Commercial property tax appeals in Surrey

If you own commercial property in Surrey and think your assessment is too high, you can challenge it. The process is the same one used across British Columbia, but the numbers that decide whether an appeal is worth it, the local tax rates and what is driving values, are specific to Surrey. This guide covers both.

How do commercial property assessments work in Surrey?

Surrey commercial assessments are set by BC Assessment, not the City of Surrey. Each year BC Assessment estimates the market value of every property as of July 1 of the prior year, then the City applies its tax rate to that value. The City sets the rate; BC Assessment sets the value. An appeal challenges the value, not the rate.

BC Assessment values roughly 2,233,648 properties across the province, and about 99 percent of owners accept their assessment without filing. For most commercial owners that is the right call, but a small share of assessments are wrong in ways that cost real money, and Surrey commercial values in particular have moved quickly enough in recent years that the assumptions behind them are worth checking. Most commercial property is valued using the income approach, where BC Assessment estimates a market rent, a vacancy allowance and a capitalization rate. Our guide on how BC Assessment values commercial property walks through where those assumptions come from and where they drift.

Classification sits alongside value as a second thing to check. The rate that applies to a Surrey property depends on its class, and the Province defines the property classes that draw those lines: a warehouse or distribution building in Campbell Heights is usually Class 5 (Light Industry), while a Surrey City Centre office or a retail strip is Class 6 (Business and Other). Because Class 6 carries the higher rate, a property placed in the wrong class, or split across classes in the wrong proportion, can be taxed too heavily even when the assessed value itself is accurate.

What is driving Surrey commercial values?

Industrial land scarcity is the single biggest force on Surrey commercial values. Metro Vancouver’s industrial vacancy rate sat near 1.4 percent at the end of 2024, far below the three to five percent considered healthy, and Surrey holds the region’s largest share of both developed and vacant industrial land. When land is this tight, values rise, and rising values feed higher assessments.

Surrey’s Campbell Heights business park has been the focus of that pressure. The City reports strong ongoing investment and construction at Campbell Heights, and the recently approved South Campbell Heights expansion adds hundreds of hectares of new industrial land next to it. New construction, high land values and strong tenant demand all show up in assessments. For a light industrial or warehouse owner, that means an assessment can climb faster than the income the building actually produces, which is exactly the kind of gap an appeal is designed to test.

Surrey’s town centres add a second dynamic. Surrey City Centre and other growth areas are seeing office, retail and mixed-use development, and redevelopment potential can lift the assessed value of an older building well above what its current use supports. A retail strip or older office that is being valued partly on what could be built there, rather than on what it earns today, is worth a close look before the January deadline.

None of this means every Surrey assessment is too high. In a market this strong, many commercial values are simply keeping pace with real increases in land and rents, and appealing a fair assessment wastes effort at best. The point of understanding what drives Surrey values is to know where the gaps tend to open, on older buildings measured against newer ones, on properties valued for a redevelopment that zoning does not yet permit, or on a business assessed above the income it actually earns, so you can tell a genuine over-assessment from a value that has simply moved with the market.

What are Surrey’s commercial tax rates and what is a reduction worth?

Surrey publishes its tax rates each year by property class, expressed per $1,000 of assessed value. For 2025, the City of Surrey’s rate schedule set the total Business (Class 6) rate at 8.64975 and the total Light Industry (Class 5) rate at 6.92547 per $1,000, both including school and regional charges. The municipal portion alone was about 3.90 for Class 6 and 2.29 for Class 5. Surrey resets these rates every year, so for the current numbers use the City’s property tax rates page, which posts the schedule for each year and explains how the rate is applied to your assessed value.

Those rates turn an assessment reduction into a dollar figure. Take a Class 6 business property and assume, as an illustration of the method, that an appeal lowers its assessed value by $1,000,000. At the 2025 total rate of roughly 8.65 per $1,000, that reduction removes about $8,650 of tax in a single year. The figure is arithmetic, not a promise of any particular outcome, but it shows why the class matters: the same $1,000,000 reduction on a Class 5 light industrial property, at about 6.93 per $1,000, is worth closer to $6,930. And because assessments carry forward, a value that is corrected once tends to keep paying back each year the lower base holds.

The rate also frames whether an appeal is worth the effort. A small percentage change on a large Surrey warehouse or business property can be worth far more than a large percentage change on a modest one, which is one reason commercial appeals are usually judged on the dollars at stake rather than the headline percentage. Our guide on whether you should appeal works through that decision, including the cases where appealing is not the right move. Industrial owners with holdings across the region can compare the local rate and pressures in our guides to commercial appeals in Richmond, Vancouver and Burnaby.

How do you appeal a Surrey commercial assessment?

You appeal a Surrey commercial assessment the same way as any BC property: by filing a Notice of Complaint with BC Assessment by January 31 to reach the Property Assessment Review Panel. Filing at that level is free, and most matters are resolved there. BC Assessment lists what a complaint must contain and the steps that follow in its complaint guide, and it is explicit that a percentage increase on its own is not a valid reason to request a review.

If the panel does not settle the concern, the second level is the Property Assessment Appeal Board, with an April 30 deadline and a fee of $300 per folio for a commercial or industrial property. Our guide on the review panel versus the appeal board explains which level fits a given file, and our guide to appeal fees in BC covers what each stage costs.

Before you file, it is worth talking to BC Assessment directly, since many issues are corrected without a formal complaint. If you do proceed, the full step by step is in our guide on how to appeal your BC Assessment, and the exact dates for the current roll are in our guide to BC Assessment appeal deadlines. A strong commercial case rests on evidence, actual rents and vacancy, comparable assessments, and any condition or classification error, not on the fact that the value went up.

There is also a quieter route that runs before the January complaint window. In the fall, BC Assessment often reaches out for income and expense information while it is still building the roll, and supplying accurate figures then can correct a value before the notice is ever mailed. Our guide to the pre-roll review in BC explains how that earlier stage works and why it can settle a Surrey commercial value without a formal appeal at all.

For a Surrey commercial portfolio, the work is mostly in the preparation: gathering the rent roll and operating figures, finding comparable assessments for similar Surrey properties, and setting all of it against what BC Assessment assumed. Because the review panel decides most matters in writing or by phone, an organized, specific submission does the heavy lifting, and there is no in-person hearing to attend for the great majority of files. If you would rather have the whole process handled, from reviewing the portfolio to filing and tracking the outcome, that is what we do, and you pay only when a reduction is won.