Davidson County, Tennessee 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 RATIOS ARE IN THE CONSTITUTION, NOT IN A STATUTE, AND THEY ARE STATEWIDE BY THE SAME CLAUSE. Tenn. Const. art. II, §28 sets four real-property subclasses — public utility 55%, industrial and commercial 40%, residential 25%, farm 25% — and three tangible personal property subclasses — public utility 55%, industrial and commercial 30%, all other 5% with a $7,500 exemption. It then adds two sentences that do most of the structural work in this record: "The ratio of assessment to value of property in each class or subclass shall be equal and uniform throughout the State", and "Each respective taxing authority shall apply the same tax rate to all property within its jurisdiction." So the classification is entirely in the base, entirely uniform across the 95 counties, and entirely beyond local reach. The corollary is worth stating because it is where secondary summaries go wrong: a Tennessee county has ONE tax rate, and every claim you will read about a Tennessee "commercial rate" is really a claim about the 40% ratio. THE 55% UTILITY RATIO IS THE ONE MOST OFTEN MISQUOTED, AND IT IS ALSO THE ONE MOST OFTEN NOT APPLIED. Federal anti-discrimination law reaches railroad, airline and motor carrier property and effectively pulls it down to the industrial and commercial ratios — 40% real, 30% personal — which the Comptroller states in the Tax Aggregate Report. So 55% governs electric, gas, water, pipeline and telephone property and not transportation property, and any list of "Tennessee assessment ratios" that offers 55% without that carve-out is incomplete. THERE IS NO STATE PROPERTY TAX, AND THAT RESTS ON A POSITIVE STATEMENT. Senate Joint Resolution 158 of the 113th General Assembly recites that the State levied a property tax "until 1949", that "in 1949, the Legislature repealed the State's property tax", and that "the current property tax is imposed at the local level at various county and municipal tax rates". The resolution proposes to write the prohibition into §28 outright, and was referred to the 114th General Assembly for the second passage the constitution requires — so as of this record's tax year the Legislature retains the power it has not used since 1949, and the question of removing it is on the table rather than settled. THE CERTIFIED TAX RATE BINDS, AND THE ESCAPE IS ONE ADVERTISED HEARING. On a general reappraisal, T.C.A. §67-5-1701 requires the assessor to certify the new total assessed value and, separately, an estimate of new construction, improvements and deletions; each governing body then certifies a rate that raises the same ad valorem revenue as the previous year, computed EXCLUDING the new property. A proposed rate and its calculations go to the executive secretary of the State Board of Equalization, who has fifteen days to report. Then §67-5-1702: a higher rate may be levied once the body advertises its intent in a newspaper of general circulation, files an affidavit of publication with the State Board within thirty days, holds a public hearing, and adopts a resolution or ordinance. That is a NOTICE REQUIREMENT AND A SINGLE HEARING — a weaker gate than Georgia's three advertised hearings. IT IS NOT, HOWEVER, CONFINED TO REAPPRAISAL YEARS, AND EVERY SECONDARY ACCOUNT OF THIS STOPS ONE SUBSECTION SHORT. §67-5-1701(c) reads: "This part shall be applicable upon the application of a current value index or other plan approved by the state board for general updating of real property values." So a certified tax rate is owed in an INDEX or CURRENT VALUE UPDATE year as well — which matters, because those are precisely the years in which a frozen roll is marked back up. CTAS's widely-cited summary paraphrases §67-5-1701(a)(1)-(3) and (b) and never reaches (c); the Comptroller's own certified-tax-rate page describes the trigger only as "a county-wide reappraisal". An earlier draft of this record repeated that, and said a Tennessee jurisdiction may in every non-reappraisal year raise its rate freely with no rollback computation. That is wrong, and it was wrong in the direction that flatters the state. What DOES bound the cap is the base it is computed on. §67-5-1701(a)(4) lets the governing body exclude from the certified-rate base not only property appearing on the roll for the first time but also the taxable value of properties under tax increment financing (title 13, ch. 20, pt. 2) and properties inside an approved economic impact plan area (§§7-53-312, 7-53-314). And §67-5-1701(a)(5) permits an anticipatory adjustment for appeal losses, with State Board recapture the following year if it was overstated. A levy limit of zero is the right encoding; a levy limit of zero on an untouched base is not. TENNESSEE HAS NO RATE CAP, AND THE ABSENCE IS DELIBERATE RATHER THAN INCIDENTAL. MTAS reports that "T.C.A. §67-5-103 eliminated all existing maximum tax rate limitations, whether imposed by home rule, general, or private charters", though it also notes it is unclear whether a later charter provision could re-impose one. Nor is there an assessment-growth cap, a circuit-breaker cap on the bill, or a general bill-growth cap. The only thing in Tennessee resembling a bill cap is the local-option senior freeze, which applies per taxpayer and not per class. THE CYCLE IS THE NORTH CAROLINA PROBLEM, AND IT IS WORSE HERE. T.C.A. §67-5-1601(a)(1) offers four-, five- and six-year cycles, and the Comptroller's own publications say so — the 2025 Appraisal Ratio Study Report opens its explanation with "Counties in Tennessee are on either a 4-, 5-, or 6-year cycle for reappraisal." Its own reappraisal schedule disagrees: read on 2026-08-12 it puts 50 counties on five years, 30 on four, nine on six, three on three (Davidson, Williamson, Wilson) and three on two (Blount, Knox, Sullivan). All six short-cycle counties carry the schedule's "A3" flag; see `reassessmentCycleYears` for why that resolves the apparent conflict rather than deepening it. This record still refuses to publish a single statewide number, and `reassessmentCycleYears` is `unknown` with the distribution attached. BETWEEN REAPPRAISALS, LITTLE HAPPENS TO THE VALUE IN MOST OF THE STATE — AND THE STATUTE AND THE SCHEDULE DO NOT AGREE ABOUT HOW LITTLE. §67-5-1601(a)(1) ends with a flat sentence: "In counties which have adopted a four-year or five-year reappraisal cycle, there shall be no updating or indexing of values as there is in counties with a six-year cycle." §67-5-1601(a)(2) gives a six-year county an updating in the third year only if its overall level of appraisal has fallen below ninety percent of fair market value, with subclasses more than ten percent off the jurisdictional level pulled to it. Read alone, that says the appraised value in eighty-six of the ninety-five counties is simply frozen from one reappraisal to the next. THE DIVISION'S OWN SCHEDULE SAYS OTHERWISE FOR SIXTEEN OF THEM, AND THIS RECORD DOES NOT PRETEND TO RESOLVE IT. Read on 2026-08-12, the schedule assigns "Index" years to fifteen four-year counties (Anderson, Carter, DeKalb, Grainger, Hamblen, Hickman, Johnson, Lawrence, Maury, Morgan, Perry, Putnam, Roane, Sevier, Smith) and to one three-year county (Wilson). Every one of the sixteen is an A3 county — and §67-5-1601(a)(3) says an approved plan "shall be implemented IN LIEU OF indexing", which is the opposite of what the schedule shows, while its last sentence does subject mid-cycle improvement values to "periodic value indexes established by the board". So the honest statement is: the base is frozen mid-cycle for most of Tennessee, the state's published schedule contemplates mid-cycle indexing in sixteen counties anyway, and no source read for this record reconciles the two. Do not model all eighty-six as frozen. AND THE STATE MEASURES THE RESULTING GAP ITSELF. The Division of Property Assessments runs appraisal ratio studies in every county at least every two years (§§67-5-1604 to 1606). For tax year 2025 the median county ratio is 0.8094, with 57 of the 95 counties below 0.90, nineteen below 0.70 and eight below 0.60 — Morgan at 0.5394, Grainger at 0.5414, Sevier at 0.5422. Only 37 counties sit at 1.0000, and those are the ones that reappraised or were updated (twenty completed reappraisal programs, three took a current value update, and thirty-four needed no action because they had revalued or been studied in 2024). READ THE ASTERISK ON THAT TABLE: three of the 1.0000 entries — Chester, Crockett and Wayne — are CVU counties whose CALCULATED ratios are 0.6829, 0.6827 and 0.6761, printed at 1.0000 because their update factors will bring them there once the State Board approves them. Substituting the calculated figures moves the median to 0.8085 and the count below 0.70 from nineteen to twenty-two. The published distribution is therefore the flattering one, and it is still materially deeper drift than North Carolina's (median 0.8974, fourteen counties below 0.70); a nominal Tennessee rate applied to a nominal 25% ratio overstates the burden across most of the state. The ratio is not, however, a discount a homeowner receives automatically: the State Board applies it to equalise centrally assessed utility property and to equalise values reached on APPEAL, and a locally assessed taxpayer gets it only by proving their property is on the books at full market value. It also enters the Tax Relief calculation directly, by statute. THE TWO SENIOR PROGRAMMES GIVE OPPOSITE ANSWERS ON THE ONE QUESTION THAT MATTERS. Tax Relief (§§67-5-701 to 704) is a state REIMBURSEMENT — the constitution requires it to be, the Comptroller says "Tax Relief is not an exemption", the taxpayer must pay the tax before applying, and the bill is unchanged; onBill is false. The Tax Freeze (§67-5-705) changes the amount the collecting official bills, is paid for by the local jurisdiction, and is onBill true — but it is a LOCAL OPTION adopted by only 27 counties and 35 cities as of this tax year, and it freezes the DOLLARS OF TAX rather than the value, which is why it is recorded with the `value-freeze` mechanic under an explicit warning. The two stack. CITATION HAZARDS, ALL FOUND BY READING BODIES. (1) The official Tennessee Code Annotated is published only through a LexisNexis container that serves a 3.7 KB JavaScript shell to any non-browser client, so no statutory text in this record is cited to the code host. law.justia.com and codes.findlaw.com both answer a Tennessee request with a Cloudflare interstitial at HTTP 403, browser User-Agent or not — but the Justia section pages ARE readable through an Internet Archive snapshot, which is how the verbatim text of §67-5-1601 and §67-5-1701 quoted above was obtained. Every other T.C.A. quotation here rests on a verbatim extract the Comptroller itself publishes as a PDF (what makes §§67-5-701 to 705 citable at tier 1), on an agency publication reproducing the section, or on the University of Tennessee's CTAS and MTAS services, which are tier 3 and labelled as such. (2) The Comptroller's extract of §§67-5-701 to 704 is stamped "(Revised 2019)" on its face and its history lines end at 2018, so it is reliable for structure and for the unindexed statutory base figures ($24,000 of income at §67-5-702(a)(2), $27,000 of market value at (a)(3)) and is NOT evidence of the operative 2025 amounts. (3) The Comptroller serves its Property Tax Relief brochure at an UNDATED URL that it overwrites each year: on 2026-08-12 that URL carried the 2026 edition ($33,600 of market value, $38,470 of income), not the 2025 one, and the Comptroller's relief page links it as "View the 2026 Tax Relief Brochure" while search engines still index the same URL under a 2025 title. THE 2025 RELIEF FIGURES ARE NOW CONFIRMED TWO WAYS, WHICH THEY WERE NOT WHEN THIS RECORD WAS DRAFTED. The $37,530 income limit is fixed by the Comptroller's own year-pinned 2025 tax-freeze income-limit list ("52 counties are at the minimum income limit of $37,530"; "21 jurisdictions have a local option income limit" of $61,920), because §67-5-705(f)(3)(A)(ii) floors every county's freeze limit at "the applicable state tax relief income limit established under §67-5-702". The $32,700 market-value cap, which appears in the Comptroller's 2025 Tax Relief Information Sheet only through a municipal reproduction, is now independently derivable from two published numbers that have nothing to do with that sheet: the Shelby County Trustee publishes the maximum 2025 tax relief credit as $219.91 for the elderly and disabled and $1,176.88 for a disabled veteran, and the 2025 Tax Aggregate Report Table VI gives Shelby's county rate as $2.6900 per $100 against an appraisal ratio of 1.0000. $32,700 x 25% = $8,175 assessed, x 2.69% = $219.91 exactly; $175,000 x 25% = $43,750, x 2.69% = $1,176.88 exactly. Both figures fall out to the cent. EVERY STATUTE QUOTED HERE WAS CHECKED FOR AMENDMENTS AGAINST THE 1 JANUARY 2025 LIEN DATE, AND ONE OF THEM MOVED RECENTLY ENOUGH TO MATTER. §67-5-1601 was last amended by 2024 Public Chapter 781, §3, effective 23 April 2024, which deleted the first sentence of subsection (a)(3) and cut the permitted continuous on-site-review schedule from "no longer than five (5) years" to "no longer than four (4) years". That is before the lien date, so the four-year text governs tax year 2025 — but secondary summaries of §67-5-1601 still in circulation quote the five-year version, and the difference is the whole substance of the A3 flag on the Comptroller's reappraisal schedule. §67-5-1701 was last amended in 2018 (ch. 911, eff. 1 May 2018) and §67-5-705 in 2023 (ch. 271), both comfortably before the lien date. The Comptroller's §§67-5-701 to 704 extract is the one that does NOT clear this check, and it is quarantined above. TAX YEAR 2025 rather than 2026 because 2025 is the most recent year with a complete certified record: the 2025 rates, assessments and appraisal ratios are all published, whereas 2026 county rates were still being adopted when this record was written. Note that the 2025 Tax Aggregate Report is served marked "(Current draft pending approval by the State Board of Equalization)", so its aggregate figures may still move even though the law they describe will not.