The History of the Illustrious Window Tax

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_country_houses_in_20th-century_Britain

It's no secret that there are a plethora of taxes that United States citizens have to pay. In fact, citizens of the United States who are in the middle tax bracket typically pay around half of their given salaries to tax. However, there are a few illustrious taxes that seem excessive to the observer but are actually class-equalizers. One of these taxes is the Window Tax of 1696.

The Window Tax was established in 1696 by the English parliament. It was intended to be a progressive tax or a tax that becomes more costly as incomes increase. The more windows on your house, the more you paid, essentially. Houses with less than ten windows were exempt from the Window Tax but were subject to a two shillings flat-rate tax.  Houses with more than ten windows, on the other hand, were subject to a linearly increasing tax with the number of windows you had. The idea behind this was that poorer citizens would typically have fewer windows on their houses, leading to a class-equalizing tax. However, this tax didn't exactly play out the way the British government had intended.

Te tax did exactly as intended-- well, almost. The tax's definition of a window was unclear. Thus, people began boarding up existing windows to get themselves into the ten-window flat rate. Houses began to be built with less than adequate ventilation to get themselves under the limit, and many had poor health.

In fact, in urban communities, where members of the working class often lived in tenants, these working-class citizens were often taxed more than their wealthy counterparts. Although these tenants were subdivided, the tax considered the number of windows on the entire building, leading to higher tax rates for these working-class citizens. As such, the tax was widely unpopular.  What was meant to be a progressive tax became a nuisance to the working class rather quickly.

The tax was repealed in 1851, having survived over one-and-a-half centuries at that point. The Window Tax, though elusive, is an example of a progressive tax with good intentions that ultimately became a divider between the working and upper classes. It's an interesting story, the Window Tax-- one that should be read about.

Works Cited

“Window Tax.” UK Parliament, www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/towns/tyne-and-wear-case-study/about-the-group/housing/window-tax/.