Land Tax on Investment Property in Queensland

This is the part that catches people, and it's worth getting straight before any of the numbers matter. Queensland land tax is assessed on the taxable value of your land. Not on what you paid for the property, not on what it's worth now, and not on the house sitting on it.

So the $800,000 house you own isn't an $800,000 land tax problem. The land under it might be worth less than half that.

Our own calculator makes the split visible, because we build and sell house-and-land. Its default scenario is a property costing $801,058, made up of $320,423 of land and $480,635 of construction. Land tax looks at the $320,423 and ignores the rest.

That single property, held by an individual, attracts no Queensland land tax at all. The threshold is $600,000 and the land is a bit over half of it.

Which is exactly why the next section matters more than this one. One property is rarely the question.

One date, once a year. In QRO's words, your liability for land tax is based on land you own at midnight on 30 June each year.

Own a block on 29 June and sell it on 1 July, and you're assessed on it. Buy on 1 July and you aren't, for that year.

Two things follow. Settlement timing around the end of June has a real cost attached to it, and a land tax assessment that arrives months later is describing a position you held in June, not the one you hold when the letter turns up.

We don't advise on settlement timing and we're not qualified to. It's worth raising with your conveyancer while a contract is still being negotiated, rather than after.

Two different scales, and which one applies to you depends on who owns the land rather than what the land is.

An individual, for this purpose, means an Australian citizen, a permanent visa holder, or someone who usually lives in Australia. Companies and trustees sit on a separate and harsher scale, and they start paying at $350,000 rather than $600,000.

That gap between the two thresholds is $250,000 of land value, and it's the reason ownership structure is a question worth asking before you buy rather than after.

Same tax, different scale. A company or a trustee pays from $350,000 of land value, and the first band is steeper: $1,450 plus 1.7 cents in the dollar, against $500 plus 1 cent for an individual.

There's a carve-out worth knowing about. For a special disability trust, QRO applies the individual rates, so the $600,000 threshold applies instead.

And a surcharge sits over the top for foreign companies and trusts: 3% on taxable land valued at $350,000 and above, in addition to the ordinary rates. If any part of your ownership structure is foreign, that changes the arithmetic more than anything else on this page.

Land tax doesn't look at your properties one at a time. It adds up the taxable value of all the Queensland land you own and assesses the total.

It doesn't care which council area each block sits in. We can be concrete about that, because our own rent roll is spread out. On 18 August 2026 the properties we manage sat across fifteen suburbs and five local government areas: Sunshine Coast, Gympie, Moreton Bay, Logan and Fraser Coast. An owner holding land in Maroochydore and Kallangur is assessed on the two together, exactly as if they were side by side.

Work it through with the numbers from our calculator. One house-and-land property at $320,423 of land value is under the individual threshold and attracts nothing. Two of them is $640,846, which clears $600,000, and the bill is $500 plus 1 cent on the $40,846 above it. About $908.

The third property is where it stops being a rounding error. Three at that land value is $961,269, and the bill is roughly $4,113.

None of that is a reason not to buy a third property. It's a reason to know the number before you do, because it's a holding cost that arrives every year and it isn't in most people's spreadsheets.

Your home is the big one. A principal place of residence is exempt, and QRO publishes an eligibility tester for the cases that aren't obvious.

That exemption is why the first investment property is often the first land tax anyone has paid. The home was never in the total, so the investment starts the clock.

Where land is owned with other people, the rate applies to your share rather than to the whole parcel. So a half share of a $700,000 block is $350,000 of land against your threshold, not $700,000.

We're describing the published rules here, not applying them to your circumstances. Which exemptions you qualify for, and what your ownership structure does to the total, is a conversation for your accountant.

These are the examples Queensland Revenue Office publishes, reproduced rather than invented, so you can check the arithmetic against the source.

An individual with land taxable at $680,000 pays $1,300. That's $500 for reaching the threshold, plus 1 cent on each of the $80,000 above it.

An individual with land taxable at $6,400,000 pays $87,000. That's $62,500 for reaching the $5,000,000 band, plus 1.75 cents on each of the $1,400,000 above it.

Both examples are on the individual scale. Run the same land values through the company and trustee scale and the answers are higher, which is the point of showing both tables above.

Land tax is one line in a list, and it's usually not the biggest one. Council rates, insurance, management, maintenance and loan interest all arrive whether or not there's a land tax assessment.

What makes it different is that it's the only one that gets worse purely because you own more. Everything else scales with the property; land tax scales with the portfolio, and it steps up rather than sloping.

Our own calculator doesn't model land tax at all. That's an honest limitation rather than an oversight: the number depends on the total Queensland land you hold, which is a fact about you and not about any one property. The calculator models the property.

So if you're using it to work out what a purchase costs to hold, add land tax separately, and work it out on your whole holding rather than on the new property alone.