Property tax is complicated, and the official sites don’t make it simpler

Ohio’s system has a lot of moving parts: a county reappraisal every six years and an update three years after it; a 1976 law that stops most levies collecting more just because values rose; credits that apply to some levies and not others, and exemptions that apply to some homes and not others; and a bill that is the sum of a dozen or more separate levies, voted on in different years for different things. None of that is secret. All of it is hard to see in one place.

• Not every county has an easy website. Some auditors publish a clear parcel page with the levies broken out. Many don’t, and the ones that do each do it differently, so what you learned on one county’s site is no help on the next.
• Your bill is hard to place inside your levy structure. A bill tells you a total. It rarely shows which levies make it up, what each one was voted for, how much of the total any one of them is, or what a new one on the ballot would add.
• The state publishes the data, not the picture. The Department of Taxation’s tables are complete and public, and close to unreadable. There is no plain overview of the whole property-tax picture at the state level, the county level or the taxing-district level — the level your bill is actually set at.
• Where the lottery money goes is hard to find. “Doesn’t the lottery pay for schools?” is the most common question in any property-tax thread. The answer is a matter of public record that almost nobody has seen laid out.

So most people find out what happened to their bill when it arrives, and have no way to check it. That is what this site is for.

So we built the overview we couldn’t find

Everything here is free, and every page is written for the person opening the envelope rather than the office that printed it.

• Ohio: start here — Every Ohio property-tax question, in one place
• Check your property taxes — Your own district's numbers, in about a minute
• What would a levy cost me? — Your school district's levies, and what one on the ballot would add
• What's on my ballot? — Every local tax issue, county by county, and what each would cost
• Why did my bill go up? — The plain-English guide, and how to challenge a value
• Is it my county's turn? — All 88 counties on a map, and the year of your next one
• What does my county collect? — All 88 counties: bills, values, levies, schools and foreclosures
• What goes unpaid? — The full series, county by county, back to 1996
• How many homes go to sheriff's sale? — Every county sheriff's sales, month by month
• How are schools funded? — Where the state's money comes from, and what the lottery covers
• Where does school money go? — What goes to teaching, and how many people a district pays
• Which districts score highest? — State test scores and Progress: all 607 districts and 88 counties
• What do superintendents earn? — Superintendent and treasurer pay in every district, against districts of its size
• School budgets — Each district's own forecast: its cash, new levies, and when it runs short
• How Ohio compares — Ohio's typical bill against the other 49 states

Beside the tax pages, the same site follows housing values for every state, county, city and zip, and mortgage rates back to 1971 — because what a home is worth and what it costs to carry are the other half of the same conversation.

How the numbers are made

Public data, computed rather than copied. The property-tax pages read Ohio’s own certified tax tables — the rates, reduction factors and credits for every taxing district in the state — and the county reappraisal schedule. Housing values come from Zillow Research, mortgage rates from Freddie Mac’s weekly survey, and the population and income figures from the U.S. Census. The school pages read the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce’s own files: each district’s spending and revenue, its staff, and its School Report Card ratings and test-score rankings. The ballot pages read the Ohio Secretary of State’s own list of local tax issues for each election, and its results. The county foreclosure figures are the Supreme Court of Ohio’s count of cases filed in each county’s court, inflation is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index, and the rents beside home values include HUD’s Fair Market Rents. A town’s “Living in” figures are the Census’s, its unemployment and jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics’, its weather NOAA’s climate normals, and the places near it Wikidata’s, and its largest workplaces OSHA’s injury and illness records, with the hospitals, school districts, colleges and federal offices from CMS, NCES and OPM; in Ohio, Indiana and Florida a town’s largest employers come first from its own annual financial report, as the Ohio Auditor of State, the Indiana State Board of Accounts and the Florida Auditor General publish them; and its natural hazards are FEMA’s National Risk Index. Every page names the source it reads and says how the figure on it was worked out — including this one: the typical bill above is the Census Bureau’s median for Ohio, rolled forward to today’s values the same way the How Ohio compares page does it, and “four in ten” is the 2024 American Community Survey’s count of Ohio homes owned without a mortgage (1,350,834 of 3,351,814 owner-occupied homes, 40.3%; table B25081).

The check is tested against real bills. Homeowners across more than a dozen Ohio counties have handed us their county’s own statements, and the estimate is compared with each one every time the arithmetic changes. And every saved check asks “Does this match your bill?” The answers go straight to the people who built this, and they are how the estimates get better.

What it cannot see, it says. A credit the county applied that you did not mention, a special assessment for a sewer or a lighting district, a levy that is on the ballot this November — the page tells you where its numbers stop. Only your county’s own statement is authoritative about your bill.

Who is behind it

A family project — two of us, in Ohio. We built it after the reappraisals sent values up 30% and more with no clear account of what that would do to a bill, because the arithmetic should be in the open for anyone, not just for people who can read a rate table. We pay for it ourselves. It is not a government site and is not affiliated with or funded by any political party, campaign or committee. There are no ads, nobody pays to appear here, and nothing that identifies you is kept — a check stores the zip code, the district and the numbers you typed, and no more. The terms and the privacy page say all of this in full.

What we hope you’ll do

Run your own check. If a number is off, say so on the page — that is how it gets fixed. Share it with a neighbour, a community group, or the thread where you first heard of it. And when a levy is on your ballot, go in knowing what it would cost you.