Every jurisdiction in this catalog has entries whose figures move when a bill passes, whose act takes effect on a later date, or whose program is repealed while its agency keeps advertising it. This page watches each jurisdiction's law, follows a bill through its own jurisdiction's process where its stages are recorded, and names the catalog entries each instrument touches.
8 instruments in Montana. Tracked across 51 jurisdictions. Every other jurisdiction on the board is still watched by hand.
A bill that died is listed only where a guide, an agency, or a news story has described it as current law. That is the failure that puts a number in front of a veteran which no assessor, registrar, or school will honor.
=No change to benefitsMoves the veterans' home loan program's funding to the Montana Housing Trust; the rate and terms are unchanged.
House Bill 924 created the Montana Growth and Opportunity Trust and, within it, a Montana Housing Trust, and section 33 amended 90-6-603 so that the veterans’ home loan mortgage program is funded from the housing trust rather than from the principal of the coal tax trust fund. The Board of Housing administers $50 million or more of the trust for the program. Nothing changes for a borrower: the rate is still one percent below the Board’s posted rate and the terms are unchanged. Tracked because every description of the program written before 2025 calls it a coal trust program, and because the funding source is what determines whether the revolving fund has money in it in a given year.
▲Expands benefitsRemoves the 2033 termination date from the military retirement income subtraction.
Senate Bill 104 of 2023 created the military pension subtraction with a termination date of December 31, 2033. Senate Bill 93 of the 2025 session removed that date, as the Revenue Interim Committee records in its November 2025 paper on veteran tax benefits. This is tracked because the repealed sunset is still being published: guidance written against the 2023 text, including the federal benefits libraries reviewed as recently as February 2026, tells a Montana veteran the exemption is scheduled to expire in tax year 2033. A veteran deciding where to retire on a ten-year horizon is being given a repealed condition.
▼Restricts benefitsLowers residential rates, and the disabled veteran benefit is a percentage of the rate, so the average benefit fell from $2,335 to $1,913.
The 2025 property tax rewrite replaced the flat residential rate with a tiered homestead structure for primary residences and long-term rentals. Because the disabled veteran benefit is a percentage reduction of the rate rather than an exemption of value, cutting the rate cuts the benefit. Department of Revenue data reported by the Revenue Interim Committee shows the average disabled veteran benefit falling from $2,335 in 2024 to $1,913 in 2025, and the total benefit to participants falling from $8.07 million to $6.91 million, even though the number of participants rose from 3,455 to 3,612. This is the clearest example in the catalog of a general tax cut reducing a veteran benefit, and it is why the entry states the reduction as a percentage rather than a dollar figure.
▲Expands benefitsPays an enlisted Guard member on state active duty at twice the federal rate for the whole order, not only the first 15 days.
Until 2025, 10-1-502(3) paid an enlisted member ordered into active duty by the Governor at twice the federal rate for the grade, and then added that the schedule applied only to the first 15 days, after which the member reverted to the single federal rate. House Bill 72 struck that limitation with an immediate effective date, so the double rate now runs for the whole call-out. The adjutant general’s stated reason was to stop cycling members on and off state active duty at the 15-day mark. Tracked because the 15-day cap is still being published, including by the federal benefits libraries, and because a Guard member working a month-long fire or flood response is being told the wrong pay rate for three quarters of it.
▲Expands benefitsLets a taxpayer subtract part of military retirement pay and up to half of military survivor benefits from taxable income.
Added 15-30-2120(3)(n), (8) and (9), letting a taxpayer subtract a portion of military pension or retirement income and up to 50 percent of military survivor benefits from federal taxable income, first available in tax year 2024. Almost every description of it as a 50 percent exemption is wrong in the same way: subsection (8) caps the pension subtraction at the lesser of 50 percent of the pension or the taxpayer’s Montana source wage income, so a retiree with no Montana earnings subtracts nothing. Subsection (9) also excludes anyone who became a Montana resident before June 30, 2023 while already drawing the pension, and limits the subtraction to five consecutive years. The survivor benefit subtraction in (3)(n)(ii) is not caught by the wage cap, which the drafting makes plain and which no summary mentions.
▲Expands benefitsKeeps a disabled veteran in the property tax assistance program through an unusual one-time increase in income.
Revised the disabled veteran property tax assistance program to provide for continued eligibility where an unusual increase in income occurs, which is now 15-6-302(9). The Department of Revenue may look past income above the applicant’s normal annual figure spent on funeral or medical expenses, including major medical expenses of an immediate family member, on major home repairs, vehicle replacement, or education and career training, and on any other unusual factual circumstance. Tracked because this is the only route back for a veteran who is disqualified by a one-year income spike, and because it appears in no summary of the program, including the Department’s own page.
=No change to benefitsRaises the general program's market value cap; the disabled veteran program has no value ceiling, so its benefit is unchanged.
The Revenue Interim Committee’s summary of enacted 2023 tax legislation describes House Bill 189 as revising the property tax assistance program and increasing the market value to which it applies. Section 3 of the act amended 15-6-311, the disabled veteran program. The distinction the catalog has to keep straight is that the general program caps the reduction at a stated market value while the disabled veteran program has no value ceiling at all, so a change to the general cap does not change what a disabled veteran receives. Tracked so that a later amendment to the general cap is not mistaken for a cap on the veteran program.
Sponsor
George NikolakakosRepublican, House, District 26
Touches Mont. Code Ann. § 15-6-311 · Mont. Code Ann. § 15-6-305
▲Expands benefitsLets a private employer adopt a hiring preference for veterans.
Created Title 39, chapter 29, part 2, which lets a private sector employer, for-profit or not-for-profit, adopt an employment policy giving preference in hiring to a veteran, and ties the authority to Article II, section 35 of the Montana Constitution. The part may not be interpreted to violate any other state or local equal employment opportunity law. Tracked because it is the only part of Montana’s veteran preference scheme that reaches private employment, it is frequently reported as though it gave veterans a right rather than employers a permission, and it is the section a veteran cites when an employer says a preference policy would be unlawful.
Sponsor
Mary CaferroDemocratic, Senate, District 41
Touches Mont. Code Ann. § 39-29-201 · Mont. Code Ann. § 39-29-202 · Mont. Code Ann. § 39-29-203
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