There are two components of the calculator:

• The residential calculator focuses on the increased homestead exemption, starting at $150,000 in 2027 and going up to $250,000 in the subsequent year. This means taxable value, for local government funding only (i.e., not schools), will be decreased. If millage (your local tax rate, expressed as dollars owed per $1,000 of a property’s taxable value) is flat, this means your property taxes would go down on your homestead property. This also means when buying a new house, the bank might be willing to offer a higher mortgage amount, based on the decrease in annual taxes. The calculator ALSO allows you to change millage rates, if you want to see what may happen if local governments raise tax rates.
• The commercial calculator focuses on the assessed growth cap, which would be lowered from 10% to 5%. In areas in which investors have seen their property values increase more than 5% year over year, that growth will now be artificially capped. You can then use the commercial calculator to determine how that may impact investments in different areas, based on different growth patterns. Once again, it allows you to change the millage rate and other assumptions to see how different tax rate changes may impact your property.

You can adjust the assumptions in the calculator, which includes helpful link to let people better understand their tax bill and the possibilities in different counties across the state.

What This Calculator Does — and Doesn’t — Do

We also want to point out what this calculator DOES NOT do. You might have heard that local governments may raise millage or modify other charges to make up for lost revenue. This calculator allows you to make your own assumptions on that by changing the millage numbers. For example, you can do a calculation with the current millage, then run one with an increased rate to see the difference. It puts you in control of all assumptions.

Our Goal: An Informed Decision, Not a Recommendation

The purpose of the calculator is for you to be as informed as you want to be. Though we cannot foresee what might happen if the amendment passes, let alone whether or not it will pass, we can make it easier to understand the potential impacts. If you want to get a perspective on how local government budgets and taxation might change – please feel free to reach out to your local city or county to ask these kinds of questions.

You are welcome to share the link or the calculator logic as you see fit – this is a free and open tool for anyone to use. This tool is meant to be iterative, so if you see a calculation that doesn’t look right, just reach out to us and we can update the logic and math.

The calculator is meant to help anyone and everyone to make up their own mind. It is not meant to convince anyone how to vote. RealAdvice’s team believes that an informed electorate is likely to make better decisions, and we wanted to contribute to that goal.

We hope you find this tool to be useful, and we look forward to any and all feedback.