🚨 Governor Ayotte just signed HB1300, the school district tax cap law. What does this mean for you? Short version: this November, you get to vote on capping your own school property taxes. Here's the long version. What happens in November At the 2026 general election, every town and city ward in New Hampshire will have a tax cap question on the ballot. Automatically. By operation of law. No warrant article, no citizen petition, no asking permission from your select board or school board. You show up to vote for governor and Congress, and the question is just there. If ballot space runs out, it goes on the back of the ballot or a separate ballot at the same polls. Absentee ballots include it too. Nobody gets skipped. What a YES vote does Adoption requires a 3/5 majority of those voting on the question. If it passes in your district, two caps kick in: 📌 The levy cap. Your local school property tax levy can't grow beyond the prior year's amount, adjusted for inflation (CPI, Northeast region) and new construction. Market appreciation and revaluations don't count as growth, so a hot housing market can't be used as an excuse to raise the levy. 📌 The admin cap. SAU central office spending gets capped at 6% of total school district appropriations. That means superintendent services, HR, payroll, legal, PR, and district-level administrators who don't actually teach. What's NOT capped Classroom instruction. School-based staff. Special education. Transportation. Food service. Building maintenance. Bonded capital projects (new schools, renovations) are excluded from both caps entirely. This law is aimed at the administrative layer, not at teachers or kids. Can it be overridden? Yes. Your district can exceed the cap by the same 3/5 ballot vote that adopted it. The Department of Revenue Administration enforces compliance and won't set a tax rate above the cap without a valid override. Any taxpayer in the district has standing to enforce it in superior court. It has teeth. Now the fine print, because you should always read the fine print This is a pilot program, not a permanent fixture. The law only puts the question on the ballot twice: November 2026 and November 2028. Adopt it this fall and the caps apply starting with FY2028 budgets. Adopt it in 2028 and they apply starting FY2030. And the entire law sunsets on January 1, 2032. Any caps adopted under it expire that day unless the legislature acts to renew them. So this isn't Concord permanently rewriting your town's budget rules. It's a two-cycle experiment in letting voters answer a question school boards have never wanted to ask: should school taxes grow faster than your paycheck does? If capped districts thrive and the sky doesn't fall, the case for making it permanent writes itself. If voters say no, that's their call too. Either way, the people paying the bills finally get a direct vote on the size of the bill. That's RSA 32:5-i. See you in November 🗽