Wyoming lawmakers are considering rewriting the state Constitution to do away with all taxation on land and buildings used for housing, as similarly sweeping efforts grow more common in other states.
But residential property tax revenue largely stays in the communities it’s raised in, helping maintain local government services like cemeteries, libraries, volunteer firefighters, law enforcement and road maintenance, not to mention supporting the budgets of cities, towns, counties and special districts. Those tax dollars do not go to the state.
To help make up for the loss of revenue to local governments, state lawmakers will consider a bill in February that would raise the state’s sales tax, which currently sits at 4%. The bill would raise that number to 6%.
The idea of taking a red pen to residential property taxes troubles people like Adelaide Myers, an attorney and board member for the Carbon County Library System in southern Wyoming.
“This would be really bad for our counties, our municipalities, our schools, all of our districts, to just take away property taxes,” said Myers.
Carbon County is vast, beautiful and sparsely populated, with towns tucked away behind mountain ranges and often buried in snow. People there depend on their libraries, not just for books, but for places to get online and do things like write resumes, Myers said.
Myers, who started a letter writing campaign highlighting the need for property taxes, has lost more than half her budget, as lawmakers have already been reducing that form of taxation in recent legislative sessions.
That’s meant the library system Myers helps lead has had to reduce the number of hours its branches are open. The board is also considering closing branches in Hanna and Medicine Bow, with a few employee layoffs on the horizon.
“We are bending over backwards to keep these libraries open, and our communities care so much that they're making a lot of noise,” she said.
In December 2025, Carbon County libraries celebrated 100 years of operation with events held countywide. Myers talked about coming across a woman and her four children in Medicine Bow, population 241, who underscored the need for the library’s services in that town.
“Her kids are probably more than half of the class in their grade … There's so few kids in that school in Medicine Bow, that the library is like an extension of the school in a way,” she said. “It's really, really important for the families that live there to have something to do. And there's not a lot to do in those towns.”
It’s not just libraries. Firefighters and other first responders are worried, too. That includes Leighton Burgen, an EMT with a rural fire district near Casper and a public information officer for the Natrona County Fire District. He envisioned a dark future if property taxes continue to dwindle.
“ Every second counts towards trying to save somebody's life,” he said. “ Long story short, it would be … closing [fire station] doors, maybe selling trucks.”
But Sen. Troy McKeown (R-Gillette), the co-chair of the interim Joint Revenue Committee that forwarded the repeal of residential property taxes to the upcoming session, said in an interview with Wyoming Public Radio that those kinds of worries are overblown.
He compared local leaders’ concerns to Chicken Little.
“‘The sky's falling. It's all going to be over,’” said McKeown.
Wyoming’s property taxes are the 12th lowest in the nation, according to one analysis by the Tax Foundation. But they’re still not low enough for some Wyomingites and officials like McKeown.
“It's immoral. It's an unconstitutional tax to begin with,” he said.
Some lawmakers, including McKeown, view property taxes as rent or a lien you pay the government for land you already own.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, property tax valuations and rates have gone up across the U.S., including in Wyoming.
“We gotta pull back. There are people who are one or two big tax hikes away from losing their houses,” he said.
Anna Phillips, a policy analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said states considering wholesale cuts are going too far.
“These kinds of just broad across the board cuts are essentially dropping the scalpel of the surgical approach that you would need in favor of a meat tenderizer,” said Phillips.
There are efforts to reduce or eliminate property taxes in Florida, Montana, Texas, North Dakota and elsewhere.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott is campaigning for reelection on a proposal to restrict how fast property values can rise in an attempt to deliver property tax relief to homeowners and businesses.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis initially campaigned on axing all property taxes. The Florida Legislature is considering rolling back property taxes for non-school purposes.
There have also been ballot measures in states like North Dakota and Ohio that would eliminate some or all property taxes.
And Montana’s state Legislature initiated landmark property tax relief legislation in 2025.
Phillips wrote to WPR in a follow-up email that legislative action to reduce or tinker with property taxes is a fairly routine policy move for state legislatures across the U.S.
She said the most notable revolts against property taxes happened in the 1970s and 1980s, but that states “have been implementing property tax restrictions all the way from the 1800s through the 2010s.”
“An interesting historical anecdote is that the introduction of the first federal property tax in the late 1700s led to a literal armed revolt,” she wrote. “So all that's to say, blowback against property taxes is just about as old as our country. Legislative focus on property taxes is definitely much higher now than it's been for decades, but it's not a new phenomena.”
An anti-tax sentiment has been growing in Wyoming in more recent years, said Dr. Phil Roberts, professor emeritus of history at the University of Wyoming and the author of the Wyoming Almanac.
“The real immigration of people into Wyoming with this attitude, I think, came about in the 1970s and 1980s and [in] more recent times,” said Roberts.
That said, debates about taxation are as old as the state of Wyoming.
The delegates who met in Cheyenne to draft the state Constitution in 1889 adopted a property tax to keep any one individual or company – like the Union Pacific Railroad, a key economic driver for the state at the time – from ending up with all the land without paying its share.
“ [The delegates] didn't wish to promote a feudal state … that didn't want to pay taxes, but [that did want] to take advantage of all the resources the state had to offer,” he said.
Back in 1889, Union Pacific had for years resisted attempts for the company to pay property taxes on the checkerboard areas it owned near the railroad.
“ They wanted to be able to hold that property without developing it, but without having to pay taxes on it,” Roberts said. “One way to encourage the railroad to step up the assumed reason for their existence was to apply property taxes to that land, and that'd get them on the stick to start selling it.”
On the residential side of things, Wyoming has long depended on mineral severance taxes on coal mining and drilling for oil to keep other taxes low for homeowners. Roberts said that drew people to the state who were looking to escape onerous taxes elsewhere.
“ The property tax from the very beginning and all along in … state history has always been viewed as sort of the bedrock, because, like I say, it's easier to tax property than it is to tax other assets,” he said. “It's more visible. People understand that if they're going to have services, that there has to be a source [of funding] from the electorate.”
Roberts went back to the 1920s and 1930s, when a statewide economic downturn resulted in “about 25% of the real property in the state” being “sold as a tax lien, because property taxes had bankrupted so many people.”
In response, the state Legislature passed the first sales tax to help those struggling with paying their property tax bill.
“ This time, we don't have any particular emergency going on,” he said. “The problems are fairly localized, literally, because the property became more expensive, not less expensive.”
Back in the 1930s, ranchers and farmers favored replacing property taxes with an income tax, he said, with those in rural areas arguing that Wyomingites in larger towns weren’t feeling as much of the effects of property taxes.
In the present day, Roberts warned about the effects of eliminating all residential property taxes.
“ It would be a seismic shift in policy,” he said. “It would be a change that may be fatal, because the future is not that rosy for a severance tax when [some] minerals are becoming less and less valuable.”
Sen. McKeown and other lawmakers on the Joint Revenue Committee are backing a draft bill to raise sales taxes to make up for lost property tax revenue, though he said sales taxes aren’t expected to cover the gap of no residential property taxes.
In McKeown’s view, most local governments already have the money they need to get by.
“There's plenty of money,” he said. “It's just since COVID and ARPA [American Rescue Plan Act] funding, everybody's kind of gotten fat and spoiled.”
That viewpoint deflated local leaders like Adelaide Myers.
“I'm honestly considering whether I want to continue to live in Wyoming if this all continues in this direction,” the library board member said. “What we're going to end up with is a race to the bottom.”
If the effort to end all residential property taxation passes the Legislature and is signed into law by Gov. Mark Gordon, it’ll go before voters in the 2026 general election as an amendment to the state Constitution.
Another ballot initiative in this year’s election cycle would reduce residential property taxes by 50% for those who’ve lived in the state for at least a year, without providing backfill for local governments.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
