Late-filing penalty fees and punitive tax increases in real estate taxation

If you file details or make corrections and additions after the deadline date, you may have to pay a late-filing penalty or a punitive tax increase if the corrections cause an increase in your real estate tax. 

Regardless of whether you file your real estate tax return electronically or on paper, the return must arrive at the Tax Administration no later than on the deadline date for real estate taxation.

Late-filing penalty

You will have to pay a late-filing penalty if you make changes or additions to real estate information and

• the deadline for filing the real estate tax return has passed, but your tax assessment is not finished yet
• the changes you make increase the amount of real estate tax to be paid.

Late-filing penalty is €50 for individual taxpayers and estates of deceased persons and €100 for others. 

Every owner of real estate has their own end date for the tax assessment process. Your personal end date of assessment is shown on your real estate tax decision. If you file new details that do not cause an increase in your real estate tax, the Tax Administration generally does not impose a late-filing penalty.

You will only have to pay one late-filing penalty for omissions relating to the real estate taxation of a single tax year.

Punitive tax increase

If you do not report properties or buildings that are missing from your real estate information to the Tax Administration or if you do not correct other such errors, you may have to pay a punitive tax increase.

Amount of the punitive increase

For individual taxpayers, the minimum amount of a punitive tax increase is €75, even if the percentage-based increase would be lower. There is no maximum limit for the percentage-based increase.

The punitive tax increase is approximately 10% of the amount added to the tax, i.e. it is based on the amount of tax that would not have been imposed because of the errors in the real estate information. The amount of tax may be increased because you had not provided some relevant information relating to your real estate – such as real estate units, buildings, or parts of a building – or it may be increased because there were errors in the information you gave.

Depending on the type of the omission, the amount of the punitive tax increase varies between 2% and 50% of the amount added to the real estate tax.

Multiple omissions

If you as the owner of a real estate unit have made several omissions relating to the filing of tax returns, it may be that the tax decision will contain a punitive tax increase resulting from one omission, and a late-filing penalty resulting from another one. However, the result of just one omission cannot be that both penalty charges are imposed.

The amount of tax increase is affected by:

• the size of the errors or omissions in the tax return, i.e. the euro amount to be added to the taxes, and
• whether or not the omission is recurring.