Can I keep my parents' low property taxes when I inherit their house?

The relief is also not unlimited. What you keep is your parent's factored base year value plus $1,000,000, an amount the state adjusts every two years, so a home worth well above that combined figure at the date of death is partly reassessed even when you qualify; the question on how much value is actually excluded works the arithmetic through. Nor does any of it happen by itself. The exclusion is a claim you have to make, not a benefit the county hands you. The child keeping the house has to be genuinely living there and has to claim the homeowners' exemption within a year of the transfer, and a separate exclusion claim goes to the county assessor under its own deadline, which the question on where to file and by when sets out. Families lose the benefit every year by letting that first window run out while the estate is still being untangled. The house is being cleaned out, the siblings are still negotiating, and an assessor's form is nobody's priority until the reassessment notice arrives in the mail. If you are the child who intends to keep the house, treat the move-in date and the two filings as part of administering the trust, on the same list as the death certificates and the bank accounts, rather than as loose ends to tidy up once everything else has settled.