What Your Assessor Won't Tell You

Your assessment went up. Before you file an appeal, there is something you should know.

The assessor does not decide how much tax gets collected. The schools, the county, the library and the fire district decide that between them, and the assessor's only job is to divide it up.

Which means the question is not whether your value went up. It is whether it went up more than your neighbors'.

Work it through and a 20 percent rise can cost you nothing at all, while a 6 percent rise can cost you hundreds. Almost no free advice online starts there, because almost all of it is published by firms that take 25 to 50 percent of whatever you save.

Here is one more thing they do not lead with.

The Cook County Board of Review publishes who wins. In tax year 2024, homeowners who represented themselves got a reduction 58.02 percent of the time. Homeowners who hired counsel got one 48.53 percent of the time. Two independent studies, eighteen years apart, same city, same direction.

This book is a plain-English guide to doing it yourself, and to knowing when not to bother.

• Why a rising assessment is not automatically a rising bill, worked through in full
• The three numbers on your notice, and the state where winning your appeal changes nothing
• The exemption roughly 57,000 households in one Texas county are not claiming
• Claiming a missed exemption back five years, and being sent a check
• Senior freezes, and the word that means three completely different things
• The states where an appeal can raise your assessment, and the firm that publishes which
• The argument that ignores what your house is worth and wins anyway
• Why recent sales can hurt you in a rising market
• The free government report that grades your own assessor
• Who carries the burden of proof, and the state where it is not you
• Keeping the payments going, and what a win actually does to your escrow
• What a tax appeal firm really costs, and when the fee is worth paying
• Florida Amendment 3, Georgia HB 581, and what changed on 1 January 2026

Twenty-one chapters in plain English, with a full homeowner's checklist, a glossary, and eight ready-to-send letters covering exemption reviews, retroactive claims, record card corrections, evidence requests and escrow re-analysis.

Every figure, deadline and citation carries a note explaining why it may have changed and naming exactly who to ask - because property tax in America is three thousand counties under fifty state constitutions, and all of it moves.

Written by someone who has served on the boards that run residential buildings since 2019, chairing one and sitting on another, and who has written plain-English handbooks on shared-ownership housing for Florida, California, New York, Ontario, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland.

General information only. Not legal or tax advice.