Property taxes by region

[Van-Guard23]

Property tax in Hawaii is one of the lowest in the nation, if not the lowest. We paid just over $2,200 on a home assessed at $726k...or about 0.30%

 

[racy]

0.9% on a 10 year old lakeside home in Nebraska.

 

[John Galt III]

My property taxes are $4500 per year and always going up. Assessed value of my house is $48,800. Market value is $160,000 I estimate. So.... based on my assessed value I am paying 9.3 % per year, every year forever. Based on my market value, I am paying only 2.8 %. I'm in Pa. Sales tax 6 %. I get free concerts at a nearby community center. Maybe the property taxes are paying for that.

 

[Ronstar]

1.67% in far southwest suburban Chicago

 

[Asher Aion]

In rural Ontario, and pay 1.2% of assessed value or .09 of fair value. Electricity rates on the other hand...

 

[EastWest Gal]

My property taxes are $4500 per year and always going up. Assessed value of my house is $48,800. Market value is $160,000 I estimate. So.... based on my assessed value I am paying 9.3 % per year, every year forever. Based on my market value, I am paying only 2.8 %. I'm in Pa. Sales tax 6 %. I get free concerts at a nearby community center. Maybe the property taxes are paying for that.

It sounds like you are paying way too much. In PA property taxes are complicated. There's county tax, school tax, and other taxes. Go to your county and township websites and find out what your tax rate should be, the mil rate that is. Then look at your tax bills and see what you are paying. There must be a mistake somewhere. In our township, we pay about 2.5% between township and school taxes.

An example: In 2010 we went through reassessment and realized our house was over assessed by 25%, as well as most of the houses. Our county used a faulty formula. We had our house appraised for tax purposes, submitted a report to the county, and had our taxes reduced significantly. The folks working at the assessor office also live here. They were amazingly cooperative. I remember lines out the door that year in the assessor's office due to the mistake. Some people I know didn't seem to care. We did. We spent a few hundreds and saved thousands.

 

[523HRR]

In Connecticut, our property taxes are 2.5% of assessment value and 1.8% of appraisal value (fair market value). Assessment values here are 70% of appraisal values statewide.

 

[MichaelB]

We live in South Florida. The proposed 2016 property tax will be 1.6% of the assessed value (after homestead). The assessed value is about 62% of the market value, so the proposed tax is about 1% of the market value.

 

[fh2000]

I am in Los Angeles county. I just received my bill with tax $4444.57.

The assessed value is $353K so tax is 1.26%.
Zillow estimates $600K, so 0.74%.

The true number must be somewhere in between.

 

[Tallman4123]

Hartford County CT: 3.11% of assessed value

 

[braumeister]

OK, I screwed up on this.
Where I have lived, the assessed value has always been at least pretty close to the market value. I forgot that this is not the case in many areas.

Sorry.

 

[SomedaySoon]

$6K taxes on 375K market value home. 6% Sales. Lehigh Valley, PA.

 

[zinger1457]

OK, I screwed up on this.
Where I have lived, the assessed value has always been at least pretty close to the market value. I forgot that this is not the case in many areas.

Sorry.

Yea, where I live the market value is about 35% more then the assessed value, so about .9% market and 1.25% assessed.

 

[Looking4Ward]

For Texas I found a link with the average taxes paid per county (the link to each county provides the house value as well as the tax paid and percent of assessed value):Texas Property Taxes By County - 2016
With this you can get some idea of the variation. Other sites can show the home price variation (largely due to land prices).
But in any case it clear that if you are retired and can live anywhere you can control property taxes from 1% up to 2+% by picking where to live . (It should be noted that the lowest taxes are in small towns in the middle of nowhere- pop 3 to 5k, but then auto insurance is in general lower there also as there are fewer folks to run into you). Big cities tend to have the highest taxes due to property values and higher taxes.

As hinted above I suspect this is true no matter what state you live in (Ct seems to be about the same)

Very true. Moving just 100 miles from a larger populace makes a huge difference. Here in central Texas within 10 miles of Austin:

County tax rate: 0.383800
Healthcare District tax rate: 0.110541
School District tax rate: 1.515000
Community College District tax rate: 0.102000
MUD tax rate: 0.930000
ESD tax rate: 0.100000

Total Property Tax Rate: 3.141341%

Appraisal district appraised value is slightly below market value at $280K. After various homestead exemptions, taxes due this year equal $7,699. Without those exemptions the tax would be $8,345.

Texas homeowners 65 and over can "defer" property taxes; they don't have to pay them but they will accrue and be assessed an 8% per year deferral rate, the total of must be paid when ownership changes hands.

Sales tax is 8.25%

While Texas doesn't have a state income tax they certainly make up for it in other areas.

 

[CRLLS]

Very difficult to compare one vs the next. Here we are supposed to be assessed on 1/3 the average of the last 3 yrs fair market value.

So I my assessed value is 71K (before any exemptions)

This would imply a 3 yr average fair mkt val of 213K

I think it is worth 250K (ish)

Taxes this yr were $6150

So what % number should I list? 8.7%; 2.9%; 2.5%?

 

[gayl]

2982 on assessed value of 194,113. Identical house but no improvements just listed at 770k sold at 800k. So actual is less than 1% but tied to 1% of sale + 2% annual increase.

 

[rodi]

The base rate is 1% of purchase price. It doesn't rise as house value rises.

It can rise with time, however. I believe it can go up .25%/year.

It can also go up if you add square footage in a remodel - so if you add on that bonus room you'll pay the "current" appraised value for the new square footage.

You can also lock in a lower rate based on the previous owners prop 13 tax rate if you're purchasing from a parent, grandparent, child or grandchild.

You can transfer your prop 13 rate if you buy a home of similar or lesser value (note - it doesn't say anything about square footage) and you are over 55. Some restrictions if you're changing counties when doing this. (Not all counties recognize the transfer from other counties.

Our tax bill is significantly higher than when we bought because:
- We transferred my dad's tax rate since this was his house. (So our rate was super low compared to the market rate we paid for the house).
- We built a granny flat - which was appraised at bubble prices - but fortunately it had some handicap accessible features - so they didn't charge us for that part.... That saved us about $500/year in taxes for the wheelchair accessible bathroom with roll in shower and the grading associated with the ramp to approach the unit that was 100% ADA compliant. (You can add on accessible features like an accessible/wheelchair friendly bathroom without impacting your prop taxes.)

Our percentage of "market value" is about 0.32% - inclusive of all the bonds that are tacked on, plus trash, mosquito control, etc.

 

[kcowan]

0.3% of market value
excludes federal state and local sales taxes and surcharge on gasoline for transit and roads and on alcohol for general purposes

 

[ERD50]

OK, I screwed up on this.
Where I have lived, the assessed value has always been at least pretty close to the market value. I forgot that this is not the case in many areas.

Sorry.

There are often so many issues with any poll like this. As pointed out, some municipalities (ours for example), the 'assessed value' is somewhere near 1/3rd market value. I think this is done to provide different rates to property with different zoning. I'm guessing they do that so that they don't need to adjust each percentage individually, with the 'equalization factor'.

Other differences - I often hear people claim that it isn't 'fair' to have their taxes doubled (for example), just because the market/assessed value of their home doubled. Well, in many (maybe most?) places, it doesn't work that way. But many people are unaware. What happens is, they have an allowed amount of taxes they can collect, and it gets divided up based on the assessed value. So, if taxes went up 5% in a year, and if everyone's assessed value doubled, everyone's taxes would go up 5%. It gets distributed equally.

Also - in Illinois for example, much (most, I think) of the school funding is local, and collected through property taxes. The State pays a smaller amount. If your state does this differently, that tax might just be shifted from your property tax to some other tax. Kind of a shell game, but comparing property tax rates w/o knowing all these other factors gets pretty meaningless pretty quickly.

But there's still value to this exercise, we learn about all these differences!

-ERD50

 

[Danmar]

$6700 on an assessed value of $1.03 million. Property taxes in Calgary are some of the lowest in Canada.

Similar numbers for Canmore.

 

[Ronnieboy]

BUT, if they don't get you one way, they'll get you another. Our sales tax is 9.75%.

+1

 

[RockyMtn]

about 1.2% of assessed value. About .6% of actual value. Fortunately the assessor has not caught up with the complete gut, reno and addition that we did last year. I bet he is coming though!

 

[Alan]

In the UK houses are put into bands, A, B, C, etc, the larger the band the higher the local taxes on that property. You can easily see how much you will pay on a house by typing in the address, seeing the band and then look at a table of the annual tax for each band.

The house we are currently renting is in band E and we are paying £2,400/year for it. (in the UK the occupiers of rented houses pay the property tax). We estimate this house to be worth about £200k.

We are buying a house, have agreed a price of £285k, and will pay the same property tax as the, much larger, house is also band E. We also considered an even larger house that is £50k more and that house is also listed as band E so the annual tax would be the same (0.7%)

So, we are currently paying 1.2% of the house's value, but when we move (hopefully) to our new house we'll be paying 0.8%.

 

[littleb]

.52% of appraised value

9.75% sales tax

 

[Cobra9777]

2.5% in suburban North Texas. With our homestead exemption, it's actually 2.4%. Assessed value is very close to actual market value. We have no income tax, no personal property tax, and sales tax is 8.25%.