Nebraska Homestead Exemption on a Temporary 100 Percent Rating

Section 77-3506(2)(c) carries the full homestead exemption to a veteran drawing compensation from VA because of a one hundred percent service-connected temporary disability. The Department of Revenue administers it as category 7. This is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. A temporary total rating is what VA assigns for a period of hospitalisation over twenty-one days, or for convalescence after surgery, or while a condition is under a prestabilization or similar temporary evaluation. It is total while it lasts and it is expected to end. Every other state property tax provision in this catalog either requires a permanent and total finding or requires a schedular percentage that a temporary rating does not establish. Nebraska takes the rating as it stands. The benefit is identical to the permanent route: one hundred percent of the taxable value of the homestead, no income limit, no ceiling on the value of the house, and state reimbursement to the county under 77-3523. A veteran holding a temporary total rating on January 1 of the application year pays no property tax on the home that year. The condition attached is the filing cadence, and since 2026 it is the only thing that distinguishes this category. Section 77-3506(3), as rewritten by LB803, provides that application under subdivision (2)(c) shall be required annually and shall include certification of the status from VA. Every other veteran and surviving spouse category now files once. This one files every year, with a fresh VA certification each time, after February 1 and on or before June 30. That is the correct design and it is worth understanding rather than resenting. A temporary rating that has ended is not a rating, and the annual certification is how the county finds out. What it means practically is that a veteran in this category who files once and assumes the exemption rolls forward will lose it, and section 77-3512(2) makes the consequence explicit: failure to file is a waiver of the exemption for that year. The route out is the permanent one. When VA converts a temporary total rating into a permanent one hundred percent evaluation, or awards individual unemployability, the veteran moves to 77-3506(2)(a) and the annual filing stops. That transition is worth watching for, because nothing in the county's process prompts it. The surviving spouse of a veteran in this category is named in the same subdivision, unremarried or remarried after reaching fifty-seven, and files on the same annual cadence. One timing point that is easy to miss. The Department of Revenue requires the effective date of the temporary rating to be on or before January 1 of the application year. A temporary total rating granted in March, for a hospitalisation in February, does not reach that year's exemption at all, and if it has expired by the following January it never will. Section 77-3512(1)(d) allows a late application where the VA certification arrived after June 30, which is the only relief available and it does not move the January 1 date.