Massachusetts Property Tax at Total Disability: $1,000 or the Whole Bill

Two clauses of G.L. c. 59, s. 5 deal with total disability and they produce wildly different results. A veteran at the top of the rating scale should read both before filing anything. Clause Twenty-second E covers a veteran who, as a result of disabilities contracted in service and in the line of duty, has a disability rating of one hundred per cent as determined by the Veterans Administration. The abatement is six thousand dollars of taxable valuation or the sum of $1,000, whichever produces the greater reduction. In practice it is $1,000. Clause Twenty-second F covers a veteran who, by reason of injury received in service and in the line of duty, is a paraplegic, or who has a disability rating of one hundred per cent for service-connected blindness. It exempts the real estate. Not a valuation slice and not a dollar figure: the clause states no amount at all, and the whole of the domicile portion comes off the roll. For a property carrying a $12,000 tax bill the difference between the two clauses is $11,000 a year. Both clauses carry the same residency and service conditions as the rest of the series: a legal resident of the commonwealth, a veteran under G.L. c. 4, s. 7, clause Forty-third, a last discharge under other than dishonorable conditions, and either six months of Massachusetts domicile before entering service or two consecutive years of residence before filing. Both require the property to be occupied as the veteran's domicile, and where the property is larger than a single-family house only the domicile portion is exempt. Both continue unchanged for the surviving spouse after the veteran's death for as long as that spouse remains an owner and occupant. Now the two things clause Twenty-second E does that no other clause in the series does. It requires annual recertification. After the assessors have allowed the exemption, they shall require an annual statement certifying that the rating has not been reduced below one hundred per cent. Every other clause in the series stops asking after the first allowance, and clause Twenty-second F expressly says no further evidence shall be required in any subsequent year. A veteran at one hundred per cent files something every year; a paraplegic veteran files once. And it does not mention unemployability. Clause Twenty-second E asks for a disability rating of one hundred per cent. It says nothing about a total disability rating based on individual unemployability, and neither does clause Twenty-second F. That silence is conspicuous, because the motor vehicle excise exemption in G.L. c. 60A, s. 1 and the registration and licence fee waiver in G.L. c. 90, s. 33(29) both name a veteran determined by VA to "be individually unemployable due to their service-connected disability" alongside the veteran with a combined rating of one hundred per cent. The legislature knew how to say it and said it twice in the motor vehicle statutes, in language added by the 2024 HERO Act, without touching clause Twenty-second E. This catalog does not resolve how a board of assessors will treat a veteran paid at the total rate through unemployability. There is a respectable argument that such a veteran holds a rating of one hundred per cent as determined by VA, because that is how VA rates and pays them. There is also the plain fact that the legislature wrote the words into the neighbouring statutes and not into this one. A veteran in that position should claim clause Twenty-second E, expect the question, and take the refusal to the county board of assessors and then to the Appellate Tax Board rather than assuming the answer. Two other doors are worth checking before settling for $1,000. A veteran who received VA assistance in acquiring specially adapted housing and is permanently and totally disabled qualifies under clause Twenty-second C for $1,500, which is more than clause Twenty-second E pays. And a veteran whose town has accepted clause Twenty-second J can have the abatement doubled, and clause Twenty-second I indexes it to inflation. Those local options are carried separately in this catalog. Cost sharing follows the pattern. For clause Twenty-second E the municipality bears $2,000 of valuation or up to $175 and the commonwealth reimburses the balance up to four thousand dollars of exemption or $825. For clause Twenty-second F the municipality bears the same first slice and the commonwealth bears all the rest, which is what makes a full exemption politically sustainable.