I start and end all of my tax courses with reminders that a big part of my job is responding to questions from tax officials and taxpayers across the state. I learn a great deal from those questions, as they inform my teaching and writing. Keem them coming!
Below are my thoughts on a few of the most common questions I’ve received over the past year, along with reminders as to where you can find the answers in my new property tax collection law book now available for sale. (It’s never too early to grab the perfect holiday gift for your loved one.)
Nuisance Abatement Costs
Chapter 15 of my book discusses costs and other taxes beyond the property tax that a local tax office could be tasked to collect. Nuisance abatement costs might be the most common. They are the costs incurred by a local government when it eliminates dangerous conditions on private property such as overgrown lots, abandoned vehicles, accumulated trash, or other concerns that violate local nuisance ordinances. The costs to clean up (“abate”) these problems automatically become liens on the real property in question and may be collected using property tax remedies.
Nuisance abatement costs may be added to property tax bills and collected using attachment & garnishment or levy & sale. They do not automatically accrue Machinery Act interest unless the governing board adopts a resolution or ordinance to that effect. Read this post for more details on what else can be added to tax bills (spoiler alert: any charge can be added to those bills, but doing so does not automatically provide property tax collection remedies for those charges).
It’s best practice to record liens for nuisance abatement costs so that potential buyers are aware of the liens and demand that they be paid before closing. But recording is not required to make those liens enforceable unless the abatements were imposed under general ordinance-enforcement authority rather than the “summary” nuisance abatement statutes (GS 153A-140 for counties or GS 160A-193 for cities).
Nuisance abatement efforts can be an effective component of a coordinated effort to fight blight and encourage more responsible property ownership. See this blog post for more.
Discounts
Discounts are reductions in tax bills to encourage early payment. Unlike interest, which is a mandatory penalty for paying late, discounts are optional. A county or municipality may decide whether to offer a discount and may determine the amount, subject to approval by the North Carolina Department of Revenue. As discussed on page 34 of my book, discounts commonly range from one to two percent and may decline over time—for example, two percent for payment in July and one percent for payment in August.
All discounts must end on September 1. Only payments made prior to August 31 may qualify. This is a statutory deadline that cannot be adjusted due to late budget adoption, billing errors, or any other mishap.
For example, the mandatory 2026 reappraisal postponements implemented by the General Assembly likely delayed billing in several counties and their towns. But even those governments could not extend their discount deadlines past September 1, regardless of how late their bills were mailed.
Remember that the postmark rule applies to discounts just as it does to the delinquency date. A taxpayer whose payment is postmarked prior to September 1 is entitled to the discount regardless of when the tax office receives the payment. The weekend-and-holiday rule also applies to discounts. If August 31 falls on a weekend or legal holiday, the deadline to pay moves to the next business day.
The Machinery Act does not describe the process by which a local government may terminate or reduce an existing discount. I think this means that a local government may terminate a discount at any time its governing board desires. That said, it makes sense for a local government wishing to end its discount to make that decision well before bills are mailed and to provide ample notice of the change to taxpayers before they start making payments for the next tax year.
The Tax Rate
Every local government that levies a property tax sets its own tax rate each fiscal year as part of the annual budget ordinance. Note I said tax rate, not rates; the uniformity provision in the NC Constitution (Article V, Section 2) requires one tax rate per jurisdiction. That single tax rate will apply to all taxable property within its jurisdiction. A local government may not levy different tax rates on different types of property (residential vs commercial property or primary residences vs second homes, for example).
Note that a jurisdiction is free to break its property tax rate into as many components as it wishes, so long as each one of those components applies to all taxable property in the jurisdiction. For example, a county could levy a 50-cent "general" property tax along with a 5-cent "library" tax and a 10-cent "schools" tax, so long as all three of those property tax components were levied on all taxable property in the county. See this post for more on earmarking parts of the property tax for specific uses.
The only exception to the “one-rate” rule is for special service districts, which allow additional property taxes to be levied on certain portions of the county or city to fund specific services such as fire protection, trash collection, or water and sewer. In fact, the state constitution had to be amended to allow the extra taxes in service districts. But the uniformity requirement still applies within those districts; the additional property tax rate for a specifical service district must apply uniformly to all taxable property sited in that district.
Property tax rates are currently capped at $1.50 per jurisdiction, including special service district taxes. However, that cap is subject to a several exceptions (taxes used pay for courts, elections, and schools are not counted toward the $1.50 limit, for example). And even so no local government is close to exceeding it (the highest county tax rate is just under $1.00).
The combined rate paid by a taxpayer who lives in a municipality may (and often does!) exceed $1.50, so long as the respective rates levied by the county and municipality are each below the $1.50 cap.
I discuss tax rates and the revenue-neutral rate calculation on page 22 of my new book.
