New Westminster’s 2025 Property Tax Notices are out, so let’s talk property taxes!
There will undoubtedly be millions of pixels devoted to complaining about 28% or 35% or 81% property tax increases over the last three years by certain anti-tax blowhards, so I figured I’d help put property taxes in context using numbers.
Specifically, the numbers I’ll be using are the exact property taxes we’ve paid for our townhouse in New Westminster over the past nine years.
In 2016, the first year we paid property taxes in New Westminster, we paid $1,264.73. In 2025, nine years later, our property tax bill is $2,415.42, nearly double! This works out to a yearly increase of 7.53%. One year our property tax went up 15.5%, another year it actually went down 1.07%, this year they went up 2.71%, but on average our property tax increased 7.53% each year.
Over those nine years we have paid a grand total of $17,983.23 to the City of New Westminster in property taxes.
But hang on a second. Property values have changed quite a bit over those nine years as well. In 2016, our property was assessed at $370,000. This year our assessed value is $858,000, much more than double! One year it went up 33%, another year it went down 0.61%, but if you average it all out, our property’s value has increased 9.6% each year. Compare that to our yearly property tax increase of 7.53%, would you?
And let’s talk about absolute dollars too. Remember that we’ve paid nearly $18,000 in property taxes in nine years. In the first year we owned our house, its assessed value went from $370,000 to $494,000. In one single year our net worth increased by $124,000 without us having to do anything. In nine years it’s increased by $488,000 and we’ve only had to pay $18,000 in property taxes. Don’t forget, that $488,000 is pure profit because we live in the house, if we sell it we don’t pay any taxes on it.
In other words, in one year we made nearly seven times as much money on our house than we’ve paid in property taxes over nine years we’ve lived here.
So next time someone complains that property taxes are rising too fast, remember the bigger picture: tax bills have grown, but property values and untaxed wealth have grown even faster.