What is property tax?

Property tax is a municipal tax that municipalities can opt to introduce. Property tax is levied by the municipality’s property tax office. In most cases, you pay property tax along with other municipal taxes.

Municipal authorities that have introduced a property tax may decide to use the Norwegian Tax Administration's calculated market value for residential properties or their own calculation method as a basis for calculating property tax. If you’re in doubt as to how the property tax has been calculated, see the property tax notification you received from your municipal authority.

The property tax notification

The property tax notification is the letter you received from your municipal authority telling you the amount of property tax that you have to pay. The letter will also explain how your municipal authority calculated the value of your property. Contact the property tax office in your municipality if you cannot find any information on this in your property tax notification.

The Norwegian Tax Administration’s residential property values

If your municipality uses the Norwegian Tax Administration’s residential property values, your property tax is calculated using the property value from the last wealth and income tax assessment, reduced by an obligatory reduction factor.

This means that for property tax levied in 2024, municipalities will use property values from 2022. In addition to this obligatory reduction factor, the municipality can reduce the basis for property tax further by using a local reduction factor and/or an annual basic deduction.

Property value is not the same as taxable value

  • The property value is the Tax Administration's calculated market value of residential property, based on a price per square metre calculated by Statistics Norway (SSB) multiplied by the size of the property (primary area).
  • The taxable value is a given percentage of this property value. For the 2022 income year, the taxable value for primary dwellings with a sales value of up to NOK 10 million, the taxable value is set to 25 percent and to 70 percent when the sales value is more than 10 million. For secondary dwellings the property value is the same as market value. 
The property value is the basis for the calculation of property tax.

As a result, the fact of whether your residential property is a primary or secondary dwelling will not affect the basis for the calculation of property tax.

The assessed property value can be found in your tax return together with other information on the property (address, primary area, etc.).You can read more about the calculation of the taxable value and the property value here.