Mapped: Where homeowners pay the lowest property tax bills under 0.5%
As the costs associated with owning a home keep rising, property taxes have become so unpopular that there is a long list of states trying to reduce or reform them.Property tax relief bills will hit ballots this November in Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wyoming.Then there are the five states where the effective property tax rate on owner-occupied property falls below half a percentage point, or less than 0.50%.Those states are: South Carolina (0.49%), Arizona (0.48%), Utah (0.48%), Alabama (0.37%), and Hawaii (0.29%).According to a Tax Foundation report, these five states have the lowest effective tax rates of the 50 states for 2024 (the most recent data available) and all, except Alabama, were even slightly lower than they were the year before.This doesn’t necessarily mean that these states will always have the lowest property tax bills, which are tied to the value of a property.
Higher assessments can mean higher tax bills, even with a lower tax rate.“Since home values vary significantly across counties, it is also important to compare effective tax burdens (the median property tax paid divided by the median value of owner-occupied housing units),” writes Janelle Fritz in the report.“Because property taxes are assessed as a percentage of home values, it follows that higher property taxes are paid in places with higher housing prices.”Property taxes, which fund infrastructure and services such as schools, police, and fire departments, are set not only by cities and counties, but also by school boards, fire departments, and utility commissions, says the report.Just because valuations rise, that doesn’t mean that tax rates do as well.
“If homes in a community doubled in value but nothing else in the economy changed, local government wouldn’t necessarily need to capture twice as much revenue,” says the report.Additionally, tax rates across counties can differ dramatically.For example, the median property tax bill in ...