House and apartment owners who have not yet submitted their property tax return must hurry.
The submission deadline will not be extended again.
Owners must therefore submit the property tax return by January 31st.
This was announced by the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Finance on Wednesday.
As early as February, "reminder letters" could be sent to defaulting property owners in NRW.
Düsseldorf - The letters also point out that in the event of non-submission of the declaration to determine the property tax value, late surcharges and coercive measures are possible.
If the defaulting owners do not react even then, estimate measures are unavoidable.
According to the ministry, six days before the deadline, only 59 percent or 3.9 million declarations had been received by the NRW tax offices by Wednesday (January 25) - most of them digitally.
Around 6.7 million plots of land and agricultural and forestry businesses in NRW have to be revalued as a result of the property tax reform.
Experience has shown that deadlines are often used as far as possible, said a spokesman for the Ministry of Finance.
The current receipts confirm that. "We are in the final sprint for submissions." The number of submissions has more than quadrupled in the past few weeks.
According to the ministry, the reason for insisting on the January 31 submission deadline is that otherwise the property tax revenue of the cities and municipalities as of January 1, 2025 would be at risk.
For the tax offices, the time still available to determine the property tax values is tight.
Therefore there will be no further general extension of the deadline in NRW.
Due to the real estate tax reform passed in 2019, new methods for calculating the tax will take effect from 2025.
Due to the sluggish submission, the Federal Ministry of Finance had already extended the submission deadline by three months from the end of October 2022 to the end of January 2023.
dpa