4.94%, from $13,051.92 to $13,696. The new amount will appear on January’s third-quarter fiscal 2025 bills.

While the annual tax classification hearing offers a preview of the coming year’s taxes, its purpose is to decide whether to shift more of the tax burden to other tax classes. Because Harvard has so few industrial or commercial businesses, a high proportion of which are farms, increasing their rates would have very little impact on the bills of single-family property owners, Saltsman said. Harvard has always had a single rate for all of its property classes, and the Select Board voted unanimously Tuesday to keep it that way.

However, the residential rate paid by homeowners will be 2 cents higher than the $15.63 rate for commercial, industrial, and personal property. That’s because voters agreed five years ago to provide tax relief to long-term residents who qualify for its means-tested senior tax exemption program. Six residents qualified for the program this year and the extra pennies are needed to pay for the estimated $27,732.35 cost of the fiscal 2025 exemptions.

The new tax rate is an estimate and must be approved by the Massachusetts Department of Revenue before it can be applied, and could change, though not significantly, said Saltsman.

To estimate the taxes on your own property, multiply its most recent assessed value by $15.65 and divide the result by 1,000.

How fiscal 2025 tax bills are calculated

In Massachusetts the first two quarterly tax bills of a given fiscal year are preliminary bills, which are issued before the final valuations have been determined, and thus before the final tax rate has been set. As explained by Finance Director Jared Mullane, these preliminary bills, due Aug. 1 and Nov. 1, are calculated based on the taxes for the property for the previous fiscal year, plus 2.5% to account for the yearly tax levy growth allowed by Proposition 2½.

Once valuations are set and the final tax rate is calculated and approved by the Department of Revenue, Mullane said, the town is able to calculate the full year’s taxes for the current fiscal year, fiscal 2025, by multiplying the total valuation of the parcel by the new tax rate and dividing by 1,000.

According to Mullane, once that calculation is made, the amount paid in preliminary taxes is subtracted from the total, and the remainder is then split among the third- and fourth-quarter bills, the actual tax bills, which are due Feb. 1 and May 1. This means that amounts a taxpayer is billed each quarter will not represent exactly 25% of the total bill.

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