About the property assessment check

What does this tool decide, and why can a calculator not do it?

It decides two things a number alone cannot: whether your assessment is out of line with comparable homes, and whether filing is worth the fee and the effort. A calculator multiplies an assessment by a tax rate. An appeal turns on a statistical comparison, a county-specific procedure, and — in some states — a statutory test that overrides the comparison entirely. All three have to agree before “file” is the right answer, which is why the honest output is often “your assessment looks fair” or “we cannot determine this.”

Which rules does the engine encode?

The statistical method first: four hard comparable filters, a median assessment ratio, and the IAAO coefficient of dispersion, with fewer than 3 surviving comparables producing no verdict at all. Every step is set out on the methodology page, and every figure is reproducible by hand — the engine is pure TypeScript with no dependencies, no network access and no AI in the calculation path.

Then the county procedure. Two counties ship today: Cook County, Illinois, where residential appeals commonly rest on uniformity, and Bergen County, New Jersey, where they rest on market value. Bergen carries the statutory filing-fee schedule — $5 under $150,000 assessed, $25 to under $500,000, $100 to under $1,000,000, and $150 at or above it — a 1 April deadline that the county board must have in hand rather than postmarked, 1 May where a municipality is revaluing, and direct filing with the Tax Court above $1,000,000 of assessed value.

And where a statute overrides the statistics, the statute wins. New Jersey's Chapter 123 compares your assessment-to-true-value ratio against your municipality's Director's Ratio ± 15%, multiplied rather than added: an average ratio of 78.00% gives a corridor of 66.30% to 89.70%. Inside that corridor the board may grant no reduction however large the comparables gap looks. Below it, the assessment is raised — that is the statutory outcome, not a risk.

When does it refuse to answer?

Every New Jersey check, right now. Chapter 123 is implemented, but the table of municipal Director's Ratios is deliberately empty: not one has been read from a primary source, and none is invented. So every Bergen County result returns “cannot determine” and names the missing input, instead of falling back to the generic gap thresholds — which would tell a homeowner sitting inside the corridor they have a strong case on an appeal the board is required by statute to deny. The ratios are republished by the Division of Taxation every 1 April, per municipality, and each one needs its own citation before the engine will accept it.

What is verified, and what is still unconfirmed?

Bergen's deadline, its fee schedule, its forms and the Chapter 123 rule itself were read from the New Jersey Division of Taxation's assessors' handbook and the Division's own appeal page. Cook County is thinner, because the Assessor's site could not be read at all from the verification environment. Specifically, and each of these is live today:

• Cook's deadline is modelled as 30 days after your notice. The real rule is a close date the Board of Review publishes for each of the 38 townships each session, with 30 days only a stated minimum — 2026 Group 1 opened 3 August and closed 1 September, a span of 29 days. Check your township's published dates, not our countdown.
• Cook has a separate evidence-submission deadline after the filing deadline — 11 September for that same 2026 group — and the engine has no concept of one, so it cannot warn you.
• Cook's 10% residential assessment level rests only on secondary summaries, and its estimated tax rate is a self-described rough estimate that collapses three separately published factors into one constant. Both feed the estimated annual overpayment.
• The sample neighborhood is synthetic, and no sample parcel is attached to a real New Jersey municipality, because attaching one would imply a real place.

How should you use it?

Use it to find out whether you have a case worth building and to gather the comparables and the evidence you would bring. Confirm the deadline, the fee and the evidence rules with your county board before you rely on either — county calendars change every session, and one of the two shipped counties is currently modelled on the wrong deadline shape. Nothing here is an appraisal or a filing.

What Bracketsight is not

• Not a law firm. Nothing here is legal advice or legal representation. Bracketsight provides assistance preparing your own appeal.
• Not an appraisal. The check is a statistical comparison to similar homes, documented on the methodology page— useful evidence, not a certified valuation.
• Not a promise of savings. Appeal boards decide appeals. We tell you honestly when the evidence is thin — including telling most users their assessment looks fair.

Pre-launch status

This is a v1 build running on a clearly labelled synthetic demo neighborhood. Before launch, policy requires: a named, credentialed property-tax reviewer for the methodology and each county playbook; primary-source verification of every county rule currently flagged “awaiting verification”; and real parcel data for each launch county. None of these are optional, and none of them has happened yet — no property-tax consultant or attorney is engaged for this section today. Every citation and its verification date is listed on sources.

Privacy

The assessment check runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, stored, or logged. When document upload ships in a later phase, files will be processed in memory and never persisted — that promise is a product feature, not a footnote.