Is there taxation without representation? Egypt has witnessed a recent surge in property tax revenues, albeit from a very low base. This paper wishes to address the revenue side of state finances in Egypt since the adoption of the IMF program in late 2016, with a special focus on property taxes. The bulk of writings on Egypt’s political economy have so far tackled austerity and their adverse social impact on the poor and middle classes. I wish here to trace the shifting relations between the state and property-holding classes (or the rich in lay terms), by studying the design and implementation of property taxes. How could these changes be explained in terms of state institutional capacities to extract resources from society? And to what extent are the regime’s authoritarian dynamics shaping such transformations? Moreover, how could we position such state and regime variables in the current context of crisis-ridden neoliberal globalization? These questions are important to tackle, not just empirically but also theoretically and conceptually linking taxation to state building and authoritarian restitution in a post-revolutionary context. I argue that from a comparative perspective, it seems that regime dynamics are not the principal, not to the mention the sole, factor affecting the capacity of the state to tax societal groups, with an emphasis here on the rich. Long-term state institutional evolution and the political-economic global context (including IFI conditionality, market linkages through trade, investment and debt and ideological hegemony) have been more decisive. For instance, democratization in Latin America did not lead to any significant increases in tax to GDP ratio. Direct taxes on income and property remained significantly lower than the OECD average and closer to not-necessarily democratized parts of the Global South. In the same vein, some authoritarian non-oil MENA countries like Morocco (and to a lesser extent Jordan) have made strides in collecting taxes, including direct ones on property. Focusing on contemporary Egypt, this paper addresses the interaction between the three variables of state, regime and globalized neoliberalism in explaining the occurrence and limitations of the recent transformations in the realm of property taxes. Taxation is dealt with here as a political-economy and political-sociology topic par excellence. This offers a lens through which relations between the state and specific constituencies are reshaped with political implications.