If you’re an Ontario homeowner, every four years an envelope arrives in your mail from the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) telling you the value of your property.
This information is important because not only does it give you a snapshot of how much your home is worth, the MPAC assessment is also used to calculate your property taxes.
The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation is an Ontario-based not-for-profit organization that tracks and reports information on more than five million properties in the province.
Funded by all the municipalities in Ontario, MPAC provides property values to taxpayers, businesses, governments, and municipalities. Municipal governments then use those numbers to calculate your property taxes.
So, if your home is worth $1 million, then your property taxes will be based on the municipality’s calculation of your home’s value, as well as the municipal and education tax rates. For example, here are Toronto’s property tax calculations for various types of properties.
If the value of your home has gone up, so will your property taxes. If it drops, you will pay less tax.
When you get your MPAC assessment, you’ll see the following:
You will also see the property summary, which covers details of your property including the type, size, square footage of the buildings on it, the year they were constructed, and an overview of key factors that were considered in the assessment.
Also included is the change in the value of your property since the last assessment.
MPAC has three approaches to calculating the value of properties:
For residential properties, MPAC’s valuation includes:
Usually, your MPAC assessment happens every four years, but since November 2021, the province has postponed the assessment due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That means that the 2022 and 2023 property tax years will be based on January 2016 current values.
This may be why the assessed value of your home may be lower than the current value of the properties selling in your area.
No, but if you disagree with your property’s assessment, you can dispute it by filing a Request for Reconsideration. You can provide updated information that may help with a more accurate assessment.
One final note about the MPAC assessment: it doesn’t affect your home insurance costs, so the value of your home won’t affect your home insurance rate. However, your home’s replacement value (i.e. what it would cost to replace it altogether if it were destroyed in a fire, for instance) does matter to insurance companies and will affect your annual premium.