Since Assessed Value (AV) is the tax base upon which school district property tax bills are calculated, changes in a school district’s AV play an important role in the generation of local revenue.
If a school district’s AV grows naturally from year to year, the result is an increase in local revenue, even without raising the millage rate. For school districts with increasing AV, they might be able to minimize annual millage rate increases when building their budgets.
Check out our interactive Infogram illustrating median annual % change in assessed value over time.
However, AV does not grow from year to year in every school district. Some school districts experience declines in AV from year to year, which means that they need to raise their millage rate annually just to maintain property tax revenue from the prior year. These districts need to use a portion (or even all) of their Act 1 index (which we’ll dive into next week) just to get back to where they were the prior year.
Check out our interactive Infogram illustrating the number of school districts that experienced a decline in assessed value each year.
Check out the Infogram below for a more in depth breakdown of change in assessed value between 2017-18 and 2018-19 (based on final general fund budgets submitted to the Department of Education), check out the image link below to view our interactive Infogram.
Click on the map below to view the median change in each school district’s total assessed value over the most recent 6-year timeframe for which data is available. Some school districts have experienced an average annual growth in AV during this timeframe while other school districts have experienced decline. Additionally, the map shows the percentage of each school district’s total budget made up by this median change in AV.