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You own or will own a property in the canton of Geneva, and you declare it or will declare it in your personal or company tax return.
As you know, this property will be subject to income tax (on its real estate income or its rental value) and wealth tax (on its tax value) for individuals.
For legal entities, this property will be taxed through the taxation of the company’s profits and capital.
This property will be also subject to the complementary property tax for legal entities and individuals.
What is the complementary property tax?
The complementary property tax is a tax that depends on the tax value of your property. It does not consider any debts on the property.
The rate is as follows:
- 0.1% if you are an individual.
- 0.1% if you are a corporation, cooperative society, association or foundation and you use all or part of the property for your business;
- 0.15% if you are an association or a foundation, if you are not pursuing a profit-making goal and if you rent the property
- 0.2% if you are a corporation, a cooperative society, an association, or a foundation, and you are pursuing a profit-making goal and you rent the property.
As an example, for a company with a lucrative activity and renting a property with a tax value of 2'500'000, the additional real estate tax will be CHF 5'000.
This implies that over a period of 20 years, an amount of CHF 100,000 will be paid to the cantonal tax authorities, from which it is possible to be exempted under certain conditions.
How to be exempted ?
Your real estate must have been built after August 5, 2010 and must meet high or very high energy performance standards (HPE or THPE).
These standards are defined in articles 12B and 12C of the Regulation for the application of the law on energy (REn) - these include new or renovated buildings with the Minergie label or any other equivalent label with a clean electricity production rate.
To obtain this 20-year exemption, an application for an HPE/THPE certificate must be submitted to the OCEN (Office cantonal de l'énergie) after the work is completed. Several documents must be attached to this application, including a schematic diagram of the installations and heating commissioning protocols, to name a few.
It should be noted that each HPE/THPE certificate is subject to an administrative fee of CHF 100/hour - it takes 3-4 hours if the file is complete. If the file is incomplete, this amount may be higher.
In case of acceptance by the OCEN, the certificate will be automatically transmitted to the AFC which will grant the exemption to the complementary real estate tax.
For more information, our experts will be happy to help you.
