How will increased property values affect your taxes?

Every six years, each county in the state of Ohio must revaluate all of it's property as required by law. To come up with those values, hired appraisers take aerial views, drive through neighborhoods and take into account how much houses are selling for.

A boom in the housing market beginning back in 2019 means people have been willing to pay more, which drives values way up.

So, does that mean if your home value went up by 50 percent, your taxes will too? Mahoning County Auditor Ralph Meacham says not quite.

You don't pay taxes on the total value of your home, you pay on a fraction of the value of your home and that's based on the levies in place where you live. Those levies are set in stone and cannot be raised.

Let's say, for example, a levy was passed for $10 million. That means money collected cannot exceed that $10 million.

"So if property values go up, they won't get 48 percent more, they'll still get the $10 million," said Meacham. "So, when the property values go up, the effective tax rate has to go down to offset that," he said.

That means the levies you vote on also act as a regulator, putting a cap on how high your taxes can go. It's a complicated formula that has safeguards in place to keep your taxes from spiking and keep them relatively stable. That formula is called equalization. Here's how it works:

Let's say your property value is $100,000. You multiply that $100,000 by 35 percent to get the taxable value. Then divide the taxable value by 1000 and you take that number and multiply it by the millage you've voted on and that end result would be your property taxes for 2024. You can find your millage here, though your calculation will not be accurate until the new numbers come in for next year.

"After all the new values go in, we send it to the department of taxation in Columbus and they look at all of our new values and then they look at all the levies we have on there and they calculate for everyone of our 62 taxing districts in Mahoning County an effective tax rate," said Meacham.

Meacham tells 21 News 1/3 of tax rates will increase, 1/3 will decrease and 1/3 will remain the same.