The final numbers from the Guilford County Tax Department’s 2022 revaluation are in, and what they show are an amazing growth in property values over the last five years – and a huge windfall for the Guilford County Board of Commissioners.

According to the final numbers from county staff, if the Guilford County Board of Commissioners leaves the county’s tax rate at the same level, the county’s taxpayers will collectively pay an additional $92 million in taxes due to the recent revaluation of all property in the county.

That’s a tremendous and unprecedented increase from a revaluation. The county now does revaluations every five years. However, even when the county went eight years between revaluing property, it never saw this kind of appreciation.

Guilford County now also knows the “revenue neutral tax rate” – the tax rate at which, given the property appreciation and revaluation, the county would have had the same amount of money coming in as the previous year.

When a Republican majority ran the Board of Commissioners, the Republicans would adopt a revenue neutral tax rate after a revaluation – which meant the tax bills for property owners stayed largely the same.  If the Democratic-led board did the same this year, property owners in the county would get nearly a 14-cent tax rate reduction.

But if the Guilford County property tax rate remains at 73.05 cents per $100 of assessed property value, someone who owns a $300,000 house will have a tax bill (county portion only) of $2,191.

The new revenue neutral rate is 59.64 cents per $100.  Again, that’s the tax rate that would allow the county to have the same amount of property tax revenue this year as if the reevaluation had not occurred.  At that rate, the owner of a $300,000 house would pay $1,789 in county property taxes – a difference of $402.

The extra $92 million is a great deal more than the commissioners were anticipating. Early in the process they estimated the revaluation would mean an extra $55 million and later revised that to closer to $65 million.

The $92 million number in additional revenue was presented to the board at a work session on Thursday, May 4.  The commissioners have a lot of plans on how to use that additional revenue but currently none of those plans include giving citizens a 14-cent tax decrease.

With the new numbers, each additional penny on the tax rate adds $6.8 million to the county’s coffers. About a decade ago, the rule of thumb was that a one-cent increase in the tax rate added about $5 million in new revenue..