David Melnik Law Office has practiced from Tel Aviv since 1996 in property transactions and in the work that surrounds them: real estate taxation, planning and building, succession and estates, and litigation. We act for people moving to Israel and for those returning after years abroad, and we stay with the file from the first calculation through to registration.

Several dates govern a purchase made around aliyah, and they are not the same date. First entry to Israel opens the purchase tax period. The day a person’s life becomes centered here decides residence for income tax. The date printed on the teudat oleh governs absorption rights and little besides. A contract can fall inside one of those periods and outside another, and the distance between them is measured in hundreds of thousands of shekels.

What decides what the purchase costs

The timing, measured against first entry to Israel

The purchase tax relief for an oleh runs on a period that opens a year before first entry to Israel and closes seven years after it, and it may be used once. First entry is the operative event, so years spent here on an A/1 temporary resident visa are already inside the period. Someone who lived in Israel on A/1 and completed aliyah several years later may have far less of it left than the date on the certificate suggests. Compulsory military or national service performed during the period is excluded from the count and pushes the closing date out. Where a purchase is planned near either end we measure what remains of the period before the contract is signed, since the relief is not available a day after it closes.

The single apartment condition

Since the amendment of August 2024 the relief for a residential apartment sits in Regulation 12A, conditioned on the buyer meeting the single apartment limbs of section 9(c1c)(2) of the Real Estate Taxation Law. The purchase is therefore tested as a single home, and the apartments of a spouse and of children under eighteen are counted together with the buyer’s own. A home held abroad does not enter that count; one held in Israel does. The buyer also declares that the apartment will actually be lived in, and that declaration is examined afterwards rather than at the time. Where the family already owns something here, or a second purchase is contemplated, the order in which the two transactions are signed decides the rate on both.

Residence status in the years before the move

Whether a person arrives as an oleh, as a returning resident or as a veteran returning resident is decided by what they were in the years before, and that classification governs every relief that follows from it. It turns on the length of the absence and on the days recorded against them, and an assessment raised years later is argued on the same record. Someone who studied here, worked here for a period, or kept a home here while living abroad may find that years they treated as visits are counted differently by the assessing officer. The evidence is a traveler record for the whole period, obtained for the individual and for a spouse, and it belongs in the file before the classification is relied on rather than after it is questioned.

The tools for working from a distance, a video call, document upload and electronic signature, are set out on the Online Services page.

The rest of this section

Questions that arrive alongside the purchase and that the office handles in the same file: how the funds reach Israel and what the receiving bank will ask for, whether an Israeli mortgage is open to the buyer at the point of application, what must be signed in person and what can be done under a notarial power of attorney, and how income and assets left abroad are treated once residence begins. Meetings can also be held at the client’s location, where a power of attorney to sign the transaction can be signed.

Last updated: 28 August 2026

The content of this page is general information only. It does not constitute legal or tax advice and should not be relied upon in making decisions. The law, the amounts and the brackets change from time to time. Specific circumstances require individual advice.