County appeal playbooks

If your county is not here yet, the assessment check still shows you the analysis and the arithmetic, and the methodology tells you what to gather. A thin county page that cannot actually help you file is worse than no page, so we do not publish one.

What has to be true before a county page publishes?

Five things, each read off the county’s own authority rather than a state summary or a national aggregator. The deadline, and whether it is a received-by date or a postmark date — the difference decides whether posting on the last day works. The filing fee, including any banded schedule, because a fee that scales with assessed value changes the answer to “is this worth filing”. The body you file with, which is not always the assessor. The forms, as links that resolve today. And the evidence standard: what the board is actually deciding.

The last one is why a county page cannot be generated from a template. Some jurisdictions decide on market value against comparable sales; others decide on uniformity against comparable assessments. A few apply a statutory corridor that can require the board to deny an appeal even when the assessment is provably above market value. An appeal argued on the wrong basis loses on the merits, so the argument a county page tells you to make is the part that has to come from that county’s own rules.

Why are only a few counties covered?

Because every assessing jurisdiction in the country sets its own procedure and no single authority publishes them in a usable form. Each one is transcribed by hand from its own site and statutes, and a county only ships when every field above has been read from a primary source. Where a source is unreachable — a blocked assessor site, a dead form link, a ratio table that is not published online — the value is left alone and the gap is recorded rather than filled with something plausible. That is slower than scraping, and it is the only version of this page worth publishing.

What if your county is not listed?

The assessment check still works. The comparable-assessment analysis, the median ratio and the confidence score are arithmetic and do not depend on your county’s procedure — only the deadline, the fee and the form do. So you can find out whether you have a case, then get the three procedural facts from your county’s assessor or board of review directly. Ask for the appeal deadline and whether it is received-by or postmarked, the filing fee at your assessed value, and whether the board decides on market value or on uniformity.

If you want your county added, send its assessor or board URL to the address on the contact page. Counties whose rules are published in a readable form get encoded first, because those are the ones that can be verified rather than guessed at.

Counties covered today