Findig effective property tax rate per city

[Simon Stahl]

I am wondering if there is a webpage somewhere that shows the effective tax rate per city in the US. I have tried sites like smartasset.com or googled for the county assessors page to get the rate, but both are really unclear. What I am looking for is the complete tax that has to be payed per year (county + city + state + additional fees etc). Anyone knows of such a page or source?

[Chris Mason]

Originally posted by @Simon Stahl:

Thanks @Kyle J. for the info. I see the same here in Oakland, CA where I life. smartasset.com shows a tax rate of 0.866%, but I actually pay 1.37%. That makes quite a difference with the property prices around here.

 California has Prop 13, generic national calculations aren't useful here. In general property taxes is a state specific question.

Here is how you do it in California. 

520 Montclair Ave, Oakland CA is listed for $1,088,000. And let's pretend you've never heard of the city before, so you have no idea what county it is in. Let's say you're writing an offer at $1.2m.

Google search "CityName CA" to find the county, then google "CountyName Property Taxes."

So "Oakland CA" google search reveals Alameda county because the first line of the wikipedia entry showing up on google's preview is "...largest city and county seat of Alameda County, California..." without having to open the actual wikipedia article. So you google "Alameda County Property Taxes," which brings you to this website for Alameda County. Click "look up secured property tax" and plug in the address. Some counties, you have to plug in the APN because their search feature sucks.

Boom, you get this (looks different for each county):

Ad valorem is 1.3508%, fixed is $980.12. You're writing at $1.2m.

[ $1,200,000 * 1.3508% + $980.12 ] / 12 = $1432.48 per month.

However, parts of Oakland are 1.45%, other parts have fixed at $969, and that's just one city. 

If you cross into Piedmont and it'll cost you another $3k/yr:

That fixed portion means you can only ever be so accurate even within a single city if you just want to use a percent. We have overlapping water districts, mosquito districts, school districts, bla bla bla.

Back to that website quoting 0.866%, that's a blended mix of long-time homeowners and new, so rather useless - my grandma who had owned her $1.2m MFR for a million years was paying about 0.2% per year in property taxes (and STILL complained about it...). The random example I picked works out to 1.43%, however that percentage would be higher if the purchase price were lower, due to the fixed special assessments not scaling down with purchase price. 

All that being said: If you just want a conservative percentage to use for the Bay Area, use 1.6%. If the deal makes sense at 1.6%, then it'll make sense when you pull the bill and it turns out that it's 1.5%, etc. Outlying rural CA, use 1.25% and be pleasantly surprised when it's 1.1%.

I'm probably going to bookmark this answer so I can refer back to it in the future.