Philadelphia's 10-year residential construction abatement is not a permanent tax break. Land stays fully taxable throughout, and when the improvement exemption ends, the sheltered value lands back on the rolls all at once — usually a large, one-time jump in that parcel's tax bill. This tracks that process citywide: what's already come back since 2016, what's scheduled to land through 2031, and what the 2022 reform's slower phase-down adds on a longer horizon through 2036.
2016–2026 — a permanent annual run-rate, not a one-time sum.
From abatements already running toward their 10-year mark.
Before the reformed-schedule and anomalous-bucket figures below.
Every parcel here shows a clean, verifiable 10-year abatement: land taxed throughout, an improvement exemption that starts, runs, and ends in a single observable event. Actual for 2016–2026, projected for 2027–2031 from parcels already mid-abatement.
| Year | Parcels expiring | Revenue added | Cumulative run-rate |
|---|
The near-term cliff bucket and the reformed schedule (below) added together, year by year. The reformed-schedule slice carries a real caveat — shown here for completeness, not as a more-confident number than the chart above it.
| Year | Cliff bucket | Reformed schedule | Combined total | Combined cumulative |
|---|
Abatements starting 2022 or later split into two real legal schedules. New-construction abatements phase down 10 points a year over 10 years instead of cliffing. Improvement/rehab abatements starting 2022+ got no phase-down — they're still a flat 10-year cliff, same as before the reform. Modeled here 2027–2036.
A spot-check of parcels now in year 5 of the phased schedule (legally 40% taxable by now) found 90% still show flat or growing exempt value in the city's own assessment data — the phase-down isn't visibly showing up yet. This chart models what the law says should happen, not an observed trend. Treat it as materially more speculative than the charts above, and avoid adding its totals into the $220.0M figure without saying so explicitly.
| Year | New constr. parcels | New constr. added | Rehab parcels | Rehab added | Total added | Cumulative since 2027 |
|---|
7,954 parcels show abatement-level exempt value for more than 10 continuous years with no visible cliff — too long to be one clean abatement, and excluded from every number above. A permit-history check on the 250 highest-value parcels sorted this into three real categories rather than one guess.
| Verdict | Parcels | % of sample | % of sampled $ value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Likely two sequential abatements | 30 | 12.0% | 66.1% ($587.2M) |
| Single long-running (predates 2015, unknowable start) | 92 | 36.8% | 8.6% ($76.1M) |
| Unexplained (no qualifying permit found) | 128 | 51.2% | 25.4% ($225.7M) |
Among the 250 highest-value anomalous parcels, only 12% (66% of their dollar value) show two separate structural permits roughly a decade apart — consistent with two legitimate back-to-back 10-year rehab cycles that our yearly assessment data can't split apart on its own. Another 37% look like a single continuous rehab whose true start simply predates 2015. The remaining 51% — including 94 parcels (37.6% of the sample) with zero permits of any kind on file, even within the permit table's well-covered 2007–2020 window — are genuinely unexplained. A direct follow-up check ruled out a data-join or coverage-window artifact as the explanation: this is a real gap in the public record, not a fixable pipeline issue. Resolving it further would require OPA's internal abatement certificate data, which isn't publicly queryable. This bucket stays excluded from every headline figure above.
| Address | Year built | Start yr. observed | Current exempt bldg. | Permits found | Verdict |
|---|
Scroll within the table — top 40 by dollar value shown. The 250-row permit-checked sample and the full 7,954-row bucket are both in the downloads below.
"The abatement" isn't one program — Philadelphia and Pennsylvania law currently provide five distinct pathways, resting on four separate state statutes, only two of which are actually in use today.
Live, citywide. Flat 100% exemption for 10 years, unchanged since enactment. Enabling authority: Act No. 34 of 1971 — not LERTA.
Live, citywide. Phases down 100%→10% over 10 years for applications since Jan. 2022 (flat 100% before that). Enabling authority: Act No. 42 of 1977, the "Improvement of Deteriorating Real Property or Areas Tax Exemption Act" — a different 1977 act, also not LERTA.
Governs only the commercial/industrial deteriorated-property abatement (§19-1303.3) and the conversion-of-commercial-to-residential pathway (§19-1303.5) — the precedent the proposed 20-year office-conversion bill extends. Statewide framework any PA municipality can adopt for designated "deteriorated areas."
Not yet introduced in Council as of late Sept. 2026. State authorization is already law: Act 45 of 2025 (Fiscal Code §1799.41-E, signed Nov. 12, 2025) sets a 20-year ceiling on the exemption and leaves the schedule to Philadelphia's own ordinance. A flat 20-year exemption on improvements, applying only to the part of a building that converts, is Mayor Parker's draft choice, not a state requirement. Council President Johnson has pushed for an affordability requirement; the administration says state law preempts it. A separate bill, SB1277 (introduced April 2026, in committee), would generalize the tool statewide. See the full fiscal case for this proposal.
State law lets any PA municipality trade up to a 10-year exemption for 30%-affordable-at-60%-AMI units. Clarke introduced an implementing ordinance in Dec. 2022 for a North Broad corridor; its final disposition (passed / died in committee / still pending) is unconfirmed. Not enacted as an operating program — but still legally available for Council to take up.
One open question remains: whether Clarke's 2022 affordable-housing ordinance ever received a final Council vote. It doesn't change the practical landscape — only the two residential abatements are actually in use today — but it is worth pinning down with a direct Legistar check before this goes into anything more formal than a working page.
Built entirely from Philadelphia's public parcel-assessment history — no internal city data, no assumptions beyond what's stated here.
Philadelphia's assessments table records each parcel's exempt improvement value by year. That field also carries the Homestead Exemption (a flat cap on owner-occupied primary residences, unrelated to construction abatements, covering ~48% of all parcels citywide). A parcel-year counts as abated only when its exempt value exceeds that year's homestead cap by more than $5,000 ($30K in 2015–18, rising to $100K by 2025).
A parcel also has to be a residential property type, not owned by an institutional entity (city, state, university, hospital, authority, religious institution), and not fully land-exempt — a real construction abatement does not exempt land, only new improvement value. An expiration is counted only when the exemption drops to near-zero and the taxable improvement value recovers at least 40% of what was exempted, in the same year, with no full-property exemption or land-value shift. A single isolated one-year dip in an otherwise-continuous abated run is bridged rather than treated as a real gap. Of 33,323 candidate expirations through 2025, 22,698 passed every check.
Sourced from the enacted phase-down ordinance (Bill No. 190944-A, Phila. Code §19-1303(4)(E)): new-construction abatements starting 2022+ phase down 100% → 10% over 10 years; rehab abatements starting 2022+ are unchanged, still a flat 10-year cliff. This models the statute, not an observed trend — see the caveat in the reformed-schedule section above.
Combined City + School District real estate tax rate verified against Philadelphia's official rate schedule for every year in this window: 1.34% (2015), 1.3998% (2016–2027). Projections assume flat future assessed values, no reassessment, no appeals, and no ownership-driven exemption changes — they are estimates from abatements already in progress, not certainties.
Every number on this page traces back to one of these six files. Re-slice, re-rank, or audit them yourself.