Stamp duty is once. Land tax is forever.

What land tax actually taxes

Stamp duty is a single, enormous, visible event. Land tax is the opposite: a moderate number that arrives every year for as long as you own the asset, indexed to a valuation you have no control over, and calculated on a base most people never see. It is the reason two identical investment properties, bought for the same money on the same day, can have annual holding costs thousands of dollars apart.

Four features explain almost everything about it.

It taxes land, not property. Every jurisdiction assesses the value of the land alone — unimproved value in NSW and WA, site value in Victoria and South Australia, taxable value in Queensland, assessed land value in Tasmania, average unimproved value in the ACT. The house on top is irrelevant. A $1.4 million knockdown on a big block in an inner suburb can carry more land tax than a $1.4 million apartment, because the apartment’s land value is divided between every owner in the building.

It aggregates. The threshold applies to the total value of all your taxable land in that state, not to each property. Two $600,000 land parcels in NSW are one $1.2 million holding, and the second one is what makes the first one taxable. The ACT is the exception: it assesses each property separately, and charges a fixed amount per property on top.

One date decides the whole year. Midnight on 31 December for NSW and Victoria, 30 June for Queensland, South Australia and WA, 1 July for Tasmania, and four quarterly dates in the ACT. Own the land at that moment and you owe the full year — there is no pro-rating for a February sale.

Your home is exempt, almost everywhere. The principal place of residence exemption is what keeps most Australians out of the system entirely, along with the exemption for land used for primary production. Land tax is, by design, a tax on the land you hold beyond the one you live on.

That chart is the single most useful thing on this page. Rates get the attention, but the threshold is what determines whether you are a taxpayer at all — and the thresholds differ by a factor of twenty-one between Victoria and New South Wales.

How each state and territory calculates it

Every figure below is the rate in force for the 2026 land tax year (NSW and Victoria, assessed on 31 December 2025) or the 2026–27 year (Queensland, South Australia, WA, Tasmania and the ACT). Each jurisdiction aggregates all the taxable land you own within it, so the value in these tables is your total holding in that state, not one property.

New South Wales

NSW uses the average of the last three years of Valuer General unimproved land values, which smooths a boom and delays relief in a downturn. The thresholds were frozen from the 2025 year: they no longer index, so every year of land value growth pulls more owners in. A discretionary or special trust gets no threshold — 1.6% applies from the first dollar. Foreign persons pay surcharge land tax of 5% of the value of residential land, with no threshold, on top of any ordinary land tax, and it applies even where the land itself is exempt. Your home and land used for primary production are exempt; from the 2026 year the home exemption is lost if the individuals living there own less than 25% of the property between them.

Victoria

Victoria is the state where the threshold moved. The COVID debt levy, legislated to run across the 2024 to 2033 land tax years, cut the tax-free threshold from $300,000 to $50,000 and bolted fixed charges of $500 and $975 onto the bottom bands. The practical effect is that a single modest investment property now generates a land tax bill in Victoria where it used to generate none. Trusts pay a surcharge scale with a $25,000 threshold and roughly an extra 0.375% up to $1.8 million. Absentee owners pay a 4% absentee owner surcharge, which applies to all their Victorian land, not only residential. Victoria also runs a separate vacant residential land tax on the capital improved value — 1% in the first year a property is liable, 2% in the second and 3% from the third — which is not part of the numbers in the calculator above.

Queensland

Queensland has the largest gap in the country between how it treats an individual and how it treats a company or trustee: a $500,000 landholding is nil in an individual’s name and $4,000 in a company’s. Absentees are assessed on the company-style bands with slightly lower top rates, and pay an absentee surcharge of 3% on the value above $350,000; foreign companies and trustees of foreign trusts pay the same 3% surcharge. Assessment is on 30 June, and a home and primary production land are exempt.

South Australia

South Australia has the second-highest threshold in the country, lifted from $833,000 to $936,000 for 2026–27, and it indexes each year — the opposite of the NSW approach. Trusts are the sting: a separate trust scale starts at just $25,000 and charges $125 plus 0.5% from there, so the same land that is untaxed in your own name costs $4,500 a year inside a discretionary trust. South Australia levies no land tax surcharge on foreign owners. Your home and genuine primary production land are exempt.

Western Australia

WA is the cheapest of the mainland taxing states at ordinary investor values, and it has no trust scale and no foreign surcharge — the same rates apply however the land is held and whoever holds it. The catch is the metropolitan region improvement tax, an extra 0.14% of the value above $300,000 on land in the Perth metropolitan area, which funds regional planning and which most calculators forget. Assessment is on 30 June, and the home and rural land exemptions apply.

Tasmania

Tasmania has the simplest scale in the country and one of the harshest shapes: a flat 1.5% marginal rate from $500,000, which makes it the dearest state for mid-sized holdings. Principal residence land and primary production land attract no land tax. Foreign owners pay the foreign investor land tax surcharge of 2% of assessed land value on general land acquired on or after 1 July 2022 — and the surcharge can apply even where the value sits under the threshold and no ordinary land tax is due. Assessment is on 1 July.

Australian Capital Territory

The ACT is structurally different in three ways, and all three run against the investor. There is no threshold: any residential property that is not your home is liable from the first dollar of value. There is a fixed charge of $1,778 per property per year before any percentage is applied. And land tax is assessed per property rather than aggregated, so a portfolio pays the fixed charge several times over. Land tax is charged quarterly on the status of the property at 1 July, 1 October, 1 January and 1 April, and the valuation charge runs on the average unimproved value over up to five years. Foreign owners pay an extra 0.75% of AUV. Commercial property pays no ACT land tax at all — the tax is residential-only.

Northern Territory

The Northern Territory levies no land tax. It is the only Australian jurisdiction that does not, and it has never introduced one. That is worth exactly as much as the rest of the investment case for Darwin property — which is to say, it is a real saving and a poor reason on its own to buy there.

The five traps that cost people the most

1. The second property is what taxes the first

Because land tax aggregates within a state, the marginal cost of a purchase is not its own land tax — it is the land tax it triggers on everything you already own there. A NSW investor with $800,000 of land value pays nothing. Add a second parcel with $500,000 of land value and the bill is not the tax on $500,000; it is $100 plus 1.6% of $225,000, or $3,700, and it recurs every year. The threshold is used once per state, per ownership capacity, not once per property.

2. A trust or a company can wipe out the threshold entirely

This is the most expensive structuring decision in Australian property, and it is usually made for reasons that have nothing to do with land tax. The same $900,000 of land, in the same suburb, in the same year:

Trust ownership can still be the right answer — for asset protection, for distributing income across a family, for estate planning. But the land tax cost is annual and compounding, so it deserves to be priced before the deed is signed rather than discovered in the first assessment notice. In Queensland the same logic applies to companies: the threshold drops from $600,000 to $350,000 and the rate rises.

3. Foreign and absentee surcharges are charged on the whole value

Ordinary land tax is charged on the value above a threshold. Surcharges generally are not — they apply to the full land value from the first dollar, which is what makes them so much larger than they look.

4. Land value is not property value, and it moves on its own

The base of this tax is a government valuation of the dirt, issued annually, which can rise while prices fall. Two things follow. First, the land-value share of what you buy matters enormously: a house on a large block might be 60–70% land value, while an apartment in a tower might be 15–25%, which is why apartment portfolios attract much less land tax per dollar invested. Second, the valuation is an administrative decision and it can be objected to — within 60 days of the notice in most jurisdictions. In NSW, because the assessment uses a three-year average, an objection that succeeds can affect more than one year’s tax.

5. One date decides the year, and nothing is pro-rated

If you own taxable NSW or Victorian land at midnight on 31 December, you owe the whole of the next year’s tax, even if you sell in February. Buying just before the taxing date buys you a full year of somebody else’s liability; selling just after it means you pay for a year you did not own the land. Contracts commonly adjust land tax between vendor and purchaser at settlement, but that is a negotiated term, not an entitlement — read the clause, and get a clearance certificate before settlement so the liability does not follow the title.

The investor’s read: how to use this

Here is what the same land value costs each year across the taxing jurisdictions, for a resident individual with no other holdings in that state.

Read down the $1,000,000 column and the picture is clear: the ACT charges $12,378 a year on a landholding that NSW does not tax at all. Read across the bottom rows and it changes again — at $5 million Victoria is the most expensive and the ACT is among the cheapest, because the ACT’s rate barely rises while Victoria’s marginal rate reaches 2.65%. There is no jurisdiction that is simply “cheap”. There is only cheap at the value you actually hold.

Turn it into a yield number, then decide

The only honest way to compare is against rent. Take a $1.3 million Canberra house with $900,000 of land value, rented at $650 a week: gross rent is $33,800 and land tax is $11,138, or about a third of the gross rent before a single other cost. The same land value in Sydney, as an investor’s only NSW holding, costs nothing. That difference is not a rounding error in a spreadsheet; it is the difference between a property that funds itself and one that does not.

Three legitimate levers

Spread across states, if the assets are worth owning anyway. Because each jurisdiction gives you its own threshold, a portfolio built across two or three states pays materially less land tax than the same portfolio in one. That is a real, legal, structural saving — and a bad reason to buy an asset you would otherwise reject. Buy the property first, then take the tax saving as a bonus.

Watch the land-value share. Two properties at the same price can carry very different land tax because one is mostly dirt and the other is mostly building. Ask for the land value, not just the price, on every property you assess — it is on the rates notice and on the valuation notice.

Price the structure before you build it. Run the trust or company number for the state you are buying in, for the holding you expect to end up with, not the one you are starting with. In NSW and South Australia the trust decision can be worth more per year than the difference between two properties.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Rates and thresholds were checked against each revenue office’s own published tables on 11 September 2026 and apply to the 2026 or 2026–27 land tax year as noted.

1. Revenue NSW — Land tax thresholds and rates; How land tax is calculated; What is surcharge land tax?; Preparing for the 2026 land tax year; How trusts are assessed for land tax.
2. State Revenue Office Victoria — Land tax (current rates), general, trust surcharge and absentee owner surcharge scales for the 2024–2033 land tax years; Vacant residential land tax (current rates).
3. Queensland Revenue Office — Land tax rates for individuals; for companies and trustees; for absentees; for foreign companies and trustees of foreign trusts.
4. RevenueSA — Land tax rates and thresholds, general and trust rates for 2026–27.
5. Department of Treasury and Finance (WA) — Land tax assessment, land tax rates and metropolitan region improvement tax rates.
6. State Revenue Office Tasmania — Rates of land tax (from 1 July 2025); Foreign investor land tax surcharge, rate of surcharge.
7. ACT Revenue Office — How land tax is calculated (fixed charge and marginal rates, 2026–27); Foreign ownership surcharge for land tax.
8. Northern Territory Government — no land tax is levied in the Northern Territory.
9. Land Tax Management Act 1956 (NSW); Land Tax Act 1956 (NSW); Land Tax Act 2005 (Vic); Land Tax Act 2010 (Qld); Land Tax Act 1936 (SA); Land Tax Assessment Act 2002 (WA); Land Tax Act 2000 (Tas); Rates Act 2004 and Taxation Administration Act 1999 (ACT).
10. Commonwealth of Australia, 2026–27 Federal Budget and Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Act 2026 — negative gearing quarantine from 1 July 2027.
11. Australian Taxation Office — deductibility of land tax on rental properties.
12. richer.au calculations. Figures in the calculator and the tables are computed from the published scales above and are estimates only.

Keep reading