Vermont Property Tax Exemption for a Survivor of a Veteran

Vermont carries the veteran property tax exemption across to the family on two separate paths, and the two are worth keeping apart because one of them asks for nothing at all. The first path is in the main grant. Section 3802(11)(A)(i) lets the residence be owned in fee simple by a veteran, the veteran's spouse, widow, widower, or child, or jointly by any combination of them, where one or more of them is receiving death compensation or dependency and indemnity compensation. A surviving spouse or a child drawing DIC and owning the home qualifies in their own right, while the veteran is alive or after. The second path is section 3802(11)(C) and it is the one nobody is told about. An unremarried widow or widower of a previously qualified veteran shall be entitled to the exemption whether or not the individual is receiving government compensation or pension. Read that literally, because it means what it says. If the veteran held the exemption, the surviving spouse keeps it without having to qualify for any federal payment at all. A spouse who is denied DIC still has the exemption. The words that do the work are "previously qualified". The veteran has to have been eligible. A surviving spouse whose veteran never claimed the exemption should expect to have to show that the veteran would have qualified, so a veteran who is eligible should claim it even in a year it is worth little. Remarriage ends it. The statute says unremarried, not unremarried at the date of death, so the status is tested as it stands rather than frozen. Tell the Office of Veterans Affairs rather than letting it run. The amount is the same as the veteran exemption: $10,000 of appraisal value under the statute, up to $40,000 where the town has voted it, applied against both the municipal and the education grand lists. Only one exemption may be allowed on a property. The definitional carve-outs in paragraph (B) reach survivors too. The federal definitions apply as if federal law recognized a civil union or a civil marriage in the same manner as Vermont law, which matters for a surviving partner of a Vermont civil union, and the age and marital status limits in 38 U.S.C. 101(4)(A) do not apply, so an adult child is not aged out of the ownership test the way the federal definition would age them out. The procedure is the veteran procedure. Written application and a written statement showing the payment go to the Office of Veterans Affairs before May 1 of the year. A spouse widowed in June has until May 1 of the following year and there is no partial-year filing. No disability rating governs any of this, so a rating filter never hides this entry.