District of Columbia, District of Columbia property tax

ACS 5-year median real estate taxes paid (table B25103) divided by ACS 5-year median value of owner-occupied housing units (table B25077), county-wide. This is a ratio of two independently estimated medians — not the median of the ratio, and not a rate any parcel is billed. It reflects the actual mix of overlapping districts, exemptions and assessment caps as experienced by owner-occupants, and it lags: a 5-year sample centres about two and a half years before its end date.

Layer 1 of the county property-tax corpus: a MEASURED baseline from ACS 2020-2024 5-year, not a published rate. No statutory rate, assessment ratio or exemption has been collected for these counties yet, so nothing here should be read as what a particular property would be billed.

THE CLASS 1A / 1B SPLIT IS A TAX-YEAR-2025 CHANGE AND GOVERNS THIS RECORD. Subtitle Y of the Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Support Act of 2024 (D.C. Law 25-217, §7242, effective 18 September 2024, applying "for tax year 2025 and each tax year thereafter") added §47-813(c-9), §47-812(b-12) and §47-802(18), and §47-824(e) reclassified every Class 1 parcel as 1A or 1B without notice. Anything still describing DC as "Class 1 residential $0.85" is describing TY2024 or earlier. THE TY2026 1B THRESHOLD IS $2,558,000, AND THE YEAR ON IT WAS CHECKED BY ARITHMETIC, NOT TAKEN FROM THE PAGE. OTR's rate page states "$2.558 million" without a year. §47-812(b-12)(3)(B) indexes the $2,500,000 from TY2026 by §47-802(18) — $2.5 million times the CPI change from tax year 2024 to the preceding tax year, rounded down to $1,000. 2,558,000 / 2,500,000 = 1.0232, one year of Washington-area CPI; a TY2027 figure would carry two. Two independent checks agree. (a) The same CPI ratio (TY2025 over TY2024) drives the homestead and senior-income COLAs, and OTR's dated figures step by the same amount: homestead $89,850 (TY2025) to $91,950 (TY2026), 1.0234; senior income $159,750 (TY2025) to $163,500 (TY2026), 1.0235. (b) The Office of Revenue Analysis's Notice of Sum and Special Real Property Tax Rates for Tax Year 2026 (D.C. Register Vol. 72, No. 36, 5 September 2025, notice N142209) prints the TY2026 1B schedule on "$2.5 million" and states that the COLA-adjusted threshold "will be determined before the end of this calendar year", i.e. late 2025, for TY2026. That notice also confirms every TY2026 sum rate in this record and that 23.4% of each is the special (debt-service) rate. The same page's homestead figure is dated "for tax year 2026". So the page served on 20 October 2026, three weeks into TY2027, still showed TY2026 values — a re-check after OTR updates it will see different numbers, and should. THE CLASS 2 CLIFF AND THE CLASS 1B BRACKET ARE DIFFERENT MECHANICS. See the class notes. A single "tiered" encoding of both would be wrong for one of them. HOST HAZARDS, THREE. First, code.dccouncil.gov serves the CURRENT Code only, with emergency and temporary amendments folded in and flagged — §47-813 is served with a banner that it "includes amendments by temporary legislation that will expire on January 1, 2027" (the Residential Building Permit Classification Temporary Amendment Act of 2026, D.C. Law 26-119, read for this record: it inserts the building-permit route into Class 1A at (c-9)(2)(A)(ii), adds "solely" to the residential-zone test in (c-9)(2)(C), and adds (d-4) and a Class 2 claw-back in (d-2) — see the vacant-land class note). The "Past Permanent Version" link (§47-813(Perm)) serves the text without it. The amendment history and the "Applicability" notes are the only evidence of which text governed a past year, and they must be read: §47-812 prints a subsection (b-13) as "Not Funded", the codifier's placeholder for Vacant to Vibrant's unfunded rate escalation. The host fails honestly — a bogus section answers 404 with a 13-byte body — and serves the same body without a browser User-Agent, so a content assertion there is real evidence. Its pages print "Please do not scrape. Instead, bulk download the HTML or XML"; a monthly link check is a handful of requests, but a bulk re-verification should use the published download. Second, §47-813(c-9)(4)-(5) IS SERVED IN A STATE THAT MATCHES NEITHER EDITION. D.C. Law 26-41 §302(b) — whose applicability the Code says was later switched on by D.C. Act 26-416 — rewrote both paragraphs: Class 3 as property listed "as vacant" under §42-3131.16(a)(1) and Class 4 as property listed "as blighted vacant" under §42-3131.16(a)(2). The served text carries the new paragraph (4) but the OLD paragraph (5), still pointing Class 4 at §42-3131.17. The served §47-813(Perm) page carries the OLD text for both paragraphs, contradicting the applicability note. For TY2026 the operative definitions were the D.C. Law 25-217 text (Class 3 on the §42-3131.16 list, Class 4 on the §42-3131.17 list); the rates, $5 and $10, are the same under either. Recorded rather than resolved. Third, otr.cfo.dc.gov is a Drupal site that serves its page text in the raw body — the "enable JavaScript" banner is cosmetic — and answers a bogus /page/ path with a real 404. Its rate and relief pages are undated and overwritten annually; they are cited for figures they themselves label by year where they do so, and the Market Analytics PDF is cited, without a content assertion, as the dated evidence of the valuation-date mapping. THE SCHEMA QUESTION. Four places where DC does not fit and the closest honest member was chosen. (1) `assessingUnit`: the District is simultaneously state, county and city; 'state' is used for the reason given at the field, and `countyLevies` is true because the county-equivalent's government levies. Neither choice changes a figure. (2) DC Classes 3 and 4 — vacant and blighted IMPROVED property — have no `PropertyClass` member, and `vacant-land` is a different thing; they are carried in the class-rate-schedule divergence note with their rates. (3) Rates that step by value: `tieredRatio` steps a RATIO, and every DC ratio is 1, so the ownRate holds the first step and the notes hold the rest — a reader who ignores the notes is right below $2,558,000 (1B) or $5,000,000 (Class 2) and wrong above. (4) `Cap` has no eligibility field, so the 2% senior variant of the §47-864 credit is in the senior exemption's notes rather than a second cap that would read as applying to every homestead. ALSO NOT A CAP, AND WORTH SAYING: §47-864(e) imposes a FLOOR — a homestead's taxable assessment may not fall below 40% of its assessed value, and where the cap would push it lower the floor applies and no credit is given. Long-held homesteads in fast-appreciating neighbourhoods are the ones it reaches.