Veteran Property Tax Exemptions by State: the Instrument, the Rating and the Gaps in All 51 Jurisdictions

Updated August 18, 2026. Quick answer: there is no such thing as “the veteran property tax exemption.” Across 51 jurisdictions these benefits run on 8 different legal instruments — an exemption of value, a deduction, an exclusion, a credit against the bill, a reduction, a tax-rate reduction, a reimbursement of tax already paid, and in two states a refundable income-tax credit that touches the property tax not at all. And the disability rating — the column a by-state table normally reduces to one number — is a single percentage in only 9 of 51. The table below gives each jurisdiction’s own answer with the section it comes from, and says plainly where we could not establish one.

When the benefit is not an exemption at all

15 of the 46 jurisdictions with an established route do not run an exemption at all. The phrase “disabled veteran property tax exemption” carries one assumption: that a state exempts some amount of your home’s value once your rating clears a threshold. For most of these jurisdictions that is right. For a substantial minority it is the wrong description of the wrong tax, and the difference decides whether you file with the assessor, the county treasurer or the state revenue department — and whether you pay the bill first and get it back later.

Wisconsin is the clearest case. It has no veteran property tax exemption at all. Wis. Stat. § 71.07(6e)(a), (b) gives a refundable credit against the income tax equal to the property taxes paid, and where the claim exceeds the income tax due the excess is paid out by check. A Wisconsin veteran pays the property tax bill in full and recovers it through a different return, on a different deadline, from a different agency. Any row filing Wisconsin under “exemption amount” is describing a tax the benefit does not touch.

Three more are worth naming because the mechanism changes what you do. Tennessee reimburses tax already paid rather than exempting value (Tenn. Code Ann. § 67-5-704(a)(2)-(5)). Montana does not exempt anything — it multiplies the tax rate, and the multiplier is set by your income, so the same 100 percent rating produces a different answer at different incomes and no benefit at all above the top band (Mont. Code Ann. § 15-6-311(1)-(5)). Minnesota excludes market value before the rate is applied (Minn. Stat. § 273.13, subd. 34(a)-(c), (e)), which is not the same arithmetic as exempting assessed value.

What each of the 51 jurisdictions actually grants

All 51 jurisdictions, alphabetically. “What it takes” is the disability rating or condition the provision itself names; “What you get” is the benefit at the top of that provision’s own scale. Every citation links to the text it was read from. 5 jurisdictions have no established veteran-specific route and say so — those are explained under what is not on this page.

Each jurisdiction name links to that state’s senior property tax page, because in several states the age-based relief is worth more than the veteran route and nothing stops you reading both before you choose. Relief that passes to a surviving spouse is treated separately, and appeal deadlines are unforgiving in most states.

The disability rating is a single percentage in only a handful of states

The brief for this page asked for the percentage at which the exemption attaches. Read across all 51 jurisdictions it has four different answers, and the largest group is not the one a single number can carry.

• A single percentage and nothing else — 9 of 51: Alaska (50 percent), Illinois (30 percent), Louisiana (50 percent), Minnesota (70 percent), Nevada (60 percent), North Dakota (50 percent), Oregon (40 percent), Texas (10 percent), Vermont (50 percent). Note how far below 100 most of them sit.
• A percentage, but with a second route or a second tier — 20 of 51: Arizona, Arkansas, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia. A number appears, but quoting it alone misstates the provision — it is usually 100 percent or a named condition, or one figure at one rating and another figure higher up.
• No percentage at all — 12 of 51: California, Hawaii, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Wyoming. These state a condition, or make the rating a formula rather than a gate. A percentage column has to be blank for them, not 100.
• No veteran-specific threshold established — 10 of 51: Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin.

Two states make the rating a multiplier, not a gate. New Mexico exempts a share of the property equal to the disability rating itself (NMSA 1978, § 7-37-5.1), so a 30-percent-rated veteran gets 30 percent of the value exempted and there is no threshold to clear at all. North Dakota does the same scaling, on top of a cap on the first $9,000 of taxable valuation (N.D.C.C. § 57-02-08.8(1)). A table that prints a threshold for either state has invented one.

Maine asks for no disability at all on its main route. A war-period veteran qualifies at age 62, or at any age on a total-disability pension — and that pension may be non-service-connected (36 M.R.S. § 653(1)(C), (D), (D-1)). It is the one jurisdiction here where a veteran with no rating whatsoever can hold the benefit.

Four jurisdictions whose provision does not say what a summary would

Missouri is not a disabled-veteran exemption state. It is a prisoner-of-war state. Mo. Const. art. X, § 6; Mo. Rev. Stat. § 137.100 exempts the homestead of a citizen who is a former prisoner of war and who has a total service-connected disability. Both conditions, joined by “and.” A Missouri veteran rated 100 percent who was never held prisoner is outside the provision entirely. This is the most consequential row in the table: summarising Missouri as “100 percent, full exemption” would tell most of the veterans who read it the opposite of what the provision says.

Pennsylvania’s exemption is need-based, and the rating alone does not carry it. Under 51 Pa.C.S. §§ 8901, 8902(a), (b) it is a condition of the exemption that the need for it has been determined by the State Veterans’ Commission. A 100-percent-rated Pennsylvania veteran is not entitled on the rating alone; the same need test is applied independently to a surviving spouse.

Mississippi’s relief does not come from a veterans section. It runs through the totally-disabled route at Miss. Code § 27-33-67(2)(a), which is why a search for a Mississippi veterans exemption can come back empty and still be looking in the wrong place.

Montana’s benefit can be nothing at a 100 percent rating. Because the rate multiplier is income-banded, a fully-rated veteran above the top income band receives no reduction at all (Mont. Code Ann. § 15-6-311(1)-(5)). Every other income-tested entry in this table — the District of Columbia deduction and Washington’s banded exemption — shares the same shape: a rating gets you to the door, income decides what is behind it.

Three states index their own headline number, and print a stale one beside it

Three jurisdictions index their own headline number, which means the figure printed beside them is a base, not a current amount. Georgia’s grant is the greater of $32,500 or the federal maximum under 38 U.S.C. § 2102, and the statute then quotes its own 2004 figure inside its text — a figure dated inside the operative provision itself (O.C.G.A. § 48-5-48(a), (b), (b.1)). California’s section says “as adjusted for the relevant assessment year” three separate times, so all three of its figures are un-indexed bases (Cal. Rev. & Tax. Code § 205.5(a), (c), (h), (i)). Ohio’s moves every year by the GDP deflator, rounded to the nearest $100 (R.C. § 323.152(A)(2)(a)-(b)). None of those is published here as a current amount, and any figure you see quoted for these three is worth checking against the current adjustment.

Louisiana’s provision has an expiry date written into it, and the state’s own site serves both versions on the same page. La. Const. art. VII, § 21(K)(1)(a)-(c) renders twice — one block noted as effective until 1 January 2027 on ratification of a proposed constitutional amendment, and a successor block effective from that date. Both were read. The table records the currently operative version. Reading the first block on the correct page of the correct provision is enough to get an answer with a known expiry date and no warning attached.

What is not on this page, and what was tried

Of 204 cells — 51 jurisdictions and 4 questions each — 160 carry a verified answer and 44 are blank. A blank here means we could not establish the answer from a primary source, not that the answer is no. 5 jurisdictions have no established veteran-specific route at all, and each one is a different kind of gap:

• Alabama — Three sections were fetched and read in full — and the word “veteran” does not appear in any of them. Alabama’s exemptions there run on age and total disability. Recorded as not found rather than confirmed absent, because Alabama has no readable official statute route: one state host returns a server error and the other serves a page with no statute text on it.
• Connecticut — An unread corpus rather than an unreachable one. Chapter 203 came back whole — over 900,000 characters with 182 mentions of “veteran” — but the specific veterans clauses were not isolated. The bytes are held; this is the gap most likely to close first.
• Kansas — Fetched successfully. Kansas runs its homestead relief on age and total disability; a veteran-specific route was not located.
• Kentucky — Fetched successfully. Same shape as Kansas — the relief located runs on age and total disability.
• Utah — Two routes proved dead. The per-section page is navigation markup with no statute in it, and the per-chapter PDF downloaded and parsed cleanly but does not contain the relevant part — the word “veteran” appears in it zero times.

If your state is one of these five, the honest answer is that this page does not know and will not guess. Your county assessor’s office is the right next call, and your state’s senior property tax page — linked from its row in the table above — may cover relief you qualify for on other grounds.

How this was built

Every answer here was read from the text of the jurisdiction’s own law: 50 of 51 from the state code or constitution and 1 from an official state publication, with 0 resting on a secondary source of any kind — no aggregator, no law-firm summary, no other by-state table. Of the 160 answered cells, 149 are verified outright and 11 are flagged because the text is verbatim but the date of the copy it came from could not be confirmed at the state’s own site. Every quoted run was machine-checked against the bytes actually fetched, and the check was re-run on an independent code path before this page was written.

Where “its own law” was read from a mirror, and how often. 39 of the 51 rows were read on the jurisdiction’s own government site. The other 12 — Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota, Tennessee — were read on a third-party republisher of the state’s code. The text is statutory in every case and each quotation was machine-checked against the bytes actually served, but a republisher can carry an edition older than the one in force without saying so, and the next paragraph is what that looks like. Missouri is on that list, so treat its entry here as the reading that sent us to the constitutional provision rather than as the final word.

One warning about mirrors, because it nearly cost us a row. A widely-used legal mirror serves Louisiana’s constitution as a pre-2010 edition without saying so: the article that has carried the disabled-veteran homestead exemption since 2010 returns a clean page, over 150,000 characters long, containing the word “veteran” zero times. A build that trusted it would have published “Louisiana has no veteran exemption” off an HTTP 200.

Related: veterans burial benefits, at what age you stop paying property taxes, and property tax relief for a surviving spouse.