Salt Lake County, Utah 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.

"UTAH HAS NO LEVY LIMIT" IS THE WRONG WAY ROUND. The certified tax rate is defined as one that "will provide the same ad valorem property tax revenue for a taxing entity as was budgeted by that taxing entity for the prior year", so revenue is held at last year's dollars and only new growth is added — a ZERO-GROWTH levy limit, identical in form to Ohio's HB 920 and recorded here as one. The rate falls automatically as valuations rise, which is why a Utah rate cut is usually not a tax cut. What Utah lacks is the finality: an entity MAY levy above the certified rate after advertised notice and a public hearing, so there is no numeric ceiling and no honest value for a growth percentage other than zero-plus-override. THE RESIDENTIAL DIVERGENCE IS AN EXEMPTION, NOT A CLASSIFICATION, and the distinction is not pedantic — the constitution forbids classification, so the 45% had to be authorised as an exemption by Art. XIII §3(2)(a)(iv) before the Legislature could take it. The effect is a 55% base against 100%, at the same rate. The common misreading is that it keys to owner-occupancy; it does not, because 59-2-103(6)(b)(ii) extends it to any property that is a TENANT's primary residence. Second homes, vacation properties and transient rentals are what fall outside. THE COUNTY RATE CAP IS AGGREGATE, NOT GENERAL-LEVY. Utah Code 59-2-908 imposes "a single aggregate limitation on the property tax levied for all purposes by the county", and 59-2-911 carves out an enumerated exception list; tort liability is not among the exceptions. Describing it as a cap on the general levy alone understates its scope while overstating how close counties run to it. CITATION HAZARD, AND IT IS THE WASHINGTON FAILURE AGAIN. Utah Code 59-2-924(3) currently reads "on or before June 13" — that is the 2026 amendment. The tax-year-2025 date is 8 JUNE, per the enrolled 2025 bill made retrospective to 1 January 2025 and per the Tax Commission's own Standard 10. A reader taking the live page at face value gets a date that did not govern the year they are working in. Utah nonetheless offers the best citation form in this corpus, and it is worth copying wherever it exists: every code section is downloadable at a VERSION-PINNED url whose filename encodes both the effective date and the enactment date, in XML that carries an <effdate> element inside the document and serves as plain text to any client. That is precisely what Washington lacked. The trap is that it only helps if the right version is chosen — the current-version link on the page is the newest one, not the one that governed the tax year. Two host notes. The le.utah.gov HTML view is CLIENT-RENDERED: a plain fetch returns about 26KB of navigation with roughly 2,500 characters of site chrome and no statutory text at all, while the section number still appears in the markup — so a content assertion on the section number would pass against a document that does not contain the law. Cite the XML. And propertytax.utah.gov answers some .pdf paths with an HTML page at HTTP 200 rather than a document.