St. Louis County, Missouri 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 TAX YEAR 2025. Missouri rates are fixed by 1 September of the tax year for every political subdivision except counties (§67.110.1), by 20 September for a county (§137.055.1), and by 1 October for a charter county, a city not within a county, and any subdivision lying at least partly within one — so on 12 August 2026 the 2026 rates do not yet exist anywhere in the state. 2025 is the most recent year whose figures are certified, reviewed by the State Auditor and published — the review landed in January 2026 — and it is also a general reassessment year, which makes it the cleanest year to describe. THE CLASSIFICATION IS CONSTITUTIONAL AND THE RATIOS ARE NOT, AND THAT DISTINCTION IS THE WHOLE RECORD. Mo. Const. Art. X §4(b) creates exactly three subclasses of real property, forbids their further division, permits subclass (2) to be valued on productive capability, requires "the same percentage of value ... to all properties within any subclass", and caps every class and subclass at 33 1/3% of true value — but sets no percentage. RSMo 137.115.5 sets them: 19%, 12%, 32%. A citation to the constitution alone will not produce those numbers. The prohibition on further division has teeth beyond the printed classes: in Snider v. Casino Aztar/Aztar Missouri Gaming Corp., 156 S.W.3d 341 (Mo. banc 2005), the Missouri Supreme Court held that applying a valuation standard to casino real property different from the one applied to other commercial property "created a valuation subclass of commercial property" contrary to §4(b) and §137.115. Missouri cannot classify further; it can only reprice the three it has. (Do NOT go looking for Snider in the revisor's annotations to §4(b) — that page carries exactly one case note, McKay Buick Inc. v. Spradling, 529 S.W.2d 394 (Mo. 1975). The holding is in the reported decision, not on the constitutional section.) THREE STACKED COMMERCIAL DIVERGENCES, AND ONLY THE FIRST IS ON A RATE SHEET. (1) The ratio: 32% against 19%, a 1.684x base before any rate. (2) The countywide commercial surcharge, a self-executing CONSTITUTIONAL levy under Art. X §6.2 that replaced the abolished inventory tax, imposed on subclass (3) real property in every county, at a rate each county clerk fixed once in 1985 to reproduce that county's own lost inventory revenue, which may never rise and may fall only by a county-wide vote. (3) The Art. X §22 / §137.073 rollback, computed separately for each subclass, so differential appreciation pushes the residential and commercial rates apart with nobody legislating either — but only in the 161 of 2,811 taxing authorities that levy separate subclass rates. NO STATEWIDE SURCHARGE FIGURE EXISTS AND THIS RECORD DOES NOT INVENT ONE. Because the rate was set county by county against 1984 conditions and frozen, there is no statewide average, no statewide ceiling, and no state publication of the 115 county rates that this pass could find — the State Auditor's statutory rate review does not contain the word at all, because the surcharge is imposed by the constitution rather than levied by a taxing authority under §137.073. Secondary compilations exist and are not cited here. The county layer is where these belong. THE HANCOCK ROLLBACK BINDS, AND IT IS NOT GEORGIA'S NOTICE REQUIREMENT OR VIRGINIA'S PUBLIC HEARING. Art. X §22(a) does three things: it forbids a new or increased levy without voter approval; it requires a rate reduction when a tax base is broadened; and it requires that when equalized assessed valuation, excluding new construction and improvements, grows faster than the general price level, "the maximum authorized current levy applied thereto ... shall be reduced to yield the same gross revenue from existing property, adjusted for changes in the general price level". §137.073.2 caps the inflationary allowance at CPI or 5%, whichever is lower. There is no hearing that dissolves it. It is machine-checked: every taxing authority files its computation, the State Auditor reviews it within fifteen days, may certify a corrected rate, and refers a refusal to the Attorney General for an injunction — 4,867 rates of 2,811 authorities in 2025. BUT DO NOT OVERSTATE THE COMPLIANCE RECORD EITHER. The Auditor states that 2025 "is the ELEVENTH YEAR since the State Auditor's Office started reviewing property tax rates" — that is, since 1985 — "that no taxing authorities levied a tax rate that exceeded the certified tax rate". Eleven clean years out of forty-one. And the largest hole is structural rather than procedural: Art. X §11(b) lets a school district levy up to $2.75 per $100 by board action alone, which the Missouri Supreme Court held in Thompson v. Hunter applies "regardless of the calculation required by section 22(a)", and the Auditor's own report footnotes school levies rising for exactly that reason. Debt service levies sit outside §22 by §22(b). TWO RECEIVED CLAIMS ABOUT MISSOURI THAT ARE FALSE. It is NOT true that Missouri has no state property tax: RSMo 209.130 levies three cents per $100 of valuation on all taxable property in the state for the Blind Pension Fund, collected with other state taxes. And the MISSOURI HOMESTEAD PRESERVATION CREDIT NO LONGER EXISTS — RSMo 137.106 was repealed outright by S.B. 975 & 1024 Revision of 2018, and any description of Missouri relief that includes it is describing a dead programme. Two further near-misses worth naming: there is no homestead exemption of any kind in the assessment ratio, and the only mandatory veteran exemption requires former prisoner-of-war status in ADDITION to total service-connected disability. MISSOURI HAS NO ASSESSMENT-GROWTH CAP, BUT IT DOES HAVE A FIFTEEN-PERCENT TRIPWIRE, AND IN TAX YEAR 2025 IT BOUND THE SECOND-LARGEST COUNTY IN THE STATE. §137.115.10 forbids an assessor to raise the assessed valuation of a subclass (1) parcel by more than fifteen percent since the last assessment, excluding new construction and improvements, WITHOUT A PHYSICAL INSPECTION; §137.115.11 requires written notice of the owner's rights and gives the owner at least thirty days to demand an interior inspection; §137.115.12 provides that a drive-by "shall not be considered sufficient to constitute a physical inspection". This is deliberately NOT recorded as an `assessment-growth` cap, because an assessor who does inspect may raise a parcel by any amount — modelling it as a 15% ceiling would understate every properly inspected reassessment in the state. It is nonetheless enforceable, and it was enforced. On 22 May 2025 the State Tax Commission, exercising its §138.410 general supervision over every assessing officer in the state, ORDERED Jackson County — Kansas City — to build its 2025 residential assessments from a reconstructed baseline: the 2022 assessment roll, plus 2022 new construction, increased by fifteen percent or true value in money whichever is less, plus 2023 and 2024 new construction; and then forbade any 2025 subclass (1) entry exceeding true value or fifteen percent above that baseline, whichever is less. The Commission found §§137.115.10-.12 "mandatory and not merely directory" and stated that on appeal a taxpayer prevails as a matter of law where the assessor cannot show notice and inspection. A 22 April 2025 order was superseded by that one, and an August 2024 order had already rolled back parts of the 2023 reassessment; a Jackson County circuit judge upheld the Commission's authority in March 2025. SO FOR TAX YEAR 2025 THE STATEWIDE STORY — one lien date, one cycle, one 19% ratio on a freshly measured market value — IS NOT TRUE OF JACKSON COUNTY, whose residential base is administratively bounded rather than market-measured. Any county-layer record for GEOID 29095 must carry that; no other Missouri county was found to be under a comparable order for 2025. THE SENIOR FREEZE IS REAL, IS LOCAL, AND HAS NO PUBLISHED COVERAGE COUNT. RSMo 137.1050 lets any county authorised to impose a property tax grant a credit that holds an owner 62 or over at their initial-year LIABILITY, adopted by county ordinance or by petition-triggered referendum. No count of adopting counties is published by the State Tax Commission, the Department of Revenue or the State Auditor, and the only figures located are from an advocacy organisation. This record therefore states the mechanism and refuses the number: the credit is NOT in force statewide, and how many of the 115 county-equivalents have adopted it is a per-county fact this corpus has not collected. CITATION HAZARD ONE — THE STATUTE HOST ANSWERS 200 FOR EVERYTHING, INCLUDING FOR BEING THROTTLED. revisor.mo.gov serves a nonexistent section at HTTP 200 with a page that is simultaneously its soft-404 and its rate-limiter: it reads "Section, Chapter, Title, etc. that does NOT exist" and, in the same breath, "The system thinks you are a roBOT even though you may not be one", explaining that it tracks accesses per IP over a thirty-second window and will serve this page if requests come faster than one a second. Its search endpoint additionally warns that "Requests without a user-agent specified may fail!". So on this host a 200 proves nothing, and a failed fetch cannot be distinguished between a dead citation and a throttled client. Every citation in this record was verified by grepping the served BODY for an enacted phrase or a section number, and the assertion strings in the catalog are what a re-check should look for. CITATION HAZARD TWO, AND IT HAS A CLEAN ANSWER HERE. revisor.mo.gov serves the CURRENT version by default and 137.115 was amended twice in 2025 — effective 28 August 2025 (S.B. 4) and 1 January 2026 (H.B. 199) — so the default page shows text that post-dates the 1 January 2025 lien date by a year. Missouri publishes VERSION-PINNED EDITIONS: every section carries an "All versions" table with effective and end dates, reachable as OneSection.aspx?section=<sec>&bid=<id>, and the page it serves states its own effective date on its face. This record cites the 28 August 2021 edition of 137.115 (bid 49976, in force 28 Aug 2021 to 28 Aug 2025) and the 28 August 2024 edition of 137.1050 (bid 54677) for that reason. Where a section is unamended since before the lien date the default page is the operative one and is cited unpinned. PINNING THE URL IS NOT THE SAME AS READING THE PINNED TEXT, AND THIS RECORD ALREADY GOT THAT WRONG ONCE. An earlier draft described §137.115.9 as letting the State Tax Commission choose among several vehicle guides — which is the 1 January 2026 text. The 2021 edition names the NADA guide outright. Two subsections of the same pinned section differ between editions; the ratios in subsection 5 do not, which is the fact everything else here rests on, but the diff was not performed clause by clause and other 2025 changes may exist. When re-checking, read the pinned page, not the section you remember. CITATION HAZARD THREE — TWO CIRCUIT-BREAKER SECTIONS SHOW 2026 FIGURES TODAY. RSMo 135.025 and 135.030 were rewritten by H.B. 594 & 508 of 2025 with the new numbers keyed to "calendar years beginning on or after January 1, 2026", and both statute pages print the old and the new side by side. The pre-2026 figures are the tax year 2025 ones: $1,100 and $750 on the tax used in the computation, and a $27,500 / $30,000 income ceiling. Taking the $1,550 / $1,055 and $38,200 / $42,200 / $41,000 / $48,000 figures for 2025 is the mistake the layout invites.