Methodology

This site turns two published U.S. Census Bureau tables into a browsable comparison of property-tax burden by county and state. It adds navigation, rankings, an estimator and explanation; it does not restate statutory rates or assess individual properties.

The data

Figures come from the American Community Survey 2020–2024 5-year estimates, released through the Census Bureau's table-based Summary File:

• B25103 — Median real estate taxes paid for owner-occupied housing units (dollars). We use line 001 (all owner-occupied units) plus the with-mortgage and without-mortgage medians.
• B25077 — Median value (dollars) for owner-occupied housing units.

County names and FIPS codes come from the Census 2020 county reference file. Scope is the 50 states and the District of Columbia; territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and others) run different property-tax systems and are out of scope.

The effective rate

The effective rate for an area is median real estate taxes paid ÷ median home value. For the United States that is $3,119 ÷ $332,700 = 0.94%.

This answers "what share of a typical home's value do owners here pay each year?" It is a ratio of two separate medians from the same survey, so it approximates the typical burden rather than describing any single household. It is not a statutory mill rate, an assessment ratio, or a prediction of one person's bill.

Margins of error and reliability

ACS estimates are survey-based and carry a margin of error (MOE). We keep each table's MOE and flag counties whose coefficient of variation exceeds about 20% with a ± mark; these are usually counties with few owner-occupied homes. Counties for which the survey does not publish a reliable median (9 of 3,144) are shown without a rate rather than guessed.

Rankings

State and county ranks order areas by effective rate, highest first, over the 3,135 counties with a published rate. A county's national percentile is its position among those counties.

What this is not

• Not legal, tax or financial advice.
• Not an individual assessment — your bill depends on your parcel's assessed value, local mill rates and exemptions.
• Not affiliated with or endorsed by the Census Bureau or any tax authority.

The underlying files, with sizes and SHA-256 checksums, are listed on the data & sources page. Data was retrieved on 2026-10-24. The import is deterministic and reproducible with npm run data:check.