Property tax appeal success rates for all 38 Cook County townships
An appeal in Jefferson Township succeeded four times as often as one in Palatine in the same year. The full table, from the Assessor's published decisions.
Before you decide how much effort to put into a property tax appeal, it is worth knowing what you are up against — and that varies enormously depending on which of Cook County's 38 townships your property sits in.
Nobody publishes this. The Assessor publishes the underlying decisions, but not the rates. We counted them.
The full table
| Township | Decided appeals | Reductions | Success rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jefferson | 48,976 | 14,978 | 30.6% |
| Lake View | 66,784 | 20,358 | 30.5% |
| Rogers Park | 11,583 | 3,530 | 30.5% |
| Lake | 18,139 | 5,089 | 28.1% |
| Hyde Park | 15,721 | 3,940 | 25.1% |
| Cicero | 2,535 | 574 | 22.6% |
| West Chicago | 53,453 | 11,802 | 22.1% |
| Thornton | 7,440 | 1,572 | 21.1% |
| Rich | 3,600 | 694 | 19.3% |
| Bloom | 3,622 | 666 | 18.4% |
| Lyons | 7,130 | 1,297 | 18.2% |
| Proviso | 6,113 | 1,076 | 17.6% |
| Northfield | 4,683 | 813 | 17.4% |
| Worth | 8,254 | 1,432 | 17.3% |
| Riverside | 920 | 157 | 17.1% |
| Norwood Park | 1,083 | 183 | 16.9% |
| North Chicago | 60,080 | 9,876 | 16.4% |
| Stickney | 1,674 | 270 | 16.1% |
| Orland | 6,460 | 1,015 | 15.7% |
| Leyden | 4,625 | 720 | 15.6% |
| Calumet | 348 | 54 | 15.5% |
| Barrington | 1,117 | 172 | 15.4% |
| Niles | 5,587 | 855 | 15.3% |
| Evanston | 2,745 | 395 | 14.4% |
| Berwyn | 2,156 | 309 | 14.3% |
| New Trier | 4,466 | 635 | 14.2% |
| Lemont | 1,896 | 254 | 13.4% |
| Maine | 4,767 | 633 | 13.3% |
| Oak Park | 3,422 | 452 | 13.2% |
| Schaumburg | 5,037 | 650 | 12.9% |
| Bremen | 3,345 | 428 | 12.8% |
| Hanover | 3,376 | 428 | 12.7% |
| River Forest | 860 | 108 | 12.6% |
| South Chicago | 48,041 | 5,896 | 12.3% |
| Wheeling | 8,524 | 1,016 | 11.9% |
| Palos | 2,703 | 307 | 11.4% |
| Elk Grove | 2,965 | 298 | 10.1% |
| Palatine | 5,780 | 441 | 7.6% |
The city townships dominate the top
Four of the five highest rates are Chicago townships — Jefferson, Lake View, Rogers Park and Lake. Hyde Park is fifth. Two Chicago townships sit lower: West Chicago at 22.1% and South Chicago at 12.3%.
The suburbs fill most of the bottom half, with Palatine, Elk Grove, Palos and Wheeling at the foot.
What explains the spread
We can identify plausible causes; the data does not rank them and we will not pretend otherwise.
Where each township sat in the reassessment cycle. Cook reassesses on a triennial pattern by triad. A township reassessed in the year in question has fresh values built on recent sales — fewer errors to find. One two years into its cycle is carrying values built on an older market.
How uniform the housing stock is. A township of near-identical post-war houses produces clean comparables and clean uniformity arguments. A township of varied custom homes on irregular lots produces arguments the office can pick apart, because no two properties are quite alike.
Who files. Townships differ in the mix of professionally prepared commercial appeals and owner-filed residential ones, and in how many people appeal at all.
Volume itself. Lake View decided 66,784 appeals in one year. North Chicago 60,080. That is a great deal of work compressed into a few months, and it may affect how marginal cases are handled — though we cannot show that from this data.
How to use this
It is a base rate, not a forecast. A 7.6% township rate does not mean your Palatine appeal has a 7.6% chance. If your property is genuinely 25% above tight comparables, your odds are far better than the township average — which includes every speculative filing made that year.
It should calibrate your effort. In a low-rate township, a marginal case is probably not worth the evening. A strong one still is. In a high-rate township the bar for "worth trying" is lower.
It is the question to ask any firm. An appeal service quoting a success rate should be able to say how it compares to the published rate for your township. A firm operating mainly in Lake View will show a high rate without being any better than average.
The caveats
This is the Assessor only. The Board of Review is a separate body, reached afterwards, with its own record and its own rates — a refusal at one stage says nothing definitive about the next.
It counts appeals, not properties. One property appealing three years running appears three times.
It is one year. County-wide rates have fallen sharply — from 31.9% in 2021 to 16.2% in 2025 — so 2024 is a snapshot of a moving picture.
Everything here comes from the Cook County Assessor's published appeal decisions, dataset
y282-6ig3 on the county's open data portal. If our figures ever disagree with the county's,
the county is right.