Beverly Hills Measure ULA Exemption: Where the Line Falls

Does it matter which side of an invisible boundary your hillside estate sits on if the view, the architecture, and the asking price are nearly identical? For a seller closing above $5.4 million in 2026, the answer is worth a six-figure check written to the wrong government.

Here is the mechanism most listing copy never mentions. Beverly Hills is its own incorporated city, with its own police department, its own building department, and its own tax rules. It is not a neighborhood of Los Angeles. It is a separate municipality that happens to sit surrounded by one. That distinction is the reason Beverly Hills is fully exempt from Measure ULA, the City of Los Angeles transfer tax that everyone in this price range has heard called the mansion tax. If a property is legally inside the City of Beverly Hills, Measure ULA does not apply, full stop, regardless of sale price.

The complication is that plenty of homes marketed as Beverly Hills are not actually inside Beverly Hills. And the ones that are not can owe a six-figure tax bill that a seller two doors up the same canyon road will never see.

Trousdale Bought Its Way Into the City. The Canyons Around It Did Not.

Trousdale Estates, the mid-century hillside enclave above Sunset Boulevard, is inside the City of Beverly Hills. That was not an accident of geography. When developer Paul Trousdale purchased the roughly 410-acre parcel of former Doheny ranch land in 1955 and began subdividing it into more than 500 lots, he reportedly paid an additional sum on top of the purchase price specifically to keep the property inside Beverly Hills city limits rather than Los Angeles, satisfying a condition tied to the sale. That single decision means every Trousdale Estates closing today, no matter how large, is exempt from Measure ULA.

Climb the hills in the other direction from Beverly Hills proper and you land in an area with no name on any city map: the Beverly Hills Post Office area, generally shortened to BHPO. It covers hillside neighborhoods including Benedict Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Beverly Crest, Beverly Glen, and Franklin Canyon. Homes here carry a Beverly Hills mailing address and the same 90210 ZIP code that covers Beverly Hills proper, a postal arrangement dating back to the 1920s when the federal government assigned this rural hillside area to the Beverly Hills post office for delivery purposes. But a mailing address is not a city limit. BHPO sits inside the City of Los Angeles. Residents there vote in Los Angeles elections, their kids are zoned to Los Angeles Unified schools like Warner Avenue Elementary, Emerson Middle School, and University High School rather than Beverly Hills Unified, and their homes are fully subject to Measure ULA.

Two properties, same hillside, same ZIP code, same real estate agents describing both as "the hills above Beverly Hills." One is exempt from a transfer tax that can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The other is not.

What That Line Actually Costs

Measure ULA's thresholds reset every July 1 based on the Chained Consumer Price Index, and the current tiers took effect on July 1, 2026. As of today, a qualifying City of Los Angeles sale is taxed at 4 percent on the gross price once it crosses $5.4 million, and at 5.5 percent once it crosses $10.9 million. The tax applies to the entire sale price, not just the amount above the threshold, and it is calculated before any deductions for what the seller originally paid.

Here is what that looks like in dollars, assuming the property sits inside City of Los Angeles jurisdiction:

That right-hand column is not a rounding error. It is the entire reason sophisticated sellers verify jurisdiction before they set a list price, and the entire reason buyers comparing a Trousdale Estates listing to a Benedict Canyon listing at the same price point are not actually comparing equivalent net outcomes.

None of this means Beverly Hills is a tax-free zone. Standard county and city documentary transfer taxes still apply on every sale in Los Angeles County regardless of which city the parcel sits in, and Beverly Hills carries its own effective property tax rate, generally cited around 1.18 percent, which is close to but slightly below the broader Los Angeles County median. The exemption is specific to the ULA surcharge, not to taxation generally.

Why a Property's Address Cannot Tell You Where It Actually Is

A ZIP code follows postal delivery routes. A mailing city follows whichever post office processes the address. Neither one follows a municipal boundary, and in the hills above Sunset the gap between the two is wide enough to swallow a seven-figure decision.

The only way to know which government actually has jurisdiction over a specific hillside parcel is to check the parcel record itself, not the marketing copy, the mailing address, or the ZIP code. That means confirming the Assessor's Parcel Number through the Los Angeles County Assessor and cross-referencing it against the relevant city or county GIS boundary map. The City of Los Angeles Office of Finance publishes the current Measure ULA thresholds and rules directly, and that page is the authoritative source once jurisdiction is confirmed.

This is not a formality. Jurisdiction determines more than the tax bill. It determines which building department reviews a remodel, which police and fire departments respond to a call, and which municipal code governs what can be built on the lot. Trousdale Estates properties fall under Beverly Hills' own zoning code, including the 1987 Trousdale Ordinance that imposes a 14-foot height limit and restricts grading to protect neighbors' views, enforced by Beverly Hills Building and Safety. A BHPO property a quarter mile away answers to the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety and the Los Angeles Municipal Code instead. Two buyers planning identical additions on lots that look interchangeable from the street can be working through entirely different approval processes.

The Timing Question Worth Watching This Fall

A property's own jurisdiction is fixed. The tax rules attached to being inside Los Angeles are not. Research out of UCLA has found that the odds of a Los Angeles property selling above $5 million have fallen by as much as 55 percent since Measure ULA took effect, a reminder that pricing near a threshold inside the city carries real friction that simply does not exist a few blocks away in Beverly Hills.

That friction is now part of a live political fight. A statewide ballot initiative backed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is aiming for the November 2026 ballot with the goal of repealing or significantly limiting the tax. Separately, the Los Angeles City Council voted 9 to 5 on June 17, 2026 to direct the City Attorney to draft a possible ballot measure exempting new multifamily and mixed-use construction from ULA for its first ten years, alongside a second measure aimed at relief for Pacific Palisades homeowners selling after the January 2025 wildfire. Neither proposal has changed anything for a typical hillside single-family sale yet. Anyone timing a listing near a Measure ULA threshold this fall should know both efforts are in motion, because either one could reshape the calculation before year end.

None of this changes what a Beverly Hills-proper sale owes today. It stays exempt regardless of the outcome in November. But for anyone deciding whether to list a City of Los Angeles hillside property now or wait, the ballot measure adds a variable worth tracking alongside price.

Confirm the Line Before You Price the Home

The instinct to treat "Beverly Hills" as a single market is understandable. The hills read as one continuous neighborhood, the architecture doesn't change at a line on a map, and the listing agents on both sides use the same language to describe the lifestyle. But a hillside sale's actual net proceeds depend on a boundary drawn in 1914 and adjusted by annexation decisions made decades ago, not on anything visible from the street.

This is exactly the kind of question worth running past someone who thinks about both sides of a transaction at once, the real estate side and the tax side. Confirming jurisdiction, modeling what a Measure ULA threshold actually does to net proceeds, and deciding whether it changes the timing or pricing of a sale is not a matter of general real estate advice. It is a financial calculation that belongs on the same table as the comps.

This post is offered for general information and is not tax, legal, or financial advice. Every parcel and every seller's situation is different, and a CPA or real estate attorney should confirm how these rules apply to a specific property before any listing decision is made.

If you're weighing a sale in the hills above Beverly Hills, or comparing a Trousdale Estates property against something a few blocks over in the canyons, Lisa Bourque brings both a California real estate license and a CPA background to that conversation. Get My Valuation to start figuring out what your specific address, and your specific city line, actually means for your numbers.

A Few Direct Questions

If my mailing address says Beverly Hills, doesn't that mean I'm exempt from Measure ULA? No. A Beverly Hills, CA 90210 mailing address only confirms which post office delivers your mail. It does not confirm which city has legal jurisdiction over the parcel. Properties in the Beverly Hills Post Office area carry that exact mailing address while sitting inside the City of Los Angeles and remaining fully subject to Measure ULA.

Is Trousdale Estates really inside Beverly Hills city limits, even though it's up in the hills? Yes. Trousdale Estates was developed on land specifically kept inside Beverly Hills at the time of its 1950s subdivision, and it remains governed by the City of Beverly Hills' own municipal code today, including the height and grading restrictions unique to that neighborhood.

Does Measure ULA apply anywhere outside the City of Los Angeles, like Malibu or Santa Monica? No. Measure ULA is a City of Los Angeles ordinance and only applies to sales within that city's boundaries. Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Malibu are each separate incorporated cities with their own tax structures, and none of them are subject to Measure ULA, though Santa Monica has enacted its own separate local transfer tax under a different measure.