What Happens to the House When a Parent Moves Into Care in Central Ohio

Ohio's homestead exemption is tied to occupancy, not ownership alone — and families discover that months later, on a tax bill nobody was expecting.

By Ray Kessler, Certified Senior Advisor & Family Consultant · Published August 7, 2026

The Bill That Arrives Nine Months Later

Most of what families worry about in the weeks around a move into assisted living is immediate: the deposit, the room, the medication list, whether Dad will speak to anyone at dinner. The house sits there, locked, with the mail forwarded and the thermostat set at fifty-eight degrees, and nobody has the bandwidth to think about it. That is entirely understandable. It is also how a central Ohio family ends up opening a property tax bill the following winter that is several hundred dollars higher than the last one, with no explanation attached.

The cause is usually the homestead exemption — a statewide Ohio program that quietly reduces the property tax burden for qualifying senior and disabled homeowners. It is not a subsidy the family applied for recently; in many cases a parent has had it for a decade and nobody under sixty-five has ever thought about it. And its central condition is not ownership. It is occupancy.

Own and Occupy, as of January 1

The Franklin County Auditor's office is explicit about the requirements for the senior and disabled persons homestead exemption. A homeowner must own and occupy the home as their primary place of residence as of January 1 of the year for which they apply. They must be 65 by December 31 of that year, or be totally and permanently disabled as certified by a licensed physician or psychologist, or be the surviving spouse of someone who was receiving the exemption at the time of death, where that surviving spouse was at least 59 on the date of death. And their total income — modified adjusted gross income for the applicant and spouse together — must fall under a limit that is adjusted annually for inflation.

That first requirement is the one that matters here. "Own and occupy" is two conditions joined by a conjunction, and a parent who has moved permanently into a residential care facility in Westerville still satisfies one of them. Whether they satisfy the second is a question of fact for the county auditor, not something a family, a facility, or a website gets to decide. What the Auditor's office does say clearly is that homeowners are not required to reapply annually, but that if circumstances change and they no longer qualify, they must notify the county auditor — and the office lists no longer occupying the home as a primary place of residence among the changes it means.

The January 1 timing is the other piece worth holding onto, because it works in a family's favor more often than against it. The tax status of a property as of January 1 determines the credits for the entire tax year. A move that happens in March generally does not unravel the current year mid-stream; the consequence shows up in the following year's cycle. That is a real window, and it is enough time to make a decision deliberately instead of in a panic.

What the Exemption Is Actually Worth

Families are often surprised by the size of it, in both directions. The Franklin County Auditor's office describes the senior and disabled persons exemption as shielding the first $29,000 of a home's auditor's appraised value from taxation — so an eligible owner of a home appraised at $100,000 is billed as though the home were valued at $71,000. The enhanced exemption for qualifying disabled veterans, and for surviving spouses of public service officers killed in the line of duty, shields the first $58,000 instead.

Notice what that does and does not tell you. It is a reduction in taxable value, not a fixed dollar discount, which means the actual savings depend entirely on the local tax rate where the house sits. A home in a Dublin school district and a home in Circleville with identical appraised values do not save the same amount, and the Auditor's office publishes a district-by-district estimated reduction schedule precisely because the answer is so local. Anyone who tells you the Ohio homestead exemption is "worth about X dollars" is guessing.

The income test moves too. For the 2026 application period, the Franklin County Auditor lists a maximum of $41,000 in total income for 2025; for late 2025 applications the figure was $40,000 in 2024 income. The number is inflation-adjusted each year and always looks back one year, which catches families who check a figure they found online two years ago. One important exception: homeowners who received the exemption for tax year 2013 — 2014 for manufactured and mobile homes — are grandfathered and not subject to the income requirement at all, though they still have to file the grandfather addendum to establish it. Every figure in this section should be confirmed with your own county auditor before you plan around it; these programs are amended by the legislature more often than most families expect.

It Does Not Follow Your Parent to the New Address

This is the part that surprises people who assume a benefit attached to a person travels with them. It does not. The Franklin County Auditor's office states directly that the homestead exemption does not automatically transfer when a homeowner moves — a new application must be filed at the new address in the following application period, and that requirement applies even to grandfathered homeowners who are exempt from the income test. Because ownership and occupancy are both measured as of January 1, the exemption does not switch on at a new home immediately either.

For most families reading this, the practical answer is blunter still: there is no new property to reapply against. A parent moving from a ranch in Reynoldsburg into an assisted living apartment in Gahanna is moving into a rented unit in a building somebody else owns. The exemption is not portable to that arrangement in any form. It is worth understanding that clearly rather than assuming a form exists somewhere that fixes it.

The exception is the family whose parent moves in with an adult child, or into a condo the parent buys, or into a home held by a trust. Ohio does accommodate trusts — the Auditor's office treats a settlor of a revocable or irrevocable inter vivos trust holding title to a homestead the settlor occupies as of right as an owner for exemption purposes, and an individual trustee who meets the other conditions can qualify as well. If a trust is part of your family's arrangement, that is a conversation to have with an Ohio elder-law attorney and the auditor, with the relevant pages of the trust agreement in hand.

The Second Credit Nobody Mentions

Ohio also runs a separate owner-occupancy credit, administered by the same county auditors and turning on the same underlying idea: that the property is occupied by its owner as a principal residence. It is a smaller benefit than the homestead exemption and it has no age or income test, which is exactly why families overlook it. When occupancy ends, both credits are potentially in play, and a tax bill can move by more than the homestead exemption alone would explain. If you are calling the auditor about one, ask about the other in the same conversation.

Three Things Families Do With the House — and What Each One Costs

Hold it empty. This is the default, and it is chosen far more often than it is decided. It buys time, it keeps the option of a return open, and in a family where siblings disagree it is the path of least conflict. The costs are real but diffuse: utilities and taxes continue, a house with nobody in it deteriorates faster than one that is lived in, and — the item families miss most often — many homeowners insurance policies contain a vacancy provision that limits or suspends coverage once a house has been unoccupied beyond a stated period. Call the carrier before the house is empty, not after a pipe fails in a January cold snap. An honest conversation about the parent's likely trajectory is usually the deciding factor here; holding a house empty for six months while a rehab stay resolves is very different from holding one empty for three years.

Rent it out. Renting converts a cost into income and keeps someone watching the building, which has genuine appeal when private-pay care is running down savings. It also converts the property into a small business with an aging owner who may not be able to make decisions about it, changes the property's status for local credits, and creates a landlord's obligations in whichever central Ohio jurisdiction the house sits in. Franklin County, for example, maintains a rental registration requirement through the Auditor's office. This is a defensible choice, but it should be made with the parent's decision-making authority already documented and with an accountant looking at it, not casually.

Sell it. Selling produces the money that pays for care, ends the maintenance and insurance questions permanently, and closes the door on returning home — which is why it so often turns into the hardest family conversation rather than the simplest financial one. Two practical notes. First, sequencing matters: sale proceeds are countable assets, and how and when the house is sold or transferred interacts with Ohio Medicaid eligibility rules in ways that a well-meaning family can get badly wrong. Second, federal tax law contains a provision for homeowners who become physically or mentally incapable of self-care and move into a licensed care facility, which can affect how the residency requirement for the capital gains exclusion is applied. Whether it helps your family is a question for a CPA or tax attorney who can look at the actual dates, not something to conclude from an article.

Seven Counties, Seven Auditors, One Program

The homestead exemption is a statewide Ohio program, but it is administered county by county, and the office you deal with is the auditor in the county where the house sits — not where the adult children live and not where the parent now sleeps. A daughter in Upper Arlington whose mother's house is in Lancaster is dealing with the Fairfield County Auditor. The same holds across Delaware, Licking, Madison, Pickaway, and Union counties. Each office runs its own forms portal, its own phone queue, and its own processing timeline, and the specific figures and procedures quoted above are the ones Franklin County publishes. Confirm with the county you are actually in.

For Columbus-area families, the Franklin County Auditor's office is at 373 S. High St. in downtown Columbus and takes homestead application questions at 614-525-3240, with a general line at 614-525-HOME (4663). Ohio's application form for the senior and disabled persons exemption is DTE 105A, and Franklin County accepts it on paper or through an online submission. Real property applications are due on or before December 31 of the year for which the exemption is sought — note that manufactured and mobile homes run a year ahead of that calendar, with applications due by December 31 of the preceding year. And if an application is denied and you believe it shouldn't have been, there is an appeal: form DTE 106B to the county Board of Revision, filed within sixty days of the notification.

What to Actually Do This Month

If a parent has recently moved or is about to, four steps will save your family most of the trouble described above. First, find out whether the homestead exemption is currently on the property at all — the county auditor's online property search will show it, and plenty of families discover a parent never applied in the first place, which is its own problem worth fixing while they still occupy the home. Second, call the auditor in that county, describe the actual living situation honestly, and ask what it means for the current and next tax year; auditors deal with this every week and are markedly more helpful than families expect. Third, call the insurance carrier about occupancy before the house goes quiet. Fourth, get the decision-making paperwork in place if it isn't already, because every option above requires someone with clear authority to sign.

None of this is the emotional center of what your family is going through right now. The house is the last thing on the list, and it should be. But it is also the one item on that list where a single phone call in August prevents a bad surprise in February — and where a rushed decision made under financial pressure is very hard to undo. Slow it down where you can. The tax year gives you more room than it feels like it does.

Nothing here is tax, legal, or financial advice, and the figures cited are the ones Franklin County published at the time of writing. For a decision this size, an Ohio elder-law attorney and a CPA are worth what they cost.

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