If you live in Waldorf or St. Charles, odds are good that you should have just gotten some good news in the mail! New tax assessments were just released for roughly one-third of the county, mostly in Waldorf and Saint Charles, and over 99% of those assessments FELL from the previous years!
What Is a Property Tax Assessment?
In short, a tax assessment is the approximate value of your home, according to the government, used for taxation purposes. It is NOT an appraisal, nor is it an estimate of the sales value of your home. Homes are assessed every three years by the government, and then annual adjustments are made based on average value changes each year.
How it Works:
When you look at your property tax bill, the amount of tax you pay is based off of this assessed value. For homes that were just re-assessed, the last assessment was in 2006, so almost all of these homes have been taxed at an assessed value that was higher than the home was actually worth. In Charles County, just over 18,000 homes were re-assessed, and all but 6 of them had a decrease in value!
The county tax rate for residential property is $1.026 per $100 of assessed value. This means that for a home valued at $300,000, the tax bill should be $3,780. The average value drop on this round of assessments for Charles County was 28.2%. That means that if a home was previously assessed at $300,000, the new assessment would, on average, place it near a value of $215,400. The tax bill would then drop from $3,780 to $2,714, a savings of $1,066 on the annual tax bill!
Not All Good News
While the benefit of saving $1,000 or more on your tax bill is obvious, this isn't exactly a rosy picture for residents. You see, all that money collected from property taxes is used by the government to keep the state running. In total, Maryland is losing $1.7 billion dollars in tax revenues from this current re-assessment, and we as residents are going to feel it as everything from school budgets to local outreach programs are scaled back or eliminated to cope with the loss of revenue.
Keep your eyes out for a post later this week about the Homestead Tax Credit, which allows owners to cap the annual value increase on their tax assessments at a maximum of 7%!
Link: Maryland Independent Article: Property Assessments Plummet
~Jonathan Benya- Realtor
Century 21 New Millennium
9405-A Chesapeake St
La Plata, MD 20646
301-609-9000 - office
301-653-8116 - cell
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