Question 1: How have property taxes changed over the past few years?
The 2.24% rate has stayed constant but obviously taxes are going to go up as property values rise.
What’s interesting is that for the last four years, Baltimore’s total property tax collection has been increasing at a slower rate than inflation. (briefly go through trends).
So even though your bill has likely gone up, when you account for inflation, the real value of your property tax bill may have decreased.
That’s not necessarily a good thing. Of course everyone wants to pay less taxes, but it’s based on the value of your home, which you want to see increase faster than inflation.
| Year |
Property Taxes (billions) |
Percent Increase |
U.S. Inflation |
| 2026 |
$1.20 |
4.9 |
|
| 2025 |
$1.14 |
5.9 |
|
| 2024 |
$1.08 |
2.8 |
2.9 |
| 2023 |
$1.05 |
1.8 |
3.4 |
| 2022 |
$1.02 |
0.3 |
6.5 |
| 2021 |
$0.96 |
4.3 |
7 |
| 2020 |
$0.92 |
5.2 |
1.4 |
| 2019 |
$0.94 |
4 |
2.3 |
| 2018 |
$0.90 |
3.4 |
1.9 |
| 2017 |
$0.88 |
3.5 |
2.1 |
| 2016 |
$0.85 |
9.2 |
2.1 |
Question 2: You’re saying property taxes haven’t increased, but we’ve heard about homeowners with huge tax increases of 20-30%. So how does that work?
We’re talking about the total amount of money the city collects in taxes. But as Baltimore’s population drops, the total tax collection is spread out among less and less people.
If there’s less people the city should in theory need less money to support everyone, but we haven’t seen tax rates fall. There were two proposed charter amendments last year that tried to lower the rate, but they were thrown out by the state supreme court before they made it onto the ballot.
Baltimore’s population increased slightly last year but it fell for nine years in a row before that. Ironically a lot of studies show high taxes are one of the biggest factors.
|
1/1/2016
|
616.542
|
|
1/1/2017
|
610.853
|
|
1/1/2018
|
603.241
|
|
1/1/2019
|
594.601
|
|
1/1/2020
|
583.189
|
|
1/1/2021
|
576.575
|
|
1/1/2022
|
570.663
|
|
1/1/2023
|
567.517
|
|
1/1/2024
|
568.271
|
Question 3: What about this year and next year?
For 2025 property tax revenue is expected to go up 6%. For 2026 it’s expected to go up another 5%.
The last time we saw an increase so large in a two-year span was in 2016-17.
That means we might be getting back to a point where your property taxes are increasing even faster than inflation. Unless of course we see a large increase in inflation with all the uncertainty in the economy right now.
The 2.24% tax rate hasn’t changed, property values are just going up according to the city’s assessment.