How the comparison works
You type two addresses. We figure out which governments collect taxes at each one — state, county, city, school district, and any special districts — look up their rates, apply them to your income and home value, and add up the totals. Where a government's published budget is loaded, we also show where each tax dollar goes by department — schools, police, libraries, parks, debt, and pensions.
You can click or tap any number on the comparison page. A panel opens at the side of the page showing where the number came from, how we calculated it, and when we last checked it.
The five layers we resolve
Every US address sits inside a stack of governments. We resolve five layers of that stack and show a line for each government we find.
- 01StatePersonal income tax (where it's levied), sales tax (the statewide portion), and the state's rules for how property is assessed. States that don't levy income tax (Texas, Florida, Nevada, and several others) get an explicit “not levied” line so the absence is clear instead of confusing.
- 02CountyThe general-fund property tax that funds courts, sheriff, public health, and elections. In California the county also collects the 1% base tax plus voter-approved bond charges.
- 03CityMunicipal property tax — pays for streets, parks, fire + police, library, sanitation. Some cities (Dallas, Houston) don't levy a separate library tax; others do. The line shows the city portion of your property tax bill, not the combined city+county+school total.
- 04School districtAlmost always the largest single property-tax line. School district boundaries don't match city limits — your house might be in “Plano” for mailing but inside Frisco ISD's boundary. We resolve the actual school district your parcel falls inside, not the one named on the postal address.
- 05Special districtsSingle-purpose governments that tax on top of the other four — transit authorities, water and fire districts, library districts, utility districts, hospital districts. An address can sit inside several at once, or none. Where we have a district's boundary, we place your address inside it and show that district by name on its own line.
How California's 1% base works
California property taxes have a shape no other state shares, and we render it the way your tax bill does.
California's constitution (Proposition 13, adopted 1978) fixes the base property tax at exactly 1% of assessed value. That 1% is collected by the county and split among the county, city, schools, and local agencies by a state formula. The split itself is not published as per-agency rates— no California county publishes them — so we show the base as its own statutory line rather than guessing how it divides. The statutory line is marked “Verified” because its rate is fixed by the constitution, not because we checked a yearly document; it is the one number on the page that cannot go stale.
On top of the 1%, voters approve extras — school construction bonds, pension overrides, BART debt — and counties do publish those as actual levied rates. Each California county, city, and school line on the comparison carries only these voter-approved extras, checked against the county's published rate book. This is why a California school line can look far smaller than, say, a Texas school line: the Texas line carries the district's whole levy, while most of a California school's funding arrives through the 1% base line above it. When you compare a California address against another state, the totals are the comparable figure; the per-layer lines tell different stories by construction, and the comparison page says so inline.
What the confidence labels mean
Every number on the comparison carries one of three labels; not-applicable rows use a separate status mark.
We checked this number against a published source from the government that collects the tax — usually the county assessor's rate publication, the state tax authority's annual schedule, or the school district's adopted budget. Each verified number passes two independent checks against that source document, plus automatic screens that compare it to its own prior year, to neighboring governments, and to its state's published totals — and we re-check a random sample of verified numbers every quarter. The panel's “Sources” section links to the document we checked, and the “Updated” date is when we last verified it.
Estimated from the published rate plus assumptions about your household (income, home value). Not a checked record for your exact address. Often the rate itself is published and what we apply it to (for example, how much of a home's value is taxed, or how much of your income you spend on taxed goods) is a typical national figure. Where we have a local figure for your area we use it; otherwise we use a reasonable assumption, and the panel explains it. Sometimes the rate is our own estimate, or a checked rate that has aged past its window (see below). Where the rate is our own estimate, the “Updated” date in the panel is when we wrote or last reviewed it — not a check against a published source. Where a checked rate reads “Estimated” only because of your household settings, the date is still the day we checked the rate.
We don't have the data for this row at this address yet. Either we haven't loaded the boundaries that would place your address in that layer (this happens with special districts in some counties), or we haven't loaded the published rate for that government yet. The headline number you see still adds up the verified and estimated rows truthfully — we never invent a value to fill a blank row.
This is not a fourth confidence grade. It means the tax or service layer does not apply at that address, and the dash keeps that confirmed absence separate from rows we have not loaded yet.
Where our typical-household figures come from
Two of the assumptions behind “Estimated” numbers are national figures for a typical household:
- Taxable-spending share (about 18% of income).When you don't enter your own taxable spending, we estimate the sales tax you'd pay from roughly 18% of pre-tax income — the share a typical household spends on sales-taxable purchases (prepared food, clothing, vehicles, furnishings, and the like; rent, groceries, healthcare, and most services are exempt or untaxed). Based on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey (2024). Enter your own spending in the profile and the line uses your figure instead.
- Renter pass-through (22%).For renters we assume about 22% of the landlord's property tax is passed through in rent — a deliberately conservative long-run estimate. It sits above the ~14% measured in Schwegman & Yinger (2020, U.S. Census Bureau) and below the 50% midpoint used in the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's national tax model.
Numbers don't stay checked forever
“Verified” means we checked this number against a published source — recently, not necessarily today. Property, sales, and school rates keep their “Verified” label for 12 months after we check them; income tax rates, which change less often, keep it for 24 months. Once that window passes, we automatically relabel the number “Estimated” — not because it's wrong, but because we can no longer promise it's still current without another look. We do this on purpose: a “Verified” badge should always mean the same thing — checked, and checked recently — rather than slowly drifting into a label nobody re-earns. The “Updated” date in the panel always shows exactly when we last checked, so you can judge for yourself how fresh it is.
Which year's rates. Rates shown are for tax year 2025wherever a government has published them; where it has not yet, the line carries the latest earlier year we hold and says so. Each line's panel names its tax year beside the “Updated” date, so a comparison that mixes years is visible line by line rather than averaged away.
If you're retired or 65 or older
What the comparison does with retirement income and age, and what it leaves out.
On the household step you can set wages to $0, enter your yearly retirement income (pensions, IRA and 401(k) withdrawals, and Social Security), say how much of it is Social Security, and say whether you are 65 or older. Here is what each of those changes.
- State income tax. States treat retirement income differently: some tax none of it, some tax all of it, and some exempt part. Where we have loaded a state's rule, the state income tax line uses it. Where we haven't, or where the state's rule starts from a figure on your federal return that we don't calculate, we leave that income out of the line and tell you how much we left out. Local income tax lines (city, county or school district) are calculated on wages only; where retirement income may be taxable locally, the page says it was left out.
- Sales tax. If you don't enter your own spending, we estimate it from your wages plus your retirement income.
- School property tax at 65 or older. Where we have loaded a state's senior exemption, the school district line is reduced by it. Some states also cap or freeze the school tax for homeowners 65 or older. We don't calculate that cap, so your real bill may be lower; the page tells you when this applies. Where a state's senior relief isn't loaded, the line is calculated without it and says so.
Any line that uses your retirement income or senior relief is labeled “Estimated,” even if its rate was verified and even if the number doesn't move. Entering your own spending does not change a sales tax line's label.
If you've owned your home a long time. Property tax lines use the home value you enter, applied to both addresses. That is not your home's current assessed value, so your actual bill may differ from what we show.
Where each tax dollar goes
How each tax dollar is spent by department — today's services versus debts and promises from the past.
For addresses where we've extracted at least one jurisdiction's published budget, the comparison shows where each tax dollar is deployed by department: police, schools, library, parks, debt service, pension obligations, and so on. Each row sums your share across every loaded layer (state + county + city + school + special-district) that funds the category — so when multiple layers contribute to schools, for example, the row reflects state aid + the city's school-related spending + the school district's own budget combined. You can read off the share of each address's combined local-tax burden that funds current services versus previously-acquired liabilities (debt, pensions, retiree benefits).
For layers whose budget we haven't loaded yet, the page names them in a note at the bottom rather than making up numbers or quietly leaving them out. Coverage grows as we load more published budgets, one layer at a time.
Per-service quality context (school district student-success indices, library system circulation, healthcare access scores) appears in each department row's panel where we have it, as background rather than as a score. The previous “0–100 service match” headline and “$ per match-point” metric have been retired in favor of this deployment view — it makes the tax-to-service connection visible rather than abstracting it into a single number.
What this comparison leaves out
What we leave out, on purpose or for now — separate decisions, separate data.
- Cost of living beyond taxes — rent, childcare, insurance, groceries, utilities all vary materially by metro and are not in the comparison. Treat the tax total as one input among several for a move decision.
- An exact tax bill — for verified-rate cities we target ±5% of a real settled bill at the same assessed value. For estimated metros the estimated rows could be off by more — the confidence label tells you which is which.
- A market-price signal— the deployment view shows how each city spends its tax revenue, not whether that spending translates to better outcomes for you. A larger library budget doesn't mean your address sells for more, or that library service is necessarily better — it means more dollars flow to that department.
- Every special district, everywhere— where a county's special districts aren't loaded yet, that line reads “Not yet loaded” and adds nothing to the total rather than a guess. A district we haven't loaded can't appear on the page at all.
- Homestead exemptions in states where we haven't loaded them — several states lower the taxable value of a home you live in by a fixed dollar amount.
Included: school-district homestead exemptions in the states where we've loaded them — for example Texas's $100,000. Those school lines for a home you live in are calculated on home value less the exemption, and the line's panel says so.
Not included: Louisiana exempts the first $7,500 of assessed value for a home you live in, and Texas counties and cities may grant their own exemptions. Our figures for those lines are higher than what a typical homeowner actually pays.
How big the gap can be: on a $300,000 New Orleans home we show roughly $4,020 in property and school tax, while an owner who qualifies would actually owe roughly $3,015 — about 25% lower. We plan to add the remaining exemptions; until then each line's panel notes the limit.
Legal references: Tex. Tax Code §11.13(b), raised by 2023 Prop 4; La. Const. art. VII §20.
Privacy
No accounts, no cookies. What we keep, and when.
The site has no accounts and sets no cookies. To run a comparison we send each address to the US Census Bureau's address service (and sometimes Mapbox) to find where it is, and we keep the address so we don't have to look it up twice. Your household answers are used to work out the numbers and are not saved; they stay in your browser until you close the tab. If you flag a number, we store your note along with the address and the figure you flagged. None of this is linked to your name.
How long we keep it. A looked-up address stays in our cache for 90 days after the last time anyone asked about it, then the whole record is deleted. A priority request is kept until we have emailed you about it and you ask us to delete it, because it is your record of asking.
Two things we store when you ask us to
Both happen only if you choose to. Both are narrow. Both can be deleted if you ask.
When an address has a data gap — it didn't resolve, or a tax line is still pending — you can ask us to prioritize it. We store your email, the address you entered, and which lines were missing, so we can email you when the data lands. Nothing else gets linked to it.
Every panel has a “Flag value” button. It opens a form where you pick a reason, type a note and, if you like, paste a link to a source. We store your note along with the address and the figure you flagged. The form asks you not to include personal information.
Where to go next
- The coverage page — which states have verified rates, which are estimated, and totals by population, land area, and tax revenue.
- The comparison — enter two addresses.