Missouri Property Tax Credit for a 100 Percent Disabled Veteran

Missouri does not exempt a disabled veteran's home from property tax or exclude value from the assessment. The one exception is constitutional and very narrow: since November 2, 2010, Article X, section 6 of the Missouri Constitution exempts the homestead of a former prisoner of war with a total service-connected disability (see the separate entry). For every other veteran, what Missouri has is a general circuit breaker for senior citizens, sections 135.010 to 135.035, with a door cut into it for disabled veterans. Section 135.010(1) says a claimant must normally have reached 65. The alternative routes include a claimant or spouse who "is a veteran of any branch of the Armed Forces of the United States or this state who became one hundred percent disabled as a result of such service". Note "or this state": service in the organised militia of Missouri counts, which is broader than the federal armed forces alone. A veteran on that route does not have to be any particular age. The valuable part is not the door, it is the income rule. Section 135.010(5)(a) requires Social Security, railroad retirement and veterans payments and benefits to be added back into "income" for this credit, and then says "unless the claimant is a one hundred percent service-connected, disabled veteran or a spouse of a one hundred percent service-connected, disabled veteran", and that such a veteran "shall not be required to list veterans payments and benefits". For a veteran at the 100 percent rate, VA compensation is the largest item of household income and it is simply left out. That is what makes the credit reachable at all, and it is the single most important sentence in this entry. The amounts moved in 2025 and the new figures are not yet the ones most sources print. For claims for calendar years ending on or before December 31, 2025, the credit is computed on up to $750 of rent constituting property taxes or $1,100 of actual property tax paid, and the maximum upper limit on income is $27,500, or $30,000 for a homestead owned and occupied for the entire year. For claims for calendar years beginning on or after January 1, 2026, Laws 2025 H.B. 594 and 508 raise those to $1,055 of rent constituting property taxes and $1,550 of actual property tax, and set four separate income ceilings: $38,200 for a single filer, $42,200 for a single filer who owned and occupied a homestead for the entire year, $41,000 for married filing combined, and $48,000 for married filing combined who owned and occupied a homestead for the entire year. The income exemption in section 135.010(5) also rises from $2,000 to $2,800, and from $4,000 to $5,800 for a homestead owned and occupied for the entire year. From January 1, 2027 both sets of figures are indexed annually, and the two indexes are different: the credit maximums in section 135.025 track the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers for the Midwest Region, while the maximum upper limits in section 135.030 track the national Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers. A calendar year 2026 claim is filed in 2027, so through the 2026 filing season the old figures were still the operative ones. Sources printing $750 and $1,100 are describing a claim for 2025 or earlier, and a veteran planning around next year's claim should use the new numbers. Two traps. Rent counts only at twenty percent of gross rent paid, so a renter needs roughly $5,275 of annual rent to reach the new $1,055 ceiling, and a renter in a tax-exempt facility gets nothing because no property tax underlies the rent. And section 143.124(12) says the state pension exemption does not reduce the income used for this credit, so a retiree whose Missouri taxable income looks small may still be over the limit here. The claim is made on Form MO-PTC, or on Form MO-PTS with a Missouri income tax return, and it is a credit against income tax with the excess refunded rather than an abatement at the county.