Victorian Labor pledges to restore the A$300,000 land tax threshold

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Victorian Labor has promised that, if it is returned to government, it will lift the state's general land tax threshold from a site value of A$50,000 back to A$300,000. The party set out the pledge in a release dated Sunday 4 October 2026, and the next day the Premier's office published government data, under Treasurer Colin Brooks, on the people who pay land tax between those two values.

The two documents do different jobs. The first is a party's election commitment, with a timetable, a cost and a list of savings meant to pay for it. The second is a government release describing the group the commitment is aimed at: more than 250,000 Victorians with a land tax liability on land valued between A$50,000 and A$300,000. Nothing in either changes the tax today. The threshold stays where it is unless a future parliament legislates otherwise, and Victoria goes to an election in November, according to the Australian Associated Press (AAP).

Premier of Victoria media release, 5 October 2026; Victorian Labor release, 4 October 2026. The cost is the party's own figure.

What Labor has promised

Labor's release describes a phased return to the old threshold rather than a single step. Premier Ben Carroll said the change would be legislated through the first budget of a re-elected government. "I'll cut land tax in my first Budget," he said in the release.

The first move would come in the 2027/28 financial year, when the threshold would rise by A$25,000 to A$75,000. It would rise by the same amount in each of the following three years. The release puts a number of people and a saving against each of those four steps, and they are the only steps it itemises.

Added together, the four steps would take 107,000 people out of the tax by 2030/31. That is fewer than half of the group of more than 250,000 the party says it would remove in the end. The rest, something over 143,000 people, sit in the final three years, for which the release gives one line: continued increases, with the threshold fully restored to A$300,000 by the end of the 2033/34 financial year.

The arithmetic of those last years is worth setting out, because the release does not. After 2030/31 the threshold would stand at A$150,000, leaving another A$150,000 to cover in three financial years. AAP, in a report by Duncan Murray on 4 October, described the plan as a rise of A$25,000 a year that returns the threshold to A$300,000 in 2033. Three further steps of A$25,000 would reach A$225,000, not A$300,000, so the later steps would have to be larger than the early ones. Labor has not published their size.

The release also counts savings over a fixed span. It says the 33,000 people freed in the first year would save A$500 that year, or A$3,000 over six years, and it scales the later groups the same way: A$2,500 over the remaining five years, A$3,900 over four and A$2,925 over three. Six years from 2027/28 end with 2032/33, while the full restoration is promised for 2033/34. The schedule from first step to last therefore covers seven financial years, and the savings are counted over six.

How the party says it would pay

Labor puts the cost of the pledge at A$230 million over five years. AAP reported the same figure as the hit to the state budget.

The release names three savings to offset it. Consolidating the government car fleet is put at A$70 million. Delaying level crossing removals is put at A$798 million. Reducing the number of public service executive roles is put at more than A$100 million. On the party's own figures the three add up to more than A$968 million, about four times the stated cost of the land tax measure over five years. The release does not say over what period each saving is counted.

One limit of the costing follows from the timetable. Five years from the first step in 2027/28 run to 2031/32. The last two years of the schedule, in which the threshold would reach A$300,000, fall outside that span. No figure has been published for them.

Treasurer Colin Brooks, quoted in the Labor release, presented the savings as what makes the tax cut possible. Deputy Premier Gabrielle Williams used the same release to challenge the Liberals and One Nation to explain how they would fund their own tax cuts.

Who sits between A$50,000 and A$300,000

The government release of Monday 5 October, titled "New Data Reveals Who Pays Land Tax", describes the taxpayers in the bracket. Its central finding is that nine in ten of them have one taxable property. Around 2 per cent pay land tax on three or more. Applied to a group of about 250,000, that is roughly 225,000 people with a single taxable property and about 5,000 with three or more.

"We know that people who are within these tax brackets overwhelmingly own one taxable property," Mr Brooks said in the release.

Land tax in Victoria does not apply to the home an owner lives in. Labor's release describes it as a tax on investment properties and other land that is not a principal place of residence. The one taxable property the data refers to is therefore land held in addition to the family home, or by someone who lives elsewhere.

The release also gives ages. More than 86,000 of the taxpayers are under 50, including almost 48,000 in their 40s and more than 31,000 in their 30s. More than 51,000 are in their 50s. The median age is 53. Taken together, the under-50s and those in their 50s come to more than 137,000, over half of the bracket.

Finally, it ranks council areas by the number of taxpayers in the bracket. The count follows the taxpayer's recorded delivery address, so it shows where the owners live, not where the taxed land lies.

The next four on the list are Monash with 6,458, Hume with 6,413, Whitehorse with 5,945 and the Mornington Peninsula with 5,529. The ten areas together hold 71,259 of the taxpayers, fewer than three in ten of the bracket. No single area holds as much as 4 per cent of the total.

How the threshold came to be A$50,000

The threshold Labor now proposes to restore is one a Labor government removed. According to AAP, the cut from A$300,000 to A$50,000 was made in 2023 under former premier Daniel Andrews, to help address debt after spending during the COVID period. AAP reports that the change was slated to last until 2033.

Labor's release gives its own account of the effect. It says the 2023 change brought about 250,000 additional Victorians into land tax, most of them paying on one property, and that the pledge would save them up to A$975 a year. The two savings in the party's schedule suggest how the charge falls today: A$500 a year for the people released by the first two steps, whose land is valued under A$100,000, and A$975 for those released by the next two.

Prosper Australia, an advocacy organisation, describes the present settings in a statement of 4 October as a threshold of A$50,000 applying from 2024, with the current rates running through the 2024 to 2033 land tax years. Read with AAP's account, that places the promised end point of Labor's schedule, 2033/34, close to the time the 2023 arrangement was itself due to finish.

Where the other parties stand

Labor is not the first to promise the A$300,000 threshold. AAP reports that the opposition announced a similar policy in May 2026. Under the Coalition plan, led by Opposition Leader Jess Wilson, the threshold would rise by A$50,000 a year and reach A$300,000 by 2031/32. Five steps of that size cover the A$250,000 gap, against a first step of half that size under Labor and an end date two financial years later.

Berwick Star News, a local newspaper in Melbourne's south-east, reported on 9 October that One Nation's state leader, Warren Pickering, pledged in early September to lift the threshold to A$300,000.

The same report sets out a different approach from the Greens. They would raise land tax to 5.3 per cent for owners of more than A$5 million in residential investment property. The party says this would raise A$6.4 billion over a decade, to be used to cut stamp duty for owner-occupiers, including removing it on homes up to A$1.1 million.

So three parties propose to return the threshold to A$300,000, on different timetables, and one proposes to tax the largest residential investment holdings more heavily and reduce a different tax.

The criticism from land tax advocates

Not everyone who commented welcomed the pledge. Prosper Australia, which argues for taxing land in place of other taxes, published a response on the day of the announcement. "This is not tax reform. It is tax retreat," said its Executive Director, Rayna Fahey.

Prosper's argument is that land value is created by the community around it, and that making land cheaper to hold while keeping taxes on work and on moving is unfair to working people. It names stamp duty as the tax to remove instead, on the ground that it penalises people who move for work, family or downsizing.

The organisation also disputes that the cut is needed to help first home buyers. It cites two points. First home buyers made up 39.1 per cent of new owner-occupier lending in Victoria in the March quarter of 2026, which it says was the second-highest share of any state or territory, behind the Australian Capital Territory. And Victoria already gives first home buyers a stamp duty exemption on homes up to A$600,000 and a concession on purchases from A$600,001 to A$750,000.

Those are an advocacy group's arguments, and they sit against the government's own case, put by Mr Brooks, that the people in the bracket are mostly owners of one taxable property at ages when mortgages are still being paid.

What happens before anything changes

For an owner with a small holding, or an agent asked about one, the practical position on 10 October is unchanged. The pledges are not legislation, and the threshold remains A$50,000.

Three things remain unpublished in the sources. Labor has not itemised the steps from 2031/32 to 2033/34. Its costing stops at five years. And the number of people who would benefit in the last three years is known only by subtraction from the total.

What the week has settled is narrower. The government has put figures on who pays in the bracket, and both the party of government and the opposition are committed to the same destination for the threshold, by different routes and on different dates. Which route is taken, if any, is a matter for the voters in November and then for the parliament they elect.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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