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Study Compares Property Tax Burden In Northeast Illinois

Posted on December 20, 2017

(CHICAGO) The Civic Federation released its annual estimate of effective property tax rates in the six-county region of northeastern Illinois today. Among the 12 selected Cook County communities, Harvey had the highest effective tax rate for residential properties at 6.90% in tax year 2015, while Chicago had the lowest residential rate in Cook County at 1.66% and the second lowest of all 29 communities included in the study. The full report is available here

Effective tax rates are a measure of property tax burden for homeowners and businesses. They translate the tax rates on property tax bills into rates that reflect the percentage of full market value owed in taxes by a property in a given year. Effective tax rates allow an apples-to-apples comparison of tax burden across communities and over time. This report covers the period between 2006 and 2015, the most recent year for which comparable data are available.

Change in effective tax rates over time is a product of changing actual composite tax rates, changing median levels of assessment and changing equalization factors. To calculate effective tax rates, the median level of assessment is first multiplied by the equalization factor to approximate the percentage of a property’s total value that is taxed. (Both the median level of assessment and the equalization factor are calculated annually by the Illinois Department of Revenue.) This percentage is then multiplied by the actual tax rate to produce the effective tax rate.

Most of the selected Cook County communities experienced declines in their residential effective property tax rates in tax year 2015, compared to the previous year. Chicago, Barrington and Oak Park all saw their residential effective property tax rates increase. Commercial effective property tax rates decreased for all of the 12 selected Cook County communities. Effective tax rates for all of the selected collar communities but three fell between 2014 and 2015.

However, effective tax rates increased for all selected communities in the ten years since tax year 2006.

“While these estimates are powerful for showing high-level trends over time, it is important to recognize that the Federation’s calculation of estimated effective rates is just that: an estimate,” said Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation. “Therefore, individual properties’ trends may be different from the estimate.”

To calculate the effective tax rate for an individual property, a property owner would divide the tax liability for a property into its estimated market value for the same year. Thus, a property with a tax liability of $6,000 and an estimated market value of $300,000 would have an effective property tax rate of 2%.

The full report also analyzes trends for selected communities in the collar counties of DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will and McHenry. Among these communities, Waukegan had the highest 2015 effective property tax rate at 4.38% and Oak Brook had the lowest rate at 1.13%. All collar county communities analyzed experienced significant estimated effective property tax rate increases between 2006 and 2015, ranging from a 28.4% increase in Barrington Hills to a 74.4% increase in Woodstock, both of which are located in McHenry County.

Click here to read the full report.