Property Tax Comparison Study
Full name: "50-State Property Tax Comparison Study"
Latest Edition: 2006
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Non-Member Price: $100 ($107 w/sales tax. You will be emailed a PDF version when your payment is confirmed. Please include your email address on the order.) Add the companion Income Tax Study (for tax year 2003) and get both for only $180! ($192.60 w/sales tax. You will be emailed a PDF version when your payment is confirmed. Please include your email address on the order.) |
Members: View
study in PDF format (temporarily unavailable to members on this web page due to a technical problem. Members, to receive your free copy, contact our office.) Previous Editions
Note: The price on the PayPal purchase page will reflect a 7% Minnesota state sales tax. These previous years' studies are all paper copies and will be shipped to you when payment is confirmed. Please include your mailing address, or email address in order for us to contact you.
| Name | Year | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study (2004) | Payable Years 2004 or 2005 | $50 |
| 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study (2002) | Payable Year 2002 | $35 |
| 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study (2000) | Payable Year 2000 | $25 |
| 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study (1998) | Payable Year 1998 | $15 |
| 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study (1995) | Payable Year 1995 | $15 |
| Previous years' Property Tax Studies, 1995-2002, special price for all 4 | $80 |
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MTA Committed to Regular Property Tax Updates
With a commitment to improve upon the stellar record of its nationally recognized comprehensive comparison study, the MTA has begun the process of updating its property tax study annually, if sufficient funding is available. The payable 2005 study is the first study to come out under the annual update timeline. Plans are now being made to do another study for taxes payable in 2006. If you represent an organization that might be interested in licensing this study for your state, please contact us for details.
The 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study was first unveiled in June of 1996 for taxes payable in 1995. Over the course of that summer, nearly every major daily paper in the state carried an editorial about the onerous property tax burden of commercial and industrial properties that our study documented empirically for the first time. With that quality of research available, it is not too surprising that serious property tax reform began to be undertaken in the 1997 session.
What do we mean by serious? In our judgment, no reform proposal was serious that did not narrow the wide gap between homeowner and business property taxes for the same market values. That narrowing began during the 1997 and continued right through the landmark reform of the 2001 session, proposed by former Governor Ventura and only slightly modified by the legislature. Reformers were bolstered with measures of progress and a look at how far they still needed to go by checking our property tax study updates for taxes payable in 1998, 2000, and 2002. This final year, released in May of 2003, is more a documentation of how much reform has been achieved.
The latest study is for property taxes payable in 2005. MTA plans to publish the same study for taxes payable in 2006 sometime early in 2007. The first four studies used the same assumptions, but updates for 2004 and 2005 relied on re-examining our assumptions to make sure they were still valid. Changes that have resulted from that re-examination include dropping the $70,000 market value example for urban areas, adding a set of tables for the 50 largest cities in the country as a supplement to the largest city in each state, and adding an industrial property example with a higher portion of personal property than our 50% assumption used initially. The 2004 and 2005 studies were also done in closer cooperation with several of our sister organizations as part of the National Taxpayers Conference. NTC members should contact us if they are interested in participating in the study for property taxes payable in 2006.
This study is the only one like it that we know about. It locates parcels of property for four different classes of property (residential homestead, an apartment complex of 20 units, commercial, and industrial) in the largest city in each state and a typical rural community, and calculates the property taxes for several different market values for those parcels. The values are adjusted for differences in assessment practices.
It is a powerful tool for comparing the property tax systems of the 50 states to one another while taking into account various levels of quality of assessments. We also calculate taxes on the median selling price of homes in the largest cities around the country, to give an idea of how the combination of values and taxes affect the cost of owning a home. Future studies may incorporate variable business property valuations for a better look at the different business property markets and their property taxes.
A Word about the Income Tax Study
It was four years between our previous Individual Income Tax Comparison Study and this latest one for income taxes owed for 2003. The Minnesota Department of Revenue (DOR) used to be the primary producers of this study, done every three years by their Research Division through most of the 1980s and 1990s.
As the 1999 legislative session approached and it appeared likely that income tax cuts would at least be on the table, MTA learned nearly simultaneously that 1) DOR was not going to do a study for 1997 and 2) that we would be able to do the study ourselves.
We worked closely with DOR to develop taxpayer profiles and appropriate income examples for three filer types. As a result of this careful work, it became clear to the majority of lawmakers that the only appropriate way to cut tax rates was to cut them for all income levels. Before our study, there was significant pressure to cut rates only for lower incomes.
For the 2001 session, we provided an update on our income tax study for tax year 1999. We were able to show that for higher income singles and families, Minnesota still ranked in the top 10 states with a significant income tax.
Our goal for the latest study was to produce a re-benchmarked study for tax year 2003. We worked with DOR again to develop all new taxpayer profiles. In calculating taxes for other states, we again adjusted property tax and mortgage interest deductions based on data from our 50-state property tax comparison study that showed different levels of property taxes and home values. We also prepared the 2003 income tax study in close cooperation with our fellow National Taxpayer Conference members from other states, and added features that were particularly useful for them as we were able to do so.
The 2003 study includes income tax calculations for 10 income levels for single taxpayers, single head-of-household taxpayers with 2 dependents, and married filing jointly households with 2 dependents, using standard and itemized deductions when appropriate, as indicated by our taxpayer profile data from DOR. It also includes fewer income levels for senior filers.