Recurrent land taxes are an important revenue source for sub-national government internationally and are assessed on a number of different bases of value. This paper examines the various bases of value on which this tax is assessed internationally then focuses on the valuation of land, being the dominant basis of value used to assess this tax in Australia. Valuation experiments are used to examine the valuation practices of valuers in highly urbanised locations where vacant land sales are rare. It demonstrates the challenges of using value as the base of this tax and in particular land or site value used in Australia. The paper concludes that while issues exist in the determination of any basis of value, the practices of valuers are most important in the determination of a consistent and neutral base on which to assess the tax
