Short answer. The absolute community pays. A house your spouse owned before the marriage stays their exclusive property, but if the family lives in it, the taxes and the expenses of merely preserving it during the marriage are charged to the community, not to your spouse alone.
What the law says
All taxes and expenses for mere preservation made during marriage upon the separate property of either spouse used by the family
Family Code, Article 94 — Charges on the Community Property. Read the full provision →
Paying the tax does not give the community a share
Two separate questions get tangled here, and it helps to keep them apart: who owns the house, and who pays its running costs. Property brought into an absolute community by one spouse before the marriage generally remains that spouse's exclusive property. This clause does not change ownership. It allocates a cost. The community picks up the taxes and preservation expenses, and the house still belongs to the spouse who owned it. Years of community-funded tax payments do not quietly convert it into community property.
The condition is that the family uses it
The clause is not a blanket rule for everything a spouse owned beforehand. It reaches separate property used by the family. A house the family actually lives in plainly qualifies. Land your spouse owns in another province, which the family has never used, does not — its taxes are your spouse's own affair, payable out of exclusive property. If family use begins partway through the marriage, the clause speaks of expenses made during marriage, so it is the period of use that matters rather than the date the property was acquired.
Preservation is narrower than improvement
Read the wording closely: taxes and expenses for mere preservation. That is a deliberately modest category — what it takes to stop the property deteriorating. Compare the neighbouring clause covering community property itself, which expressly extends to major or minor repairs. The Code gave the wider treatment to property the community owns and the narrower one to property it merely uses. Routine upkeep and the tax bill sit with the community; a substantial improvement to your spouse's separate house is not covered by this clause and needs its own basis.
Why the distinction is worth tracking
It becomes concrete at liquidation. Sums the community spent on a spouse's separate property, beyond what this clause authorises, are the kind of thing that has to be accounted for when the regime ends and the property is divided. Keeping some record of what was spent, and on what, costs nothing during the marriage and saves an argument later. This is general information about how the Code allocates these costs, not advice on any particular property — the facts of use and expense do the real work.
Cases citing this provision
These Supreme Court decisions cite the provision above. We list them so you can read them yourself; the summaries of what each decided are not ours to give.
- Philippine National Bank vs. Venancio C. Reyes, Jr, G.R. No. 212483, October 5, 2016 — read the decision on LawPhil →