Fairfield Veterans’ Property Tax Exemptions

Fairfield’s Veterans/Military Exemptions page states that effective for the 2025 grand list, taxed from July 2026, all fixed veteran exemptions were doubled from their prior amount, and gives the basic veteran exemption as having gone from a $12,000 assessment reduction to $24,000. The state’s fixed amounts, in both the January 1, 2025 revision and the 2026 Supplement, are $1,000 under 12-81(19) and $2,000 to $3,500 under 12-81(20), and the 2025 and 2026 acts changed none of them. No ordinance or vote behind a town-level doubling was found, and OLR’s 2023 survey recorded Fairfield as offering none of the municipal options. Ask the assessor what amounts apply. Effective for the 2026 grand list, taxed from July 2027, the page says the town has adopted the options of P.A. 25-168 for the exemption of a veteran VA rates permanently and totally disabled: including up to two acres of land; limiting the total exemption to the median assessment of residential property, which it puts at $624,325; extending the exemption to surviving spouses of an otherwise qualified veteran who died before October 1, 2024 but after October 1, 2006; granting it to the unmarried spouse of a service member killed in action; and applying it to veterans rated permanently and totally disabled at less than 100 percent who are unemployable. Those are the options 12-81(83)(E) to (G), which P.A. 25-168 §§ 233-234 added, 12-81qq from § 241 and 12-81pp from § 240. The page itself attributes the adoption to PA25-168 Sections 240 and 241. The page also describes the combat-era veterans’ exemption on a DD-214 filed with the Town Clerk by September 30, the increased benefits for a veteran with a VA disability rating of at least 10 percent on an annual verification letter until age 65, and the state additional exemption for low-income veterans or widow(er)s, filed February 1 to October 1 with proof of income. It links the new statute as P.A. 24-46, which enacted 12-81(83).