Your value rose 39%. Your bill will not.

A letter arrives from the county auditor. The home you have lived in for twenty years is now worth $438,980 — up from $314,960 three years ago. That is a 39% rise, and nobody in the house feels 39% richer.

Then the county’s own press release says property taxes will rise about 1.5 to 2%.

Both statements are true, and the gap between them is the single most misunderstood thing about Ohio property tax. It is worth understanding properly, because the answer decides whether your bill goes up by $100 or by $1,400 — and the county cannot tell you which, yet.

Your value is not your bill

The instinct is to multiply: if the value rose 39%, the bill rises 39%. In most of the United States that is roughly right. In Ohio it is wrong, because of a law passed in 1976.

House Bill 920 does something quietly radical. When property values in a taxing district rise, it reduces the rate on most voted levies so that each levy keeps collecting roughly the same number of dollars it was approved for. The school levy passed in 2013 was approved to raise a certain amount of money. It is not entitled to 39% more money because the houses underneath it got more valuable.

So the rate falls as values rise, and the two largely cancel out. That is why the county can say “1.5 to 2%” without misleading anyone.

Then why is my bill going up more than 2%?

Because the rollback is calculated on the average rise across the district — not on yours.

If every home in your school district rose 19%, and yours rose 19%, the rollback lands exactly on you and your bill barely moves. That is the household the county’s 1.5-2% describes.

But values do not rise evenly. In a reappraisal, some neighbourhoods rise 10% and some rise 40%. The rollback is the same for everyone in the district. So:

• Your home rose less than the district average → your bill goes down.
• Your home rose about the average → your bill barely moves.
• Your home rose far more than the average → your bill goes up, because you now carry a larger share of every levy in the district.

That is the whole mechanism. Nobody is being punished. The total collected is roughly unchanged; what changed is how it is divided between the houses.

A home that rose 39% in a county that averaged 19% is carrying about twice the increase of its neighbours — and that is where an estimate of +20% on the bill comes from, rather than +2% or +39%.

The three things HB 920 does not touch

If the rollback cancelled everything, no bill would ever rise. Three things escape it, and they are where real increases come from:

1. Inside millage. Up to 10 mills that local governments may levy without a vote. It is not rolled back, so it rises with your value in full.
2. A school district at the 20-mill floor. Ohio will not let a district’s current-expense rate be reduced below 20 mills. Once a district hits that floor, the rollback stops working there and its levies rise with values like any ordinary tax. More than half of Ohio’s school systems are there now — 328 of 611 carry a current-expense rate of exactly 20.000 mills, which is a number that occurs only because the law stops the reduction at it. If yours is one of them, the reassuring version of this article does not apply to you.
3. A new levy. Anything passed after your last valuation arrives at the new value, in full, with none of the old credits. A levy on the November ballot is not in any estimate the county has published.

What this means for you, concretely

Work out one number: how your rise compares with your district’s.

Not the county’s average — your taxing district’s, which is your township or city plus your school district. If your county published a county-wide average of 19% and your own notice says 39%, you are likely looking at a real increase, in the region of 15-25%, not 2%.

If your rise is at or below the average, the county’s 1.5-2% is probably about right for you, and there is nothing to do.

You can check your own bill with the two figures on your notice and the tax you paid last year. It uses your county’s certified rates and takes about a minute.

Two dates that matter more than the estimate

December. Your county certifies its rates, and the estimate becomes an exact figure. Nothing before then is final, including anything on this site.

1 January to 31 March (or until first-half collection closes, if that is later in your county). The window to challenge your value at the county Board of Revision. This is the part most people miss: the rates are set by voted levies and cannot be appealed, but the value can. If your home was valued well above what similar homes nearby actually sold for, that is the argument, and it is free to make.

What carries weight there is evidence about your own home: a recent sale of it, an appraisal, sales of genuinely comparable homes nearby, or a defect the county cannot see from the street. What does not carry weight is that the increase felt unfair, or that you cannot afford it — a Board decides market value, not hardship.

The honest summary

Your county is not lying when it says 1.5-2%, and you are not wrong to expect more than that. The county is describing the average home; the letter in your hand describes yours. The distance between those two is your answer, and it is worth ten minutes of arithmetic before you either panic or ignore it.

Correction, 24 September 2026: this article first said 326 of 611 school systems sit at the 20-mill floor. That count decided which levies keep the state’s rollback credits from the year each was approved. Counted with the state’s own mark on each levy instead, it is 328. More than half, either way.