Proposition 19

First, why your tax bill isn't based on what your home is worth

Under Proposition 13, your property tax is based on your base year value - broadly what you paid - adjusted upward by no more than 2% per year. That accumulated figure is the factored base year value, or FBYV, and it is the number that actually matters throughout this guide.

Because the annual increase is capped at 2% while market values are not, someone who bought decades ago can pay dramatically less than a neighbor in an identical house who bought last year. Prop 19 is about whether you keep that low FBYV when you move, and whether your children keep it when they inherit.

Part one: taking your tax base with you

Three groups can transfer their FBYV to a replacement home. Effective 1 April 2021:

• Homeowners aged 55 or older
• Severely and permanently disabled homeowners - requires a physician-signed Certificate of Disability (form BOE-19-DC), and the move must accommodate or alleviate the disability
• Victims of a wildfire or Governor-declared disaster - where the original home was substantially damaged, meaning more than 50% of the improvement value. Damage includes loss of value from disaster-restricted access

How many times

55+ and severely and permanently disabled: three transfers, lifetime. Up from one under the old Propositions 60/90/110, and you get three even if you already used one of those.

Disaster victims: not limited to three. The benefit is available once per qualifying disaster event, with no lifetime cap. These are commonly lumped together and they are not the same rule.

Anywhere in California

Previously a transfer generally had to stay within your county, or move to one of ten counties that had adopted an intercounty ordinance - Riverside, San Diego, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Tuolumne. That restriction is gone. This is a real change for Southern California owners, who could previously only move among that list.

The timing rules, which are where people slip

The replacement must be bought or newly built within two years of selling the original - in either order. The "equal or lesser value" benchmark tightens depending on that order:

• 100% if you buy the replacement before you sell
• 105% if you buy within the first year after selling
• 110% if you buy in the second year after selling

Buying above the applicable benchmark no longer disqualifies you - the excess is simply added to your transferred FBYV. Worth modeling before committing to an order of operations, because buy-then-sell and sell-then-buy produce genuinely different numbers.

The Part One deadline nobody mentions

File the claim within three years of purchasing or completing the replacement to get full retroactive relief. File late and relief is generally prospective only - beginning with the year you filed, with the earlier years lost.

Disaster claimants must also own and occupy the replacement as their principal residence at the time of filing.

Part two: what changed for inherited homes

This is the half that surprises families, usually at the worst possible moment. Effective 16 February 2021, parent-child and grandparent-grandchild transfers narrowed considerably.

What used to be true

Under Propositions 58 and 193, a parent could pass a principal residence to a child with no value limit, plus up to $1,000,000 of factored base year value in other property - rentals, a second home, land. The child kept the low base regardless of what they did with it.

What is true now

• Only the family home or a family farm qualifies. The exclusion for other real property is gone entirely. An inherited rental or vacation home gets a new base year value at current fair market value.
• The family home must be a principal residence on both sides - the parent's before the transfer, and the child's after. The child must occupy it within one year and file for the homeowners' or disabled-veterans' exemption. A family farm does not have to be anyone's residence, but it must continue to be used as a family farm.
• There is now a cap. The exclusion covers the property's factored base year value plus $1,044,586. Value above that is added to the FBYV, producing a new taxable value.

$1,044,586 is the adjustment for 16 February 2025 to 15 February 2027. It was $1,000,000 through Feb 2023 and $1,022,600 through Feb 2025, and it adjusts again on 16 February 2027. Take the figure current on your transfer date from the BOE - not from any website, including this one.

Grandparent to grandchild

Still available, and unchanged on this point: all of the grandchild's parents who qualify as children of the grandparent must be deceased as of the date of transfer. The same family-home and cap rules then apply.

What this means in practice

A family home held for decades at a low FBYV, inherited by a child who moves into it, may still transfer largely intact. The same home inherited by a child who keeps their own residence and rents it out gets a new base year value at current market - and the new bill can be several times the old one. That single fact occasionally decides whether a family can afford to keep a property at all. More on inherited property →

Quick reference: things people get wrong

• It works both directions. Parent-to-child and child-to-parent both qualify.
• Only one spouse needs to be 55, provided that spouse is on title to both the original and the replacement home.
• "Children" is broader than people assume - natural children, stepchildren, sons- and daughters-in-law, children adopted before 18, and certain foster children.
• Legal entities do not qualify. Property held by a corporation, partnership or LLC is ineligible for either part. The benefit runs to individuals, including present beneficiaries of a trust - so how a trust is drafted matters. QPRTs whose term ends on or after 16 Feb 2021 are specifically exposed. If your property is in an entity or a trust, this is a conversation with your estate attorney.
• "Family home" includes only reasonable underlying land - the area used as a site for the residence. What counts as reasonable is decided by the county assessor.
• Prop 19 is not retroactive. Transfers on or before 15 February 2021 remain under Prop 58/193. The date of death or change in ownership controls.
• Manufactured homes: treatment turns on homeowners'-exemption eligibility, and a coach on leased land in a park is treated differently from one on the local roll. Relevant to a lot of Southern California 55+ communities - confirm your specific situation with the county assessor.

Forms and where to file

Part one: BOE-19-B (55+), BOE-19-D with BOE-19-DC (disabled), BOE-19-V (disaster). Part two: BOE-19-P (parent-child), BOE-19-G (grandparent-grandchild).

File with the county assessor - where the replacement home is for part one, where the property is for part two. In Riverside County that is the Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder.

Is Prop 19 going to change?

Several efforts have sought to amend or repeal the inherited-property rules. None has succeeded. Repeal initiatives failed to gather enough signatures to qualify in both 2022 and 2024, and a constitutional amendment to restore the parent-child exclusion failed in committee in 2023.

As of 2026 the rules described here are fully in force, and no repeal has qualified for a ballot. Plan on the law as it is, not as it might become - but if you are weighing a transfer that is years away, it is worth a check at the time.

Where we can actually help

We are brokers, not tax advisers, and the consequential decisions here belong with your accountant or estate attorney. What we do is the real estate side: model what a replacement at different price points does to a transferred FBYV, sequence a buy and a sale to land on the right benchmark, and value an inherited property properly when a family is weighing keeping it against selling.

The pattern, consistently, is that families who do well are the ones who asked before the transfer rather than after.