Windsor has the highest tax rate in Ontario, according to a Toronto real estate website.
Zoocasa said Windsor is the Ontario city with the highest tax rate at 1.789394 per cent, while Toronto has the lowest tax rate in the province at 0.614770 per cent. Their math showed that a homeowner living in Windsor pays $5,873 more per year in property tax on a home assessed at $500,000 than one in Toronto.
Zoocasa said bigger cities with higher real estate prices and larger populations generally have more leeway on keeping their tax rate low because the amount collected from homeowners is higher to reflect the real estate value, and there are more taxpayers to contribute to the pot. On the other hand, cities with the highest tax rates often have the lowest-priced real estate.
In June, the average price of a home in Toronto was $915,481, while the average price of a house in Windsor was $337,923.
Zoocasa said the amount of property tax a buyer will need to pay is a considerable carrying cost that’s often overlooked, despite it being an ongoing annual financial obligation over the course of the home’s ownership.
Keeping property taxes low can act as an incentive to draw more buyers to a city.
Just this week, Windsor's senior manager of asset planning, Melissa Osborne, told council that it needs to raise property taxes until 2026 to make up a funding shortfall to fix and replace aging roads and other infrastructure. Osborne said there's a $34 million annual shortfall in the capital budget and that property tax bills would need to jump by approximately 1.16 per cent each year to start to fix or replace the $336 million of city assets estimated to be in very poor condition.
