Bavaria extends the deadline for filing property tax returns. This ended on Tuesday. Now property owners are to be given another three months, i.e. until the end of April, as Bavaria’s Finance Minister Albert Füracker (CSU) announced on Tuesday after a cabinet meeting. So far, the Free State is alone in this.
In Bavaria, around 4.3 million declarations had been submitted by the end of the submission period, said Füracker, which corresponds to almost 70 percent. In particular, tax consulting professions had pointed out that they were very busy, and the extension of the deadline would accommodate them. “We don’t want to annoy anyone,” said Füracker, “we want to carry out this tax procedure properly.” The deadline will therefore be extended by a further three months. Nevertheless, one does not want to “waste energy with eternal extension debates”.
Originally, the deadline for submitting the new property tax returns was the end of October 2022. This period was then extended throughout Germany up to and including January 31st. There was no further nationwide extension of the deadline until recently. And the Bavarian decision is now very surprising.
Shortly before the expiry of the previous deadline, Füracker had only emphasized that sanctions were not immediately threatened if someone did not submit their property tax return on time. “No one has to fear that there will be a penalty tomorrow, not even in the next few days or weeks,” Füracker said on Bavarian radio on Tuesday morning.
From 2025, the property tax for well over six million economic units in Bavaria will be calculated on a new assessment basis. The background is a decision by the Federal Constitutional Court in 2018, according to which the previous assessment basis in Germany is unconstitutional. In Bavaria, the recalculation is based on a separate model because the state government finds the federal model “too bureaucratic”.