JFO lays out preliminary models showing how changes to property tax credit could shift bills for low‑income homeowners

Julia Richter, Joint Fiscal Office, told the House Ways & Means Committee that JFO ran preliminary, iterative models to illustrate how changes to the property tax credit's income sensitivity would change taxpayer liabilities.

Richter said the work is not a policy proposal but an exercise to "explain results and intuition of changes to the property tax credit." She described assumptions that shape the modeling: the analyses look only at filers who may have qualified for the credit in fiscal year 2025 (household income at or below $115,000), assume the credit earned in FY 2025 applies to FY 2025 bills (ignoring the actual statutory lag), and hold other factors equal while varying only the credit mechanics.

The nut graf: the property tax credit that reduces education property tax liabilities is a sizable tax expenditure (JFO used a working figure of about $153,000,000 earned in FY 2025) and changing how it is targeted or converted into an exemption would redistribute tax burdens across income and property‑value groups. Richter's limited data set (households that reported income on homestead declarations) constrains conclusions about higher‑income payers because many above the $115,000 threshold do not submit household income on the homestead form.