The new system draws a hard line between your main residence and everything else you own. Your primary home, where you are officially declared, gets a generous exemption from taxation unless its registered value exceeds 450000 euros. For the vast majority of Lithuanian homeowners, that threshold is irrelevant. The problem is what happens to your second property, your third, your summer cottage in Palanga, your garage in Siauliai. All non primary real estate owned by an individual gets pooled by the State Tax Inspectorate, their combined registered value is totalled, and a progressive rate is applied to anything above 50000 euros. On the portion between 50000 and 200000, the rate is 0.2 percent. Between 200000 and 400000 it rises to 0.4 percent, then 0.6 percent up to 600000, 0.8 percent up to a million, and 1 percent above that. Tax returns for most residential property owners are being prepared by VMI and sent out automatically, which means plenty of people will open their post this year and encounter a bill they never once budgeted for.

The number that goes into the bracket calculation is not the market price of your apartment. It is the registered tax value set by the Centre of Registers using mass valuation, updated periodically. Generally running below market. That sounds reassuring until you learn that January 1, 2026, was also when the Centre of Registers rolled out a full set of revised values for the first time in several years. Kazys Maksvytis, director of the registry management division, confirmed when the new values were published in late 2025 that the increases were directly tied to rising real estate prices and were largest in major cities. In Vilnius and Kaunas, where apartment prices have risen somewhere between 7 and 13 percent annually for several years running, the updated registered values are meaningfully higher than what landlords saw on their last statement. A two bedroom apartment in central Kaunas that the Centre of Registers valued at 90000 euros three years ago might now sit at 130000 or 140000 in the new assessment. Owners who have not checked the RC portal recently may be working off outdated estimates when they think about their tax exposure.

To see what this actually costs, take the logistics worker and run her numbers. Say she has three apartments in Kaunas with updated registered values of roughly 130000, 115000, and 95000 euros. That is a combined non primary portfolio of about 340000 euros. The bracket from 50000 to 200000 is taxed at 0.2 percent, producing 300 euros on that slice, and the bracket from 200000 to 340000 is taxed at 0.4 percent, adding another 560 euros. Total annual property tax comes to around 860 euros, against a previous bill of essentially zero. If she is renting those apartments out commercially rather than to family, there is also an additional 0.2 percent defence contribution on top of the standard rate. That can push the combined annual charge toward 1500 euros or more on a portfolio that size. Under the old system, a bill like that would have been unthinkable for a private individual with three mid range Kaunas flats.

The defence contribution catches people off guard because it is not optional, and it applies more broadly than most landlords expect. The standard 0.2 percent surcharge goes to the National Defence Fund and is levied on commercial real estate owned by individuals and on all property owned by legal entities. What counts as commercial in this context is broader than most assume. If you rent out a second apartment and register that rental income as economic activity, the property can be classified as commercial and the surcharge applies on top. A financial analyst at Kreditai.INFO who has been working with small landlords through the transition says a meaningful share of the people he talks to discover only when the assessment arrives that they have two separate charges. The progressive property tax comes from VMI, and the defence contribution runs alongside it. In some cases, the combination doubles the effective rate on the lower brackets, and nobody mentioned this when they were signing up for a business licence to handle their rental income.

There is a three month window running through the end of March each year in which owners can request an adjustment of the registered value if they believe the mass valuation is too high. The gap between the mass figure and the individual assessment has to exceed 20 percent for the adjustment to go through. In a rising market that is a harder case to make than it sounds, though, for older properties in regional towns, the model may have overvalued relative to actual conditions. The argument is worth running. The deadline for the 2026 tax year was March 31. Owners who missed it are stuck with the current assessed values for now.

Arnoldas Antanavičius, head of the real estate consultancy Realdata, observed when an earlier version of this tax was being debated that a landlord with twenty tiny flats in older apartment blocks might not pay any property tax if each is individually valued below 50000 euros. Meanwhile, the owner of one spacious house easily crosses the threshold. The final law pooled all non primary properties together rather than evaluating each one individually, which addresses that specific gap, but his broader observation about uneven exposure still holds. A person with three modest Kaunas apartments has crossed into taxable territory for the first time this year, while someone with a large house will likely pay nothing. The line the law draws is not intuitive. A fair number of people on the wrong side of it will not find out until the envelope arrives.