Property tax in Lebanon: what owners pay each year

A home in Lebanon carries two yearly charges. The owner pays built-property tax (ضريبة الأملاك المبنية) to the Ministry of Finance: 4% to 14% of the property's net yearly rental income, plus 10% for the municipalities. Whoever lives in the home pays the municipality 6.5% of its rental value. A home the owner lives in is exempt on its first 360 million pounds (about $4,000) of rental value a year.

How built-property tax is worked out

The owner pays, or anyone who earns from the building, such as a tenant who sublets. It's charged on each property's net yearly income: the rent for a rented home, or, for a home you live in, lend or leave empty, a rental value the Ministry of Finance sets by comparison with similar properties.

The 2024 budget law (Law 324/2024, Article 51) set these brackets. Each rate applies only to the slice inside its bracket, as with income tax.

The state adds 10% of the tax for the municipalities (Law 60/1988, Article 87). The law applies these brackets from 2024. Because it was published in mid-February, the Ministry used slightly lower brackets for 2024 income, so the table applies in full from 2025 income. Dollar figures here use 89,500 pounds to the dollar.

The exemption for a home you live in

Since 2024, each home an owner lives in is exempt on the first 360 million pounds of its net yearly rental value (Article 53), for two homes per owner at most. Co-owners who live there, such as siblings sharing an inherited flat, each get it in proportion to their share. A rented home gets no exemption.

Three examples, in pounds:

Declaring and paying

If a property earns more than 1.2 billion pounds a year, the owner must declare it (form K21) and pay (form K22) on the Ministry's e-services portal, eservices.finance.gov.lb, with e-keys collected from the finance office. The deadline is before 1 April of the following year (Article 52), so 31 March 2027 for 2026 income. It has moved two years running: to 31 July 2025 for 2024 income, and from 31 March to 31 August 2026 for 2025 income, under a 2026 law that suspended legal deadlines (Law 46/2026).

Below 1.2 billion you don't have to file, though above 40 million pounds a year you may. If you don't, the Ministry assesses the tax itself and publishes the assessments in the Official Gazette, and you count as notified the next day (Tax Procedures Law 44/2008, Article 27). Ask the built-property tax office for your area what you owe.

Filing late costs 10% of the tax for each month or part of a month, up to the full tax (Law 44/2008, Article 109, as amended in 2024 and 2026). Paying late adds its own monthly fine.

Tip: Check what you owe once a year, even if you don't file. Unpaid tax keeps adding fines and will stop a sale.

If you rent out a home

Rent from a home is taxed through the built-property tax, not income tax. The base is the rent in the lease, with no exemption.

Register each lease at the municipality, or with the mukhtar where there's no municipality, by 31 December of each year (Law 60/1988, Article 6). Missing it costs twice the registration fee, on top of the fee. If you let rooms or flats by the month or the season, furnished or not, the law treats you as the occupant, so the municipal fee is yours (Article 4).

Leases signed before 23 July 1992 have their own rules: see the rent law. What your tenant pays is in renting an apartment in Lebanon.

Municipal fees

The municipality charges whoever lives in the home, tenant or owner, 5% of its rental value a year (7% for shops and offices), plus 1.5% for sewers and pavements (Law 60/1988, Articles 4, 12 and 79). For a home, that's 6.5%.

The rental value is the rent in a registered lease. When the owner lives there, or no lease is registered, a municipal committee estimates it (Articles 7 and 8). The 2024 budget (Article 36) multiplied the rental values municipalities had set for 2022: by 10 for homes, and by 10 to 20 for shops and offices, depending on the floor. After a brief suspension, the Constitutional Council upheld it in April 2024. If the municipality used the same 450 million pounds as the example above, the fee would be 29.25 million pounds a year (about $327).

Empty homes, and what may change in 2027

An empty home pays no built-property tax if you declare it vacant in writing to the finance office (Built-Property Tax Law of 1962, Articles 15 and 16). The tax stops from the month after you declare and restarts from the month after the home is let. The municipal fee falls on occupants, so an empty home pays none.

The Ministry of Finance's draft 2027 budget (Article 37) would tax homes left empty beyond a set period, one year for an ordinary home and up to three for developers' buildings, on half their estimated rental value. As of November 2026 it isn't law, and in October An-Nahar reported that the government had taken it out of the Ministry's draft.

Clearing the tax before a sale

The Land Registry won't record a sale without the Ministry of Finance's rental value statement. The finance office issues it only once the property's built-property tax and the seller's capital gains tax are paid (Law 10/2022, Article 66, and Ministry of Finance Decision 825/1 of 8 November 2023). That includes tax still owed on the original plot before it was divided into flats. In practice the seller also settles the municipal fees at this stage.

Arrears are the seller's to pay, but they can hold up your purchase, so ask for the receipts early. The costs of buying a home covers the other fees.