Nassau County has frozen its property tax rolls for a fourth straight year and made it easier for challengers to win reductions — factors that also expand inequities in assessments and erode the accuracy of the rolls, experts say.
County Executive Bruce Blakeman froze the property rolls for the 2025-2026 tax year, keeping assessments for the county’s 385,000 homeowners the same as the prior four years.
By continuing to freeze, “property assessments are no longer based on their actual value,” said Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of Miller Samuels, a Manhattan appraisal firm that publishes Long Island housing market reports for real estate firm Douglas Elliman.
Nassau’s long-standing practice of granting reductions to many homeowners who appeal has shifted hundreds of millions of dollars in property tax burden onto taxpayers who don’t.
WHAT TO KNOW
- Nassau County has frozen property tax rolls for a fourth straight year and made it easier for challengers to win reductions.
- These are factors that also expand inequities in property assessments and erode the accuracy of the rolls, experts say.
- The county has extended the deadline for filing appeals to March 18.
Values were last updated for the 2021-22 tax year, under the administration of former County Executive Laura Curran, a Democrat who had broken a decadelong freeze the previous tax year and reassessed all 425,000 property values.
For the next two years, Curran ordered new freezes, citing instabilities in the housing market during the coronavirus pandemic. Blakeman, a Republican who took office in 2022, has frozen the rolls twice.
Nassau Legis. Debra Mulé (D-Freeport) said the freezes have created a “degraded assessment roll.”
“The issue is that we’ve gone back to the days when in order to get a fair assessment and make sure you’re not paying too much, you have to grieve your own taxes,” Mulé said. “That should be the government’s job to make sure the assessments are correct,…
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