By Indy Senior Advisor Care Team · September 16, 2026
Senate Enrolled Act 1 repealed Indiana's Over 65 property tax deduction and replaced it with two credits your parent has to claim on one form by January 15. Here is what each is worth, who qualifies, and what a move into care does to both.
Read the Bill That Arrives This Fall
Indiana property taxes come in two installments, due May 10 and November 10. The statement your parent gets is a TS-1, which is both a bill and a comparison: it lists this year's numbers beside last year's, line by line, including every deduction and credit applied to the parcel. The county treasurer has to mail it at least fifteen days before the spring installment is due.
If you are the adult child who has quietly taken over your parent's mail, the fall is the right time to actually read it. Not because anything can be fixed for this year's bill — it cannot — but because the deadline to fix it for next year's bill is January 15, and that arrives faster than it sounds.
There is a specific reason to look this year. Indiana rewrote this corner of its property tax code twice in two sessions. Senate Enrolled Act 1 in 2025 repealed the deduction most seniors in this state had been receiving, and House Enrolled Act 1210 in 2026 changed the rules again for the thing that replaced it. A parent who has had the same benefit on the same house for fifteen years may have lost it without anyone mentioning it.
We are not tax preparers and this is not tax advice. The county auditor is the office that actually applies these credits, and the county auditor is who you call. What follows is what the statutes and the state's own forms say, so you know what you are asking about.
The Deduction Your Parent Had Is Gone
The Over 65 Deduction lived at Indiana Code 6-1.1-12-9 for a long time. Senate Enrolled Act 1-2025, signed April 15, 2025 and made retroactive to January 1, 2025, amended that section so it applies only to property taxes imposed for an assessment date before January 1, 2025. The Department of Local Government Finance describes that as essentially repealing the deduction. It is not being phased out. It ended.
In its place the same act created a new Over 65 Credit at Indiana Code 6-1.1-51.3-1. The credit is worth $150. That is the whole amount, not a percentage of anything.
The mechanics changed along with the name. A deduction came off the assessed value before the tax rate was applied, so what it saved depended on the rate where your parent lives. A credit comes off the tax bill itself. Whether $150 is more or less than the old deduction saved depends on the parcel, and that comparison is not the useful question anyway. The useful question is whether it is on the bill at all.
Here is the trap. DLGF's guidance says individuals who want the new credit must apply on the prescribed form even if they previously received the Over 65 Deduction — but that counties may instead choose to transfer current recipients automatically. May. Some counties did it; some did not. Nobody is required to write and tell your parent which kind of county they live in. If you assume it was handled, and it was not, the benefit simply stops appearing and no letter explains why.
One more detail that catches families where a house is shared. If the property is owned with joint tenants or tenants in common who are not all at least 65, the $150 is reduced by a fraction — the number of tenants under 65 over the total number of tenants. That reduction does not apply when the only co-owner is a spouse.
The Credit That Is Worth More Than $150
The Over 65 Credit gets the attention because the number is easy. The one that protects a fixed income is the Over 65 Circuit Breaker Credit, at Indiana Code 6-1.1-20.6-8.5, and it is a separate thing with separate rules.
What it does is cap the increase. State Form 43708 states the formula in one line: the credit equals the tax liability minus the product of the preceding year's tax liability multiplied by 1.02. In plain terms, a qualifying homestead's property tax bill cannot rise more than two percent over last year's. Everything above that is credited away.
In a flat year that is worth nothing. In a year when assessed values jump — which is exactly the year a retired person on Social Security and a small pension cannot absorb it — it can be worth many times the $150. It is insurance, and like insurance it is invisible until the year you need it.
SEA 1 made this credit reach a lot further. It raised the income ceilings from base amounts of $30,000 and $40,000 to $60,000 single and $70,000 joint, and it removed the $240,000 assessed value limit entirely. That second change matters in Hamilton County and on the north side of Marion County in a way it does not elsewhere in the state. Plenty of people who bought in Carmel or Broad Ripple decades ago were knocked out of this credit purely because the house around them appreciated past $240,000. As of applications filed on or after January 1, 2025, that disqualification is gone.
The income ceilings on this one move every year. DLGF's April 20, 2026 memorandum set the thresholds for 2026 pay 2027 bills at $61,680 for a single filer and $71,960 for a married couple — the base amounts adjusted by the 2.8 percent Social Security cost-of-living increase for 2026.
Two Credits, One Form, Two Different Income Tests
Both credits are claimed on the same piece of paper: State Form 43708, Application for Senior Citizen Property Tax Benefits, revised 5-26. There are two checkboxes at the top. Check both if both apply, because they are not alternatives.
Both test income the same odd way — on adjusted gross income from the calendar year two years before the year the taxes are first due and payable. For a bill payable in 2027, that is the 2025 return. Pull the right year.
Where they differ is what happens to the limit after that. The Over 65 Credit's $60,000 and $70,000 are flat. DLGF's June 2025 memorandum says explicitly that, unlike the repealed deduction, the new credit does not include an annual adjustment of the income limits based on Social Security cost-of-living increases. The Circuit Breaker Credit's limits do adjust every year. So a parent can sit just under the line for one credit and above it for the other, on the same form, in the same year, and that is not an error.
The eligibility conditions differ too. The Circuit Breaker Credit requires that your parent qualified for the homestead standard deduction in the preceding year and qualifies for it in the current year, on the same homestead. The Over 65 Credit, since the 2026 amendment, requires that the applicant reside on the property. Both require that your parent owned the home, or was buying it under a recorded contract, for at least one year before claiming, and was at least 65 on or before December 31 of the preceding year. For the Over 65 Credit only, a surviving, un-remarried spouse who is at least 60 can claim it if the person who died was 65 at the time of death.
Filed once, it stays. Indiana Code 6-1.1-51.3-1 says an individual who remains eligible the following year does not have to file again. The obligation that runs the other direction is the one families miss: someone who becomes ineligible must notify the county auditor within 60 days.
If Your Parent Has Already Moved, Read This Part Twice
This is the part that belongs on a senior care site rather than a tax site.
House Enrolled Act 1210-2026, signed March 12, 2026 and retroactive to January 1, 2026, added a residency requirement to the Over 65 Credit: the individual claiming it must reside on the property. The same statute keeps the protection that has always gone with these benefits — a person may not be denied the credit because they are absent from the home while in a nursing home or hospital. Form 43708 repeats that line in its instructions.
Read what that carve-out names. A nursing home. A hospital. Indiana does not license assisted living as either of those; it issues a Residential Care Facility license under 410 IAC 16.2-5, which is a different license from the comprehensive care facility license a nursing home holds. We could not find an Indiana source — statute, rule or DLGF memorandum — that says how county auditors treat a stay in a residential care facility for this purpose. We are not going to guess at it, and you should not let anyone else guess at it for you either. Ask the county auditor directly, ask in writing or by email, and keep the answer.
The 2026 act also tightened the homestead side of the same question, which is the larger number on the bill. "Principal place of residence" is now defined in Indiana Code 6-1.1-12-37 itself as an individual's true, fixed, permanent home to which the individual has the intention of returning after an absence. And the penalty language moved from permissive to mandatory: a person who fails to notify the auditor after becoming ineligible and keeps claiming the homestead deduction shall be liable for the additional taxes plus a civil penalty equal to ten percent of them.
So a permanent move into assisted living — the house rented out, or emptied and listed, with no intention of returning — is a change to report, not a loose end to leave alone and hope nobody notices. A short rehab stay after a fall is a different situation entirely. The distinction the statute draws is about intention to return, and the person who knows the answer to that is you.
If the house is being held or sold to pay for care, the property tax question sits next to a bigger one. Our post on Indiana Medicaid estate recovery and the family home covers what happens to the house later.
The Bill Is Rising Anyway, and That Is on Purpose
None of this happens in a vacuum. SEA 1 is phasing the homestead standard deduction out entirely. The amount is $48,000 for the 2025 assessment date, $40,000 for 2026, $30,000 for 2027, $20,000 for 2028, $10,000 for 2029, and $0 for 2030 and every year after.
Other pieces move the other way. The supplemental homestead deduction grows from 40 percent of the value remaining after the standard deduction for taxes payable in 2026, to 46 percent in 2027, 52 in 2028, 57 in 2029, 62 in 2030 and 66.7 percent from 2031 on, capped at 75 percent of gross assessed value. A separate new deduction for property covered by the two percent tax cap phases in at 6 percent of assessed value for pay 2026 and 12 percent for pay 2027, climbing to 33.4 percent by pay 2031. And a new Supplemental Homestead Credit is worth the lesser of ten percent of the homestead tax liability or $300.
Those last two require no application at all. The county auditor is supposed to identify eligible property and apply them. That is worth knowing mainly so you do not go looking for a form that does not exist.
What all of it adds up to on one specific house in Lawrence or Greenwood or Zionsville, we are not going to tell you, because nobody honestly can. It turns on the assessed value and on local tax rates that are set year by year. No primary source publishes a reliable per-household figure, and anyone who quotes you one for your parent's parcel is estimating. What is defensible to say is narrower: the two percent cap is the durable protection in that list, and it is the one that requires an application.
What to Do Before January 15
Find the TS-1. It is the statement that came with the tax bill, not the assessment notice. Look down the deductions and credits lines and read them against last year's column, which is printed right there. If your parent had the Over 65 Deduction and you cannot find anything replacing it, that county did not do the automatic transfer.
Call the county auditor, not the assessor. The assessor values the property; the auditor applies deductions and credits. Marion, Hamilton, Hendricks, Johnson, Boone and Hancock counties each have their own, and DLGF keeps the directory at in.gov/dlgf/county-specific-information. Ask two questions and write down both answers: is the Over 65 Credit on this parcel, and is the Over 65 Circuit Breaker Credit on this parcel.
Get State Form 43708 from the auditor or from DLGF's deductions and credits page. Check both boxes if both apply. Have the 2025 tax return in front of you for the income line if you are filing for a 2027 bill. The form carries a perjury warning, which is a real one — answer the residency and ownership questions accurately rather than favorably.
File it with the county auditor on or before January 15, 2027, in person or by mail. A postmark on the deadline counts. Keep the file-stamped copy; the form says the taxpayer gets one.
If your parent has moved into care, or is about to, deal with the homestead question in the same phone call rather than separately. The 60-day notification clock and the ten percent penalty are the reason.
Then keep it in proportion. A $150 credit and a two percent cap are worth claiming and they are worth nothing like the cost of care. Indiana's assisted living median was $5,639 a month in the 2025 CareScout survey, and no Indianapolis-specific figure exists from any primary source. If the property tax bill is the thing straining the budget, the ways families actually pay for care, the VA Aid and Attendance benefit and township trustee assistance are all larger levers than this one. And if the money is genuinely running out, start at what happens when it does.
