Jefferson County, Kentucky 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.

WHY PROVISIONAL. Every figure here was read from a primary body — the KRS and Constitution PDFs the Legislative Research Commission serves, and the Department of Revenue's own notices and 2025 Rate Book. What holds it back: three sections are served by the LRC only in text that post-dates the 1 January 2025 assessment date: KRS 132.017 (effective 15 July 2026, amended by 2026 Ky. Acts chs. 155, 161 and 175), KRS 160.470 (school rate limits, effective 15 July 2026, not cited for that reason) and KRS 132.010 (effective 27 June 2025, 2025 Ky. Acts ch. 98). The versions governing 2025 were read from Internet Archive captures of the LRC's own superseded ids (132.017 id 55621, effective 15 July 2024; 132.010 id 54628, effective 17 April 2024), which the LRC no longer serves. 132.010(6), the compensating rate, and (8), new property, read identically in both. 132.017 as of 2025: the slice above the 4% rate takes effect 45 days after passage, or 50 for a school board or other district primarily located in a county containing an urban-county or consolidated local government; a THREE-voter petition committee; and the 15 September second-billing rule. The 2026 acts moved the 50-day trigger to counties of 300,000 or more. The Department's HB 44 page says FIVE voters, which matches neither version — the page is the stale one. THE STATE RATE. The widely repeated "11.4 to 11.9 cents" is a prior-year figure. DOR's own notice (14 July 2025): "has set the 2025 State Real Property Tax Rate at 10.6 cents per $100 of assessed value", against 10.9 cents for 2024, because 2025 assessments rose an estimated 7.54%. The Rate Book's Table I prints 10.6 on every real estate row. DOR's undated "Property Tax Rates" explainer still says the rate has declined "to 10.9 cents" — the 2024 figure — so it is cited only for its account of HB 44, never for the rate. The statute's own date (by 1 July) and the announcement date (14 July) differ. HB 44 IS A RECALL TRIGGER, NOT A CEILING. A district may always take the compensating rate (the rate yielding last year's real-property revenue from this year's existing property, rounded UP to the next tenth of a cent; KRS 132.010(6)); may go up to 4% over it after a public hearing; and may go above 4%, but that slice takes effect only after a 45-day petition window (50 days for districts primarily in Fayette or Jefferson County, KRS 132.017(2)(a)2. as of 2025) and can be put to the voters. The `levy-limit` of 0.04 therefore marks where voter exposure begins, not a number no district exceeds. New property is excluded from the base, and personal property is outside the compensating calculation entirely. The 4% rule binds the STATE rate too, by formula and without any vote (§132.020(2) and (4)). THE SCHEMA QUESTION. Kentucky calls itself "a broadly-based classified property tax system" (2025 Rate Book, Explanation of Rate Tables), and Ky. Const. §171 authorises classification. But the classification is by RATE and by which levies a class is exposed to, not by assessment RATIO — every class is valued at fair cash value. `classified` is set false because the corpus uses it to mean ratios differ by class (as for South Carolina, against Massachusetts and California). The divergence a commercial taxpayer actually sees is in personal property, and `commercialDivergence` has no member for "real property uniform, personal property on a class rate schedule"; `class-rate-schedule` describes a REAL property schedule like the District of Columbia's, so it was not borrowed. Separately, `assessingUnit: 'county'` is honest about the unit (one PVA per county) but cannot say that the PVA is a state official (KRS 132.370(1)); Maryland's `state` is a centrally appointed assessor, which this is not. COLLECTING THE COUNTIES. The 2025 Property Tax Rate Book (Table III) carries all 120 counties with every county, school, city and special district rate, by property class, in cents per $100. Two traps. Its county numbers are the Department's ALPHABETICAL codes — Jefferson is 056 — not FIPS (Jefferson is 21111), so a crosswalk is required. And the PDF's metadata shows it created 16 January 2026 and modified 19 February 2026, so it is revised in place at a year-pinned URL; record the fetch date. Jefferson County for 2025 reads: Louisville Metro general fiscal court 11.8 cents real estate, Jefferson County schools 71.7, Anchorage Independent schools 99.6, the Urban Services District 31.9 inside the former City of Louisville, and dozens of small-city and fire-district rates. The Department disclaims the local figures ("no warranty ... regarding the accuracy"), so a county record should cite the levying body where one is available. HOST BEHAVIOUR. revenue.ky.gov answers HTTP 403 to curl's default User-Agent and serves normally to a browser or to the repo's link-checker User-Agent. apps.legislature.ky.gov serves every KRS section and Constitution section as a small PDF the repo's pdfText extracts cleanly, at `statute.aspx?id=<n>` — but the id belongs to a VERSION, not to the section: KRS 132.096 and 132.195 each show two ids in the chapter index, one per effective date, and 132.017's id serves the 2026 text. So a citation here is pinned to whatever version the id was minted for, and an amendment publishes a new id rather than overwriting this one. The Constitution ids (`ViewConstitution?rsn=<n>`) do not match section numbers: §172 is rsn 201, §172A rsn 199.