Marion County, Indiana 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 CAP IS A SHARE OF GROSS ASSESSED VALUE AND THE TAX IT BOUNDS IS COMPUTED ON NET. That asymmetry is the whole mechanism and it is not a technicality. Gross assessed value is the assessor's figure before any deduction; net assessed value is what remains after the homestead standard and supplemental deductions, the new IC 6-1.1-12-47 deduction and everything else; the certified district rate is applied to NET; and then the resulting liability is compared with a ceiling computed on GROSS. DLGF states the rule in one sentence — "homestead taxes are capped at 1 percent of gross assessed value, other residential and agricultural land property at 2 percent, and all other property at 3 percent" — and works it: a $100,000 homestead billed $2,100 gets an $1,100 credit and pays $1,000. Because deductions shrink the numerator without touching the denominator, they and the cap are substitutes at the margin: a homestead already at its cap gets nothing from a larger deduction, which is why SEA 1-2025 pairs deduction changes with TIF neutralisation and why the phase-down of the standard deduction does not raise every homestead bill. THE CAP IS APPLIED PIECE BY PIECE, NOT PARCEL BY PARCEL, AND THE ARITHMETIC IS NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. DLGF's own worked example takes a dwelling with a garage on five acres, three of them agricultural, and splits it into a $200,000 homestead piece at 1%, a $20,000 agricultural-land piece at 2% and a $10,000 extra-acre piece at 3%. Each piece is compared with its own ceiling and credited separately, and the total credit ($1,337) exceeds the difference between the combined liability and the combined maximum ($937) — so computing the credit against a single blended cap understates the relief on every mixed parcel in the state. THE 1/2/3% CAPS ARE NOT 1/2/3% WHERE A REFERENDUM PASSED, AND THE ADJUSTMENT IS COMPUTED ON THE OTHER BASE. Levies approved by voters in a referendum or local public question sit OUTSIDE the caps, and the ceiling is raised by the referendum rate applied to NET assessed value — DLGF is explicit that the adjustment uses net rather than gross "because this indicates which portion of the tax liability ... should be outside of the caps". In its example a 1.000% referendum rate lifts the homestead ceiling from $2,000 to $2,977.50 on a $200,000 house, a 49% increase in the supposed 1% cap. Any statement that an Indiana homestead cannot pay more than 1% of value is false in every district carrying a referendum levy. SEA 1-2025 IS ALREADY IN FORCE IN THIS RECORD, WHICH IS THE MAIN REASON IT COVERS TAXES PAYABLE 2026 RATHER THAN 2025. Three homestead changes take effect together for the 1 January 2025 assessment date: the standard deduction lost its "60% of value" branch and became a flat $48,000 on a five-year march to $0 in 2030; the supplemental deduction lost its $600,000 two-tier structure and became a flat 40% of the post-standard remainder, climbing to 66.7% by 2031; and an entirely new deduction (IC 6-1.1-12-47) gives the 2%-cap classes 6% of assessed value, rising to 33.4%. SEA 1 also converted the Over 65 and Blind/Disabled DEDUCTIONS into $150 and $125 CREDITS, added a supplemental homestead CREDIT of the lesser of 10% of homestead liability or $300, and expired eleven other deductions outright — solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, resource recovery, residential rehabilitation, fertilizer storage, inventory and more. Two of its changes were then partly undone by HEA 1427-2025 within three weeks: the veteran deductions were reinstated and the 2025 business personal property threshold increase was repealed. A description of Indiana that predates 15 April 2025 is wrong about most of this list. AND THE 2025 SESSION IS NOT THE LAST WORD ON THE 2025 ASSESSMENT DATE — THE 2026 SESSION REACHED BACK INTO IT TWICE. This is the amendment-date-versus-lien-date trap running a full session FORWARD rather than backward, and it is the reason a record for taxes payable 2026 could not be finished in 2025. (i) ELEVEN EXPIRED DEDUCTIONS IS TEN FOR THIS RECORD'S YEAR. Section 50 of HEA 1210-2026 is "retroactively effective January 1, 2025 (and thus applicable as of 2025 Pay 2026)" and reinstates the deduction for surviving spouses of World War I veterans at IC 6-1.1-12-16 — one of the eleven SEA 1 expired. A surviving spouse who held it for the 1 January 2024 assessment date does not reapply; the county auditor restores it automatically, and DLGF says it handled the few affected counties by direct communication rather than by a public form. It is not carried as an `exemptions` entry here because DLGF publishes no amount for it in any source read for this record, but it is live in this year and the eleven-item list above is wrong by one for that reason. (ii) The County Option Circuit Breaker Credit's sunset moved from 1 January 2028 to 1 January 2029 (SEA 163-2026). Both changes post-date every 2025 memorandum this record otherwise rests on. ONE LOCAL-OPTION MECHANISM THIS RECORD DOES NOT CARRY, NAMED SO ITS ABSENCE IS DELIBERATE RATHER THAN AN OVERSIGHT: the COUNTY OPTION HOMESTEAD RELIEF CREDIT at IC 6-3.6-6-3.1, added by SEA 1-2025. It is a homestead property tax credit funded out of a county local income tax expenditure rate, and it lands on the property tax bill — DLGF's 2026 order-of-operations table puts it at step 8, last, after every IC 6-1.1 credit, and Section 76 of HEA 1210-2026 had to amend IC 6-1.1-20.6-3(3) precisely because it and the Supplemental Homestead Credit each claimed to be applied last. It is omitted from `exemptions` because its size is set by a county ordinance rather than by statute, and because no tier-1 source read for this record states the first year in which a county could adopt it. A consumer reconciling an Indiana homestead bill against this record should expect an unexplained credit line in any county that adopted one.THREE DIFFERENT THINGS IN THIS STATE ARE CALLED A CIRCUIT BREAKER AND THEY DO NOT DO THE SAME JOB. The constitutional caps of IC 6-1.1-20.6-7.5 bound the bill's LEVEL as a share of gross value and reach every parcel. The Over 65 Circuit Breaker Credit of IC 6-1.1-20.6-8.5 bounds year-over-year GROWTH at 2% for income-qualified homesteads. The County Option Circuit Breaker Tax Credit of IC 6-1.1-49 bounds growth at an ordinance percentage between 2% and 5% inside a "neighborhood enhancement district", is adopted only in Marion and St. Joseph counties, and now expires 1 January 2029 rather than 1 January 2028 — SEA 163-2026 moved it, so every source written before the 2026 session, including the DLGF memorandum cited here for the credit itself, prints the superseded date. Collapsing the three loses two instruments and misstates the third. FOUR RECEIVED CLAIMS ABOUT INDIANA THAT ARE WRONG. There is no mortgage deduction — the $3,000 deduction was repealed effective with the 2023 assessment date, and it still appears in a great deal of secondary material. Agricultural BUILDINGS do not take the 2% cap; only agricultural LAND does, and a barn is nonresidential real property at 3%. The homestead standard deduction is not "60% of value or $48,000, whichever is less" any more; that formula died with the 2024 assessment date. And Indiana has no GENERAL rate limit — the binding instrument is the maximum levy under IC 6-1.1-18.5-2, whose growth quotient the State Budget Agency certified at 4.000% for CY2026 with SEA 1 §59 holding the statutory cap at 1.04 for this cycle. Read that as no general rate limit and never as no rate limit anywhere: individual funds do carry statutory maximum rates per $100 — $0.40 cumulative for a fire protection territory established after 2024, $0.0333 for its equipment replacement fund, $0.05 for a new conservancy district, $0.005 for a school cultural institutions fund — and none of them is enumerated on this record, which carries no `rate-limit` cap for that reason. Nor does the 4% bound every dollar a unit raises: debt service, voter-approved referendum levies and rate-controlled funds sit outside the maximum permissible levy, and DLGF says so of one of them in terms ("are not considered part of the school corporation's operations fund maximum levy"). The claim that new construction earns a unit no additional levy capacity, so that a growing base lowers the rate rather than raising the levy, is an INFERENCE from DLGF's plain-language account of the maximum levy and its "gift purchased by a group of people" analogy — no source read for this record contains a clause stating it. ASSESSED VALUE IS "MARKET VALUE-IN-USE", WHICH IS NOT FAIR MARKET VALUE. DLGF says it in the same breath as the caps — "a property's assessed value must still reflect the market value-in-use of that property" — and the ratio to that value is exactly 1.0 for every class. The distinction matters most on agricultural land, which is not valued on the market at all but on a single statewide base rate per acre derived from net farm income and a statutory capitalisation rate: $2,120 for the 1 January 2025 assessment date, recertified in May 2025 after SEA 1 raised the top capitalisation rate from 8% to 9%. Anyone reconciling an Indiana assessment against a sale price should expect them to differ by construction. CITATION HAZARD, AND IT IS THE WORST IN THIS CORPUS SO FAR FOR A STATE WITH THIS MUCH GOOD DOCUMENTATION: THERE IS NO READABLE HOST FOR THE INDIANA CODE. iga.in.gov, the General Assembly's own site and the official publisher of the year-pinned Code, is a client-rendered single-page application that returns an identical 691-byte HTML shell with HTTP 200 for EVERY path — the real chapter URL, a deliberately bogus path, a .pdf path, and the Constitution PDF alike — to a plain client and to a full browser User-Agent. A link checker cannot tell a live section from a typo there. archive.iga.in.gov answers 403 while serving a real index page, and covers only the 2000-2013 sessions. law.justia.com and codes.findlaw.com both sit behind a Cloudflare interstitial that answers 403 with "Just a moment...". The api.iga.in.gov endpoint requires a key. Consequently NOT ONE STATUTORY SECTION IN THIS RECORD WAS READ ON A STATUTE HOST. Every figure rests instead on the Department of Local Government Finance, which is tier 1 in its own right and which reproduces the operative statutory text verbatim in its legislative memoranda — IC 6-1.1-12-47 and IC 6-1.1-20.6-7.7 appear in full, in boxes, in the 12 June 2025 memo. The single iga.in.gov citation carried here is deliberately recorded WITHOUT a contentAssertion for that reason. SECOND CITATION HAZARD, AND IT IS INSIDE THE GOOD SOURCE: DLGF'S EXPLAINER PAGES ARE YEARS STALE WHILE ITS MEMORANDA ARE CURRENT. The Citizen's Guide to Property Tax still describes the homestead standard deduction as "the lesser of $45,000 or 60% of the gross assessed value" and the supplemental as "35% of the remainder value up to $600,000; 25% of the remainder value exceeding $600,000" — the first figure has been wrong since the 2023 assessment date and the second since the 2025 one — it works its rate example on 2010 Ohio County levies, and its distribution of the property tax dollar is "based on average expenditure per dollar of property tax levied in Indiana for taxes payable in 2018". Tax Bill 101 runs the same $45,000/$54,250 arithmetic and its worked example still grants Joe "the homestead and mortgage deductions", four assessment dates after the mortgage deduction was repealed. Both pages are otherwise the best available account of how a bill is built, and both are cited here for the MECHANISM and never for a figure. The figures in this record come from the dated legislative memoranda and from State Form 51781 (revision R20, August 2025), which state their year on their face. THIRD CITATION HAZARD, AND IT IS THE ONE MOST LIKELY TO CATCH THE NEXT AUTHOR: THE PRIMARY SOURCE IS TWO YEARS OLD AND IS STILL THE BEST STATEMENT OF THE STRUCTURAL SPINE. The Circuit Breaker Caps fact sheet is dated April 2024 and there is no newer edition. Nothing in it appears superseded — the caps are constitutional and no 2025 or 2026 act touched the six category definitions — but the record's whole classification rests on a document that predates its lien date by nine months and its verification by two years, and its supersession would be silent. Re-read it against the class definitions, not merely re-fetch it. FOURTH, AND THE ONE THAT ACTUALLY BIT: A 2025 SOURCE IS NOT ENOUGH FOR A 2025 ASSESSMENT DATE IN THIS STATE. Two 2026-session acts are retroactive into it — HEA 1210-2026 §50 reinstating the World War I surviving-spouse deduction "as of 2025 Pay 2026", and SEA 163-2026 moving the County Option Circuit Breaker sunset — and neither appears in any 2025 memorandum. The only source that carries them is the 27 May 2026 memorandum, which a reader would naturally file as "next year's changes". Read the following session's legislative memorandum before closing a year, and read it for what it does to the year already past, not only for what it does to the year ahead.