Property taxes in rural New Brunswick soar following amalgamations

Tammy Burrell got the 2025 property tax bill for her rural Salisbury home earlier this month and as she feared, it had risen to $1,309. 

It's lower than typical property tax amounts on houses in New Brunswick cities, but for the cost-conscious Burrell, who lives and works in a rural area to save money, the amount is 59 per cent more than she was paying three years ago.  

It's a big jump, and the $486 increase has been putting real pressure on Burrell's razor-thin household budget.

"I live a very basic life," Burrell said in an interview.

"I don't drink, I don't smoke. I can't afford to go out and eat. I got rid of my cable TV because I couldn't afford that any more," she said.

"Every penny I have is going toward paying bills, and these property taxes keep going up and up."

More than 400,000 property tax bills were mailed out across New Brunswick earlier this month and for the third straight year, some of the highest tax increases were delivered to rural homeowners.  

Burrell lives in an area that used to be the local service district of Coverdale, in southeastern New Brunswick. It was among more than 200 rural New Brunswick areas broken up by the province in January 2023 and made to merge with existing municipalities, or in some cases join with each other, into new larger rural districts.  

The changes shrank the number of local government entities in New Brunswick from 340 to 89 and although some financial changes were expected, the risk of large tax increases on some rural homeowners was not something that government highlighted.

A  white paper issued in 2021 that first announced the proposed reforms did acknowledge that, "Increases or decreases in tax rates will result from the restructurings," but in the case of increases, it said those would be "phased in to mitigate the impact to property owners."

The province eventually set a limit of tax rate increases that could be imposed on rural property owners following a merging of communities of five cents per $100 of a property's assessed value per year.  

But there were exceptions to that limit and many rural residents soon experienced tax rate increases above that amount, even as property assessments on their homes were also escalating.

In Hampton, residents of the old local service district of Norton have had their tax rates increase by more than 5 cents per $100 of a property's assessed value in each of the last three years.

That, combined with large assessment increases on houses in the area, have several former Norton residents paying 69 per cent more in property tax this year than three years ago, including a 15 per cent increase in this year's bill.