Fairfax County, Virginia 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 GEOGRAPHY IS THE HARD PART. Virginia has 133 county-equivalents — 95 counties and 38 independent cities — and the Department of Taxation prints them as two separate tables with no shared column, because an independent city is not inside a county. Va. Const. Art. VII §1 makes the distinction on the face of its definitions: a "city" is "an independent incorporated community", a "town" is "an incorporated community WITHIN one or more counties". So for 38 localities there is no county rate at all and the city rate is the whole general levy, while a resident of one of the 189 towns pays the town rate ON TOP of their county rate. Any model that treats "the county rate" as the answer is wrong in both directions in Virginia. THERE IS ALMOST NO STATE LAW TO RECORD, WHICH IS ITSELF THE FINDING. No rate cap, no assessment-growth cap, no circuit breaker, no bill-growth cap, and no state levy on real property. The one levy limit, §58.1-3321, requires a locality whose reassessment would raise total real property levies by 1% or more to roll its rate back to 101% of the prior year — "unless subsection B is complied with", and subsection B is a single advertised public hearing. It is a notice requirement wearing a cap's clothes, and it binds only a locality unwilling to hold the hearing. Note also that the section HEADING says "referendum" while the body contains none. ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE IS LOCAL OPTION, so the county layer will carry more of Virginia than of any other state so far. Reassessment cycles run from annual to every six years. Elderly and disabled relief is enabling legislation under which each locality writes its own income and net-worth limits. Land-use assessment is adopted locality by locality. The statewide, mandatory items are few: the disabled-veteran exemption, the surviving-spouse exemption, and the self-executing constitutional exemptions at Art. X §6 for public, church, cemetery and nonprofit library and school property. ONE STATE LEVY DOES EXIST, contrary to the usual "Virginia has no state property tax". Art. X §4 segregates real estate and tangible personal property to local taxation only "except the rolling stock of public service corporations", and §58.1-2652 taxes that rolling stock at $1 per $100 of assessed value into the state treasury. It is small, and it is not nothing. CITATION HAZARD, AND IT IS SHARPER THAN WASHINGTON'S. Virginia regular-session acts take effect on 1 JULY following adjournment (Va. Const. Art. IV §13), but the property tax lien date is 1 JANUARY. So any code page whose history line ends in a 2025 chapter is showing text that took effect SIX MONTHS AFTER the tax year it appears to govern began. Four sections cited for this state are in exactly that position and are recorded as such rather than being quietly relied on. The rule this yields is general and worth carrying into every remaining state: on a statute host that serves only the current version, the amendment history is the only evidence of which text governed the lien date, and it must be read every time. Two smaller traps worth recording. The Department's rate tables footnote that Accomack, King William and Westmoreland each carry two distinct sets of county rates and that the printed rate "does not apply to specific Towns" — so those three counties cannot be used to illustrate town-on-county stacking, which is precisely what makes them tempting. And §58.1-3506(A) enumerates 48 tangible personal property rate classes in tax year 2025; the 49th, for electric-powered landscaping equipment, was added by a 2026 act and is not part of this year.