Wake County, North Carolina 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.

"NORTH CAROLINA ASSESSES AT 100% OF MARKET VALUE" IS TRUE ONLY IN A REAPPRAISAL YEAR. The ratio is genuinely 1.0 — assessed equals appraised — but G.S. 105-285(d) fixes real-property value only as of the reappraisal years, so between them the roll is frozen against a moving market. North Carolina measures the resulting drift itself: NCDOR's 2025 sales-assessment-ratio study puts the median county at 0.8974, with 51 counties below 0.90 and fourteen below 0.70. That is why assessmentLevel belongs on the county records as a cited datum here, and why a nominal rate alone would misstate the burden. Three of the deepest-drift counties are large ones — Buncombe at 0.6172, Guilford at 0.6831 and Davidson at 0.6755 — which matters because it rules out the tempting explanation. G.S. 105-286(a)(2) forces a county over 75,000 population to advance its reappraisal once its ratio crosses the .85/1.15 trigger, so it would be neat if the worst drift sat in small counties outside that gate. It does not. THE OCTENNIAL CYCLE IS A CEILING, AND THE PUBLISHED "NEXT SCHEDULED" YEAR IS NOT A CYCLE. G.S. 105-286(a) requires reappraisal "every eighth year thereafter" unless a county must advance under (a)(2) or chooses to under (a)(3), and NCDOR's footnote states it correctly: "Real property must be revalued every 8 years but counties may elect to revalue more frequently." NCDOR publishes each county's latest and next-scheduled year, but its own footnote warns the next-scheduled year reflects the county's declared budget-reserve intent, so differencing the two columns yields an INTERVAL and not a cycle — Wake, for instance, took a one-off three-year interval and has since resolved on a different cycle again. For the distribution, the UNC School of Government puts it at about two-thirds of the 100 counties on four years and about a quarter on eight. This record therefore carries the statutory 8 and leaves the observed interval to the county layer, where NCDOR publishes it for all 100 counties in one table. THE $1.50 RATE CAP DOES NOT CAP A COUNTY RATE. Schools and debt service — the two largest county property-tax purposes — are among the eight purposes G.S. 153A-149(b) allows "without restriction as to rate or amount". See the note on the cap itself. What North Carolina does NOT have is as load-bearing as what it does: no assessment-growth cap, no levy limit, no cap on the bill, and no state ad valorem levy. The thing called a circuit breaker here is a deferment against a lien, not a cap, and encoding it as one would misstate every bill it touches. Citation note: ncleg.gov and ncdor.gov both answer a plain client at HTTP 200 and serve section text in the raw body, so this is the most checkable state in the corpus so far — 28 citations, every one verified against the document body rather than a status code.