Legislative information

Quarter 3, 2024 legislative update

Going above and beyond to help Washington’s communities

Senate Bill 6175, which provides tax incentives for converting buildings from commercial to residential, including providing affordable housing, passed earlier this year and went into effect June 6, 2024. 

Cities are eager to use the provisions of SB 6175 to address the housing crisis and tackle the challenge of what to do with underutilized buildings. Recognizing the demand from cities, DOR has gone above and beyond to produce needed interpretive guidance so that we’re not an obstacle to communities’ work.

The standard rulemaking process takes roughly nine to 12 months, which would have been too slow to have SB 6175 guidance published in time for cities and developers to plan for 2025 construction season. 

To expedite the timeline, this summer we undertook a two-pronged approach of working on the standard rulemaking process while simultaneously crafting an expedited interim guidance statement. (Check out the last legislative update to learn more about our interim guidance statements.) We held a public hearing in July for the rulemaking process to receive input from communities that informed our work on the interim guidance statement. 

It has been a significant, collective effort, but we have now published our interim guidance statement providing guidance on SB 6175 that cities and businesses can rely on to begin preparations for 2025. In the meantime, we are continuing our normal rulemaking work and will have that long-term guidance succeed the temporary interim guidance statement next year.

DOR’s new assistant legislative liaison, Kate Armstrong

DOR is pleased to welcome Kate Armstrong as the new assistant legislative liaison. Previously, she worked in the Senate as a legislative assistant for four years, and prior to that in DOR’s unclaimed property section. 

She is committed to carrying out DOR’s statutory duty to provide nonpartisan tax policy assistance to the legislature and will use her time as a legislative assistant to inform how she carries out the role of liaison.

Go-to tax resources

Ever find yourself thinking, “I sure wish I knew where to find thousands of pages of fascinating tax data and information?” We hear you. If you’re not aware of them already, here are some go-to resources on DOR’s website that present helpful information succinctly and clearly.

• Tax Reference Manual. This manual gives you a primer on more than 40 taxes and fees used by state and local governments. Published every few years, it includes a history of collections and statutory changes, in addition to basic information about the tax or fee.
• Tax Statistics. If words aren’t your thing, this chart- and table-heavy report is overflowing with data on taxes, fees, state operating budget accounts, and more.
• Tax Exemption Study. This report summarizes all 786 tax exemptions from major state and local tax sources and provides a brief description, purpose, fiscal impact, and more for each exemption.
• Descriptive Statistics Report. This report summarizes tax incentives for which the legislature requires businesses to submit an annual tax performance report. Businesses provide DOR tax incentive amounts, as well as employment data. Interactive data collected for this report is available in a separate online database. For more information, go to the DOR Services page, menu item Incentive Report Public Disclosure.
• Property Tax Statistics. This page on our website offers an abundance of resources, including reports, interactive tables and graphics, and more.
• Local Tax Reference Guide. The report provides insightful but brief information about each local tax the department administers. Supplemental to the report is our Local Sales and Use Tax Distribution webpage, which lists an annual history of data tables about local taxes. Clicking on “Local Tax Distribution 2012-Current” will take you to an interactive database that allows you to analyze local taxes by tax, location, and month/year.
• Tax Legislation Summary. After each legislative session, DOR publishes a report summarizing tax legislation passed by the legislature and signed by the governor. It briefly describes each bill and features a table showing the fiscal impact of all bills in the report.

The above resources and plenty more can be found on our Statistics & Reports page. We encourage you to bookmark those resources helpful to you and avail yourself of them—a lot of staff effort and time go into generating them and we hope you find them useful. 

Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions about our resources. And if there is something you think would be valuable for DOR to publish that you don’t see on our site, we welcome suggestions!