The Israeli municipality re-measured my apartment and my arnona has jumped. Can I challenge it from abroad?

The letter arrives in Hebrew, often to the Israeli address of a tenant or a relative, and says the municipality has re-measured the property. The floor area has grown by 22 square metres, the classification has moved from residential to something else, or a balcony that was open in 1998 is now counted as enclosed. The bill roughly doubles. Owners abroad tend to treat this as an administrative error to be sorted out by email at leisure. It is not: it is a determination with a statutory challenge period, and the period runs from delivery, not from the day somebody translates the letter for you.

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Detailed Answer

The Local Authorities (Appeal on Determination of General Arnona) Law 5736-1976 creates a self-contained route that displaces the ordinary courts for most arnona arguments. Section 2 requires every council to appoint one of its employees as the arnona manager (menahel ha'arnona). Section 3 allows a person charged with general arnona to object to that manager within ninety days of receiving the payment demand, and it limits the objection to four grounds: that the property is not situated in the area stated; that there is an error in the type of property, its area or its use; that the objector is not the holder of the property at all; and, for a property used as a business, that it falls within a statutory exemption. Section 3(b) closes the door on arguments that the levy itself is unlawful, which belong in a petition rather than an objection, while Section 3(c) preserves the "I am not the holder" ground so that it can still be raised in court even after the ninety days have gone. Section 4 sets the discipline that makes the procedure worth using: the manager must give a reasoned reply within sixty days of receiving the objection, and if he does not, the objection is deemed to have been accepted, unless the appeals committee has granted him an extension of up to a further thirty days. Section 5 provides for appeals committees of three members appointed by the council, and Section 6 carries the matter onward, first to that committee and then by appeal to the District Court sitting as a Court for Administrative Affairs, in each case within thirty days of the decision being challenged. The Municipal Taxes and Government Levies (Payment under Protest) Law 5723-1963 runs alongside all of this and allows the disputed sum to be paid under protest and recovered, which matters because filing an objection does not by itself suspend collection, and unpaid arnona attracts interest and linkage and can end up as an execution file against the property.

For an owner outside Israel the whole case is usually won or lost on measurement, and measurement is a factual argument that has to be made with an Israeli surveyor's report. The municipality's own figure comes from an aerial or external survey and frequently includes areas the local by-law does not permit it to charge for, or applies a classification the property no longer matches because a shop became a storeroom or a flat was split. None of that can be argued from photographs. The workable sequence is to instruct an Israeli lawyer or surveyor to obtain the municipality's measurement file and the current arnona by-law, have the property measured internally, and file the objection within the ninety days with the survey attached, since an objection filed on time can be supplemented later while one filed late is simply out. Three cross-border points recur. Delivery to the property address counts, so an owner abroad who has not registered a mailing address or an Israeli representative with the municipality loses weeks before the letter is even seen. A power of attorney is needed for anyone to act for you, and the municipality will want it notarised and apostilled if signed abroad. And an exemption for an empty property, which is a separate track under the arnona regulations rather than a ground of objection, has its own notification requirements, discussed in our answer on arnona for non-resident property owners.

In Practice: Section 3 of the Local Authorities (Appeal on Determination of General Arnona) Law 5736-1976 gives 90 days from receipt of the demand to file an objection with the arnona manager at the local authority, on four grounds only. Section 4 requires his reasoned reply within 60 days, failing which the objection is deemed accepted, subject to a possible 30-day extension granted by the appeals committee. Section 6 allows an appeal to the appeals committee within 30 days, and then to the District Court sitting as a Court for Administrative Affairs within a further 30 days. On a 100 square metre flat billed at a typical big-city residential rate of roughly NIS 100 per square metre a year, a 20 metre measurement error is about NIS 2,000 every year until it is corrected, and an Israeli surveyor's measurement report costs around NIS 1,500 to NIS 3,000.

When to Consult a Lawyer

• The re-measurement is retrospective and the municipality is billing arrears for earlier years. Retrospective charging is subject to its own limits and is the part most often reduced, but the argument has to be made in the objection rather than raised later.
• The property has been reclassified from residential to business, commercial or storage. Classification disputes turn on the wording of that municipality's by-law rather than on general principles, and the difference between categories in a city like Tel Aviv or Haifa is several times the residential rate.
• You are not in fact the holder of the property, because it was sold, inherited, or is occupied by someone else under an arrangement never reported to the council. This is the one ground that survives the deadline, and it needs to be raised with the right documents.

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Speak With an Israeli Attorney

We file arnona objections and appeals for owners abroad, obtain the municipality's measurement file, and deal with arrears and collection where a bill has already gone to the execution office.

Contact us for a confidential initial consultation.