Nebraska Mobile Home Property Tax Exemption for a Disabled Veteran

Section 77-202.24 is four lines long and it is the most generous rating test in the Nebraska file. A mobile home is exempt from taxation if it is owned and occupied by a disabled veteran or blind veteran of the United States Armed Forces whose disability or blindness is recognized by VA as service connected and who was discharged or otherwise separated with a characterization of honorable or general under honorable conditions. There is no percentage in it. Section 77-202.23 defines disabled veteran as having the same meaning as in 5 U.S.C. 2108, as that section existed on January 1, 2025, which reaches a veteran who has established the present existence of a service-connected disability or who is receiving compensation, disability retirement benefits or pension because of a public statute administered by VA or a military department. A ten percent rating qualifies. So does a zero percent rating, because a zero percent rating is a service-connected disability that VA has recognised and simply not compensated. Blind veteran is defined separately in 77-202.23(2) as a veteran whose sight is so defective as to seriously limit the ability to engage in the ordinary vocations and activities of life. That is a functional test rather than a rating, and it stands alongside the disabled veteran route rather than inside it. Set this against the rest of the Nebraska property tax file and the result is strange. A veteran rated thirty percent who owns a house pays full property tax on it; the homestead exemption in 77-3506 needs one hundred percent or individual unemployability, and the income-tested route in 77-3508 needs wartime service and a total non-service-connected disability. The same veteran who owns a mobile home pays nothing on the mobile home. Nothing in the drafting history explains the difference, and no state guide this catalog has found points it out. Two limits keep it in proportion. The exemption is of the mobile home, not of land. Where a mobile home sits on land the veteran owns, the land is taxed as real property and this section does not touch it. And a mobile home permanently attached to real estate may instead be assessed as part of the real property, in which case the homestead provisions rather than this one decide the question; 77-3502 expressly treats a mobile home as capable of being a homestead. A veteran with a mobile home on owned land should ask the county assessor which way the home is classified before relying on either provision. The application is annual and the deadline is different from every other deadline in this file. Section 77-202.25 requires an application to the county assessor on or before April 1 of every year, not June 30. The assessor approves or disapproves and must notify the taxpayer within twenty days. An adverse decision is appealed to the county board of equalization within twenty days of the notice being mailed, and from there under 77-202.04. The 2025 act that created the motor vehicle tax exemption for disabled veterans, LB650, also amended this section. The two provisions now use the same definition of disabled veteran, and a veteran claiming one should claim the other.