"All those early developments are coming off the rolls, and we have about 4.5 percent increase without raising taxes."
That's Mayor Sal Panto, describing Easton's 2026 budget to LehighValleyNews.com, and he wasn't complaining. He was explaining where the city's extra revenue was coming from without touching the 24.95-mill rate that applies to everyone. The example he reached for was the Simon Silk Mill, the converted industrial campus off North 13th Street that's spent years paying reduced property taxes while it filled up with apartments. That abatement is finishing. The taxes on those improvements are catching up to what they'll eventually be for good.
If you're comparing homes in Easton right now, that sentence is worth sitting with. A number of the most attractive-looking tax lines in the city, the ones attached to converted mill lofts, new downtown construction, and renovated homes in older neighborhoods, aren't fixed. They're partway through a ten-year climb, and the home you're pricing against your monthly budget may look very different on that front five years from now than it does on the listing sheet today.
What "Coming Off the Rolls" Actually Means
The mechanism behind this is a state program called LERTA, the Local Economic Revitalization Tax Assistance Act. Pennsylvania has allowed municipalities to use it since 1977, and Easton has run its own version since 2012, aimed at deteriorated or underused properties. The idea is straightforward. When an owner substantially renovates a property or builds new on a qualifying parcel, the resulting increase in assessed value doesn't get taxed all at once. It gets phased in.
Easton's own tax code lays out the schedule plainly. In the first year after the improvement becomes assessable, the owner gets a 100 percent exemption on the added value. Year two drops to 90 percent. Year three is 80 percent, year four is 70 percent, and the exemption keeps sliding down in ten-point increments until the property is paying full freight, typically by year ten or eleven. The land itself was never part of the deal. Owners pay full tax on the land the whole time. Only the value created by the improvement gets the temporary break.
That distinction matters for anyone shopping renovated inventory in Easton. A converted loft with a low current tax bill isn't cheap to own long-term. It's on a clock, and the clock started the day the city issued the certificate of occupancy, not the day you closed on the unit.
The Schedule Behind the Discount
| Year after CO | Exemption on improved value |
|---|---|
| 1 | 100% |
| 2 | 90% |
| 3 | 80% |
| 4 | 70% |
| 5-10 | continues declining 10% per year |
The pace is fixed by ordinance, which means it's knowable. If you can find out when a property received its certificate of occupancy, you can work out roughly where it sits on this table and how many years of relief are left before the tax bill reaches its full, permanent level.
That's a very different question than the one most buyers ask, which is simply what the current annual tax bill happens to be.
The Buildings Behind the Statistic
Easton's own financial disclosures show how much this adds up to citywide. As of late June 2025, 42 parcels were receiving LERTA abatements. In 2020, those properties had added $1.2 million in taxable assessed value to the city's rolls, generating about $30,000 in that year's tax revenue. By 2024, the added value had grown to $6.3 million, worth about $157,000 in current-year taxes. The city's own projection puts that figure at $15.1 million in added value by 2033, or roughly $377,000 in annual tax revenue, as more properties phase in and older ones finish phasing out.
The Easton Area School District has its own version of this math on a separate batch of properties added to its LERTA rolls a few years back. Nine parcels, including 1-6 and 8 Centre Square, 508 West Canal Street, four properties on Philips and Charles Streets, and two more on Bushkill Street, were generating about $39,575 a year in combined school taxes at the time they were added. The district's own projection put the eventual figure, once those abatements fully mature, at roughly $389,230, an almost tenfold increase. Those parcels started their climb a few years ago. The Silk Mill is much further along in finishing one.
Between those two examples you get a fuller picture of what's happening across the city at once. Centre Square, where a seven-story hotel has been proposed on the site of the former Standard bar and restaurant, and Canal Street, where the Shiloh Commons affordable housing project sits, are both early in their abatement window. Watermark's second phase, expected to add roughly 300 residential units this year, will be too. Simon Silk Mill is largely on the other side of it. None of these properties carry a permanently low tax bill. They carry a bill that's still moving toward its real number, just at different points along the way.
What You Actually Inherit When You Buy Mid-Schedule
Here's the detail that catches buyers off guard most often. The abatement belongs to the property, not the person who applied for it. If you buy a renovated home in year four of its schedule, you don't get a fresh ten years starting at your closing date. You get whatever's left, which in that example would be six more years of a shrinking exemption before the tax bill reaches its ceiling.
That makes the seller's disclosed tax bill a snapshot, not a forecast. Two homes priced within a few thousand dollars of each other in Easton, one an older property that's been paying full tax on its full assessed value for years and one a recently converted unit still in its first or second year of abatement, can look nearly identical on paper today and diverge meaningfully in carrying cost by year five.
There's a second wrinkle worth knowing if you're looking at anything that's had a rough ownership history. Easton's ordinance is explicit that if property taxes become delinquent, the LERTA benefit is rescinded outright, and the owner becomes liable for the full, unabated tax rate going back over the exemption period. For a buyer eyeing a distressed or foreclosure-adjacent property that once carried an abatement, that's a liability worth asking about before making an offer, not after closing.
And one more boundary to know. The exemption only ever applies to city, county, and school district taxes tied to the improvement itself. It doesn't shield a property from a countywide reassessment, which is a separate action Northampton County can take independent of any individual owner's abatement schedule. A LERTA property isn't insulated from broader shifts in how the county values real estate. It's only insulated from being taxed on its own renovation, and only for a limited, declining window.
Two Questions Worth Asking Before You Compare Two Tax Bills
Before treating any Easton tax line as a stable number, it's worth asking the seller or listing agent two things. When did this property receive its certificate of occupancy, and is the current tax bill reflecting an active LERTA exemption. The answers tell you where the property sits on the schedule and roughly what the full, unabated bill will eventually look like.
It's also worth knowing that the current version of Easton's LERTA ordinance accepts new applications only through December 31, 2027. That doesn't affect properties already in the program, which continue on their existing schedules regardless of what happens to the ordinance afterward. It does mean that anyone considering a major renovation project with LERTA in mind has a defined window to get the application in before the current terms could change.
None of this makes Easton's renovated housing stock a bad buy. The city has been deliberate about using this tool to bring buildings like the Silk Mill back into use, and the tax base growth Panto described is the program working as intended. It just means the number on today's listing sheet is one point on a curve, not the destination. Knowing where a specific property sits on that curve is the difference between comparing two homes accurately and comparing two homes that happen to look similar this year.
If you're weighing a renovated property in Easton against something older and already at full assessment, that's exactly the kind of detail worth running down before you get attached to a monthly payment. Bernadette Rabel can help you pull the certificate of occupancy date and figure out where a listing actually sits on its abatement schedule before you make an offer.
