NC Senate votes to pause property tax revaluations
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- North Carolina Senate passed a bill to pause county property tax revaluations for on year.
- An amendment exempts counties with fewer than 15,000 people, including Clay and Chowan.
- The bill’s future in the House is uncertain even though the Senate passed it 36-9.
A bipartisan majority of North Carolina senators agreed on a bill Tuesday to pause county property tax assessments for a year.
The bill exempted a few small counties from the moratorium, which could become law this month, if the Senate gives final approval, the House passes it and Democratic Gov. Josh Stein signs it. The vote comes as local governments are in the final weeks of deciding their upcoming budgets.
The key sponsor is Republican Senate leader Phil Berger, who wants to pause local governments’ property tax revaluations now so the General Assembly can spend more time working on other proposals to give homeowners some property tax relief.
It also comes as local governments are proposing property tax increases. Beyond a local tax rate, property taxes are based on a house’s assessed value, which some counties assess more frequently than others.
Republicans add small county exemptions, Democrats try to redirect voucher money
The bill was changed on the floor, adding a Republican-proposed amendment that would exempt counties with fewer than 15,000 people, affecting Clay, Pamlico and Chowan counties.
Berger said after the Senate session that lawmakers received feedback that those three small counties were satisfied with their current revaluation schedule.
During floor debate, Democratic Sen. Woodson Bradley of Mecklenburg County proposed an amendment that would add workforce housing and remove funding from the private school voucher program, which failed.
Republicans hold a supermajority in the Senate. Another Democratic amendment that would have redirected funds from private school vouchers to veteran housing exemptions was withdrawn, as Republicans said they planned to work on that issue separately.
The bill passed with bipartisan support, 36-9. A final procedural vote is expected Wednesday.
One of the Democrats who voted in favor of the bill, Senate Minority Leader Sydney Batch of Apex, said she and other Democrats supported it because counties had been consulted. She said the amendments Democrats proposed were a “way that you could actually lower costs instead of just pausing it, because (the Republican-written bill) is just a shell game of pausing it for a year. It doesn’t change anything with regards to the valuations.”
Property tax revaluation TBD in House
The future of the Berger-led bill in the House is uncertain.
House Speaker Destin Hall told The News & Observer last week that while House Republicans aren’t “necessarily opposed to it,” he doesn’t know if they’ll take it up quickly. Berger previously said he hoped it would become law by mid-May.
Hall said lawmakers “need to get a comprehensive solution” on changing property tax law.
The revaluation pause “may be one component of it. But you know, every time you make a change, you’ve got to look at the other side of it. How is this impacting local governments doing core services? And so once we get to a good place on sort of all of these issues, I think that you’ll see us probably have a broad agreement on that as well,” Hall said.
He also noted that counties are on different schedules for property tax assessments, so a revaluation pause may not apply to all counties this year.
“You may have (House) members who want their area to be in it. You may have some who don’t want it. And so that’s part of the issue with that particular bill, but I do think we’ll make some substantive changes on property tax, one way or the other,” he said.
The issue has been debated for months in a House study committee, which recommended putting a constitutional amendment on fall ballots that would allow the General Assembly to set limits on tax-rate increases. But there are no specifics on the amount of that cap, and several municipalities are opposed to it.
This story was originally published May 5, 2026 at 4:08 PM with the headline "NC Senate votes to pause property tax revaluations."
