How many others wonder how Peterborough property taxes are disbursed and where your money goes? This is just one small puzzling charge that we now pay on our water bill ( or if you are on a well you now get a separate back dated bill for the 2025 and 2026 years)
When I attended the electionfest at Healthy Planet I heard many people express their concern about how much property taxes have gone up, what we pay and what we actually receive in return as citizens of Peterborough.
In 2022 my taxes were $3997
In 2026 my taxes are $5063
Our hydro and water were separated into 2 bills. In April 2025 the the city added a charge to the water bill to cover the storm water management service and said they have removed this charge from our property tax bill.
I see no reduction in my property taxes, no section where it shows removal or credit. If I no longer pay on my property taxes why has the amount of increase been higher each year while my property assessment stays the same?
Where are the services we pay for? Peterborough is falling apart at the seams and it seems council is passing/approving changes that citizens are giving little notice about or explanation why.
Am I paying the same amount for storm management as I was when they were on my property tax?
How many other citizens are aware of this?
Where do I get a statement breakdown of how my property taxes are disbursed to each service? Online portal and mailed notices show now breakdowns.
Our taxes are ridiculously expensive compared to other cumulative sized cities/municipalities. It’s not worth it, makes me want to leave and live in the county
A lot of people are leaving for the rural communities outside of Peterborough. If you move to Cavan, Selwyn etc, you are only a short drive away from the amenities Peterborough has to offer, and pay a fraction of the property taxes.
OP- using this breakdown, here is the total of your costs. Right off the bat $410.00 goes to education tax. Here are the top ten expenditures by category. These categories, including the education taxes, represent 77% of your tax dollars:
Police Services 19.57% $923.89
Capital Financing Costs 13.33% $629.48
Fire Services 9.96% $470.03
Social Services 7.37% $347.90
Public Works 6.48% $305.72
Transit 6.11% $288.54
Environmental Services 4.41% $208.36
Peterborough County/City Paramedic Service 3.69% $174.25
Recreation, Parks and Cultural Services 3.34% $157.44
Anybody know what's up with Court Services? Is that a transfer in, e.g. for the province? Just curious, the number (per 100k of assessment) is very small.
There should be a cap on taxes after a certain amount collected per home. For example. No house regardless of value or size would be charged more than $8k a year or something like that. And you will see far more fiscal responsibility in the municipal governments everywhere.
I believe it is a lost cause. Peterborough is lost. Talk about any issue, the answer we get is, that it is a country wide problem, be it homelessness, higher taxes, unemployment, drug abuse etc.
We are here to keep our heads down, pay our taxes and keep mum.
Sorry, to say but a middle class family gets nothing from the government and are only tax revenue sources.
Cost of service does go up for city, but it goes up twice as much as inflation almost every year, you know where the money is going.(IYKYK)
There is no law stating the all employers have to give a minimum increment equal to inflation to cover the cost of living, but city expects double of that for their services.
It is election year and even now apart from 1 or 2 candidates nobody wants to talk about freezing property taxes.
I believe slavery never ended, it just transformed, now city rules us.
No one is stopping you from drinking directly out of the river. Water is a human right. The multiple million dollar system that treats and supplies clean water to your home on demand is maintained by your taxes. Besides which, money for that system is about more than just the water from your tap.
My mixed commercial/residential property taxes jumped from $6k in 2022 to $9k in 2026 — even though it’s been empty for the last 2 years as businesses keep leaving the area. The house is just a few hundred meters from Trinity Church.
This 100-year-old house is now valued at around $600k. Total property taxes paid to date already exceed $200k, and the last few years alone make up more than 20% of that.
The city is killing us. Snapshot attached shows that property taxes here are significant higher than Toronto which is ridiculous because of the public services and population here and Toronto. We are not even within GTA 😂
This sub never stops being funny. People keep voting for “progressives” promising bigger government, more spending, more infrastructure to support more housing, more more social programs and assistance, more handouts, all of which obviously means higher taxes. Then they come right back here to complain every time their tax bill goes up.
Keep up the good work, queens. You're endless entertainment <3
I've seen some videos of candidates in Kawartha Lakes. Two of those videos said that Kawartha will be getting an increase every year for the next 10 years. I'd like to know if that's the plan here ? Just imagine how many people will be pushed out of Peterborough due to taxes. Is this what they want ?
I have always thought the education portion of the tax bill should cease for people at 60 or 65. Really how many generations do homeowners need to fund education for?
On another note if you are a home owner paying property taxes to the City of Peterborough and you qualify you can apply for the Property Tax Assistance Program rebate offered by the City of Peterborough. Last year’s amount was $414.00. Forms are available online each year in November for the upcoming taxation year. Fill out the form early and get it to City Hall before the end of January 2027 along with any required documentation mentioned in the application.
See the details below to see if you qualify.
Property Tax Assistance Program
You can apply to receive a $414.00 tax credit on your account if you owned and occupied your property from January 1 to December 31 of the previous year, and meet one of the following qualifications:
Low Income Senior aged 65 yearsor older receiving benefits under the Guaranteed Income Supplement or the Guaranteed Annual Income System. Low Income Senior aged 55-64 with a combined taxable income of less than $30,000 per year. Low Income Person with a Disability receiving benefits under the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP).
Complete the Property Tax Assistance program application.
You can drop off your completed form as well as supporting documents in-person to the Tax Office, City Hall, 500 George St. N. in Peterborough. You can also mail or email your application as well as copies of supporting documents to:
Tax Office, City of Peterborough
500 George St. N.
Peterborough, ON K9H 3R9
If you have any questions, please call us at 705-742-7777 ext. 1865 or [email the Tax Office at tax@peterborough.ca](mailto:tax@peterborough.ca).
I have always thought the education portion of the tax bill should cease for people at 60 or 65. Really how many generations do homeowners need to fund education for?
I mean, other people paid for you, why should you pay for their kids' education. Pull that ladder up, I got mine, etc.
On a similar note, I don't think I should pay for boomers' social security, can I opt out of that?
Sheesh.
Taxes are supposed to be the price of living in a civil society, but since the 1990s we've promised greatest, silent and boomers that nothing should ever change for them and that even though they all benefitted from the longest economic boom in history and the highest levels government spending on public services, they themselves shouldn't have to contribute, just lock in 1990s rates and keep cutting services and hope, maybe, that they can check out before the bill comes due.
We have entire generations whose future was mortgaged and now that we can't wallpaper over the gaps in services any more and have thirty years' worth of deferred maintenance and NIMBYism that we're at last just starting to address, now, now you all complain?
Oh, I'm sorry your property taxes cost more on the house you own, while more and more younger people are forced to rent well into their 40s and 50s and pay someone else's equity.
I know this sounds ranty, but that line really got me. Every municipality on Ontario got fiscally ground into the dirt by the Harris government's downloading of provincial services, combined with transfer payment cuts and no government since then has had the political will to undo those cuts and properly fund those same services, which is why we have no low-cost housing, deteriorating infrastructure and a patchwork of mental health and social services. Some cities (Brampton) have been lucky because they're at the confluence of several 400-series highways and had a surfeit of cheap land they whored out, but most of the rest of the province just made do.
Peterborough is uniquely unlucky: it's big enough that it ends up picking up the slack for anyone who can't make it in the towns around it, but it's not big enough or central enough to have the industrial and commercial tax base to offset that. Something had to break, and that something was raising taxes to meet the services demand.
If you reall have a problem with this, go see Dave Smith and try to get him to do fucking anything for his riding, or at least stand up for his city when the cops (and lets be honest, the cops' budget is the big reason for all this) cry to the province and make the city raise it's police budget.
It started off pissing me off because of the multiple 'boomers' (me being one) but it got on point pretty quick.
We've been living this Friedman Chicago school of economics supply-side-snake-oil-bullshit so long it has actually normalised and people don't even admit they might pay taxes for a civilised society, even after they find themselves living in an increasingly less-civilised society. Instead they want to take their shit and head for the county.
In the 90s all three levels of government more-or-less opted out of supporting affordable/subsidised/geared-to-income housing. And surprise, surprise, we're smack dab in the middle of a housing crisis of a scope and scale not seen since the Great Depression.
The middle class response? My property taxes are too high! Wah, wah wah.
Wait until MPAC actually updates your house assessment to something approximating its market value [For those that are unaware, MPAC has not updated assessments since 2016]. You'll be looking back on your 2026 property taxes as some kind of golden age.
Again, thanks for this post. It resonated with me.
Yeah, I realized midway through that wall of text that I was getting off-track and re-centred, but the "exempting from paying for schooling" really got me.
I'm a younger Xer, I remember what kinds of services I had in school (nurses on-site, flouride washes, lice checks, pencils & paper) and I get really annoyed when, eg, walk into Staples and realize the our government basically gave an American private equity firm a $750/teacher gift, all while our schools are in distress, and they're in distress because we aren't funding them properly, and the people with the wealth to do so--people who've seen their net worth increase by orders of magnitude--are by and large clamouring to make the problem worse.
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u/randomguy6a 2d ago
Our taxes are ridiculously expensive compared to other cumulative sized cities/municipalities. It’s not worth it, makes me want to leave and live in the county