DeKalb County, Georgia 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.

ONE RATIO, 159 COUNTIES, AND FROM 2025 TWO PARALLEL SYSTEMS. Georgia assesses everything at 40% of fair market value (O.C.G.A. § 48-5-7) with no classification, no local classification power and no state levy, so the pre-2025 story was almost entirely about millage. HB 581 of 2024 broke that: it granted every homestead an exemption for the excess of current assessed value over an inflation-indexed base year value, and let each county, consolidated government, municipality and school district opt out. 316 of them did. From tax year 2025 forward, whether a Georgia homestead is protected depends on which of the three or four taxing authorities billing it opted out, and those authorities do not move together — a county can stay in while its school system leaves. THE 2025 EXEMPTION WAS A FREEZE, NOT AN INFLATION CAP, AND ALMOST EVERY SECONDARY DESCRIPTION SAYS OTHERWISE. The Department's Informational Bulletin 2025-01 states that no Inflation Index Rate would be provided for the 2025 digest year, that the base year assessed value for 2025 is the 2024 assessed value, and that "the assessed value on a person's homestead will not change from 2024 to 2025". The first index applies to the 2026 digest year and is 2.7%. So the mechanism that governs this record's year is stricter than the one everyone describes, and only for this year. DO NOT DESCRIBE THE OPT-OUT AS RARE OR AS UNIVERSAL. Data the Secretary of State supplied to the Tax Foundation, published 17 April 2025: 316 entities — 47 counties (30% of counties), 141 cities and towns (26%), 123 school districts (68%) and 5 consolidated city-counties (63%). About 64.8% of counties had their school system, their general government or both opt out, covering nearly 83% of the state's population. School districts left at more than twice the rate of counties, which is the fact that matters most, because the school levy is usually the largest line on a Georgia bill. HB 92 of 2025 extended a rescission window to 30 April 2025 for tax year 2025 and to 1 March in each year from 2026 through 2029, and requires an authority that opted out and has no base year exemption of its own to repeat the whole opt-out procedure by 1 March 2027. THE SCHEMA QUESTION, ANSWERED DELIBERATELY. § 48-5-44.2 is recorded as an `Exemption` with a `value-freeze` mechanic and NOT as an `assessment-growth` cap. The statute grants an exemption; the county still appraises at full market value and still assesses at 40%. And the cap kind requires a fixed positive ceiling, which Georgia did not legislate — the bound is whatever CPI-U turns out to be, published annually by the Commissioner under Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 560-11-2-.32. Recording it as a 2.7% cap would freeze one year's measurement into what the statute leaves open. For the same reason it is not entered in `commercialDivergence`, even though it will pull homestead and commercial bases apart over time: no member of that union expresses a homestead-only cap on VALUE growth, and the divergence is per-jurisdiction rather than statewide. THE STATE LEVY IS GENUINELY GONE, and this was checked rather than assumed. The Department's current millage-rate page states that the state millage rate was .05 in 2015 and that "On January 1, 2016, there was no State levy for ad valorem taxation." `statewideLevies` is empty on that evidence, not on the strength of the phase-out schedule. WHAT LOOKS LIKE CLASSIFICATION AND IS NOT. O.C.G.A. § 48-5-7 names conservation use, forest land conservation use, qualified timberland, rehabilitated and landmark historic, brownfield and residential transitional property in separate subsections, and every one of them is assessed at 40%. What those programmes change is the value the 40% multiplies — a current-use value, a covenant value, a frozen value — under covenants of ten years (conservation use, preferential agricultural) or fifteen (forest land, brownfield). The only true ratio departures in the whole code are preferential agricultural assessment at 30% of fair market value, which is elective and covenanted, and standing timber at 100%, which is a once-only tax on harvest or sale. `classified` is therefore false, on the same reasoning as North Carolina. THE ACQUISITION-VALUE QUESTION, ASKED PROPERLY AND ANSWERED MARKET. `valuation` is `market`, and the HB 581 exemption is the closest that call has come in this corpus, because two of Proposition 13's three features are present. § 48-5-44.2(a)(2) lets the adjusted base year value rise each year by no more than the previous base multiplied by the inflation rate — a capped inflation drift. And § 48-5-44.2(a)(3)(B) sets the base year at "the taxable year immediately preceding the taxable year in which the exemption ... is first granted to the applicant", while (b)(2) provides that the exemption "shall not transfer to any subsequent owner" — a reset on sale. What is missing is the third and decisive feature: the VALUE is not fixed at acquisition. The county still appraises the parcel at current fair market value every year and still assesses it at 40%; § 48-5-6 requires it. What HB 581 changes is how much of that assessed value is EXEMPT, which is why it is recorded as an `Exemption` and why `valuation` stays `market`. The practical difference shows up the moment a jurisdiction opts out, or the owner dies without a surviving spouse, or the acreage limit bites: the full market assessment is already on the roll and simply stops being sheltered. In an acquisition-value state there would be nothing there to fall back to. THE 20-MILL CAP CAPS ONE LEVY. Ga. Const. Art. VIII, Sec. VI, Par. I limits a school system's maintenance-and-operations millage to 20 mills absent a local referendum. County, municipal, special district and all debt service millage sit outside it, and the Department puts the average county-plus-municipal rate at about 30 mills — so reading it as a ceiling on a Georgia bill is off by more than half. AND THE LEVY LIMIT IS NOT A LIMIT EITHER, WHICH THE `levy-limit` SHAPE CANNOT SAY ON ITS OWN. O.C.G.A. § 48-5-32.1 is recorded at a maximum levy growth of exactly zero, and that zero is real rather than missing — the roll-back rate is defined to raise no additional revenue from reassessment. But nothing forbids a levying authority from adopting a millage above it. It must instead advertise the increase, issue a press release and hold three public hearings, one of them beginning between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. on a business weekday, and Georgia authorities clear that bar routinely. Ohio's HB 920 shares the zero and actually binds; Georgia's does not. From 2025 HB 581 bolts one consequence onto it: where the adopted millage exceeds the estimated roll-back rate, the tax bill must carry a bold-print statement saying so (new O.C.G.A. § 48-5-34). CITATION HAZARD, AND IT IS AN UNUSUAL ONE: THE PROBLEM IS THE STATUTE HOST, NOT THE STATUTE. Georgia's official code is published by LexisNexis, and the state's free-access link redirects to a client-rendered container with no statutory text in the body. law.justia.com and codes.findlaw.com both answer HTTP 403 to any non-browser client. sos.ga.gov answers 403 as well, which is why the Constitution could not be read directly. ga.elaws.us answers 200 with a full page whose own banner reads "GEORGIA CODE (Last Updated: August 20, 2013)" — thirteen years stale — and which redirects any unknown section path to its title list and still finishes 200, so it fails in two of this corpus's documented ways at once and is not cited here. The consequence is deliberate: this record rests on the Department of Revenue's own publications, which quote the code sections they administer, and on ENACTED BILL TEXT from legis.ga.gov, which is version-pinned by its enactment date and therefore answers the amendment-date question better than any current-text host could. Every figure here was read out of a document body. A SECOND HAZARD IN THE SAME DEPARTMENT PUBLICATION, AND IT IS A PINPOINT-CITE TRAP. The Department's July 2025 Exempt Properties Workshop reproduces § 48-5-44.2 in full, and prints subsection (f) as paragraph (1) followed by paragraph "(3)" — with no (2), and with (1) still opening "Except as otherwise provided in paragraph (2) of this subsection". The rule that resolves an overlap between the statewide base year exemption and a local one, by allowing only "the base year value homestead exemption that is larger or more beneficial", is therefore printed at (f)(3) there. IT IS (f)(2). HB 581 as passed by both chambers numbers it (f)(2), and HB 92 of 2025 — checked against the signed text at gov.georgia.gov, not against a summary — amends only paragraph (4) of subsection (a) and subsections (e) and (i) of that Code section. Subsection (f) was never renumbered. This record cites (f)(2); anyone taking the paragraph number off the workshop will cite a paragraph that does not exist. A STATEWIDE SENIOR EXEMPTION THAT EXEMPTS NOTHING, DELIBERATELY OMITTED FROM `exemptions`. O.C.G.A. § 48-5-48.3 grants any Georgia resident aged 65 or over an exemption on the homestead "in an amount equal to the actual levy for state ad valorem taxation made pursuant to Code Section 48-5-8", and (d) adds that it "shall not apply to or affect county taxes, municipal taxes, or school district taxes". Since the state levy has been zero since 1 January 2016, the exemption is worth exactly zero and has been for a decade. It is left out of the list on purpose rather than by oversight, because entering it as a statewide senior exemption would put a benefit in front of a consumer that no Georgian has received since 2015. ONE DISCREPANCY LEFT UNRESOLVED, RECORDED RATHER THAN SMOOTHED OVER. The Department's 2024 Summary of Enacted Legislation says HB 581 "limits the value freeze for appealed properties to apply only when the property value is reduced upon challenge, instead of freezing when reduced or unchanged". The bill as passed by both chambers does not do that: § 48-5-299(c) still opens "When the value of real property is reduced or is unchanged from the value on the initial annual notice of assessment". The summary appears to describe a version that did not survive. The enacted text is what this record follows. THE AMENDMENT-DATE CHECK, RUN AGAINST THE 1 JANUARY 2025 LIEN DATE, AND IT DOES NOT COME OUT CLEAN. Three 2025 acts touch this subject and only one of them reaches this tax year. HB 92 took effect 1 APRIL 2025, three months after the lien date, but its Part I is expressly "applicable to taxable years beginning on or after January 1, 2025" — so the five-contiguous-acre limit, the rescission window and the March 2027 re-opt-out do govern tax year 2025, by an applicability clause rather than by its effective date. SB 141 took effect 1 JULY 2025 with no such clause, so its twelve-year extension of historic preferential assessment does NOT govern this year and is carried as forward notice on the two historic entries. HB 90 is contingent on a ratification vote that has not happened. This is the Virginia hazard in Georgia dress: a regular-session act effective mid-year cannot be assumed to govern a January lien date, and each one has to be read for an applicability clause rather than for its effective date. WHAT THE 2025 MILLAGE COMPILATION ACTUALLY CONTAINS, ESTABLISHED BY PARTIAL DECODE RATHER THAN ASSUMED. The statewide digest PDF cannot be read with ordinary text extraction — its fonts are subsetted with no ToUnicode map and a /Differences array of bare numeric glyph names — but the glyph map of the first page is recoverable by aligning the page against its own printed header, and that was done. Page 1 decodes to an alphabetical county listing beginning at APPLING and ATKINSON, 46 pages in total, and each county carries rows not only for COUNTY INCORPORATED and COUNTY UNINCORPORATED and SCHOOL but also for named municipalities (BAXLEY, GRAHAM, SURRENCY, PEARSON) and for special districts (COUNTY FIRE DIST). So `coversAllCounties: true` rests on decoded structure rather than on the title alone, and the compilation does NOT have North Carolina's gap: fire and other special district rates are in it, not excluded from it. Two caveats stay honest. Later pages use different subset encodings and were not decoded, so the count of 159 counties is inferred from the alphabetical run and the page count rather than counted. And every county block carries a "STATE 0.0000" row, which is a second, independent confirmation from the digest itself that `statewideLevies` is empty. FORWARD NOTICE, OUTSIDE THIS TAX YEAR. SB 33 of 2026, the Homeownership Opportunity and Market Equalization Act, repeals subsections (h) and (i) of § 48-5-44.2 outright — the contingency clause and the entire opt-out procedure — making the base year exemption mandatory for all political subdivisions, and adds a Local Homestead Option Sales Tax. Its own Part VI makes it effective on the Governor's approval with no applicability clause, so the first tax year it governs is not settled by the Act's face; secondary accounts say 2027. Nothing in it touches tax year 2025.