Check exemptions before you appeal
An exemption is a form. An appeal is a hearing with risk. Do the cheap one first.
If you are trying to reduce a property tax bill, there is a right order, and most people get it backwards.
The comparison
| Exemption | Appeal | |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | A statutory entitlement | A contested argument |
| Chance of success | Certain, if you qualify | 23% county-wide, and falling |
| Typical value (Cook) | $750/yr, general homestead | $570/yr, median successful |
| Effort | One form | An evening assembling comparables |
| Prior years | Often recoverable | No |
| Deadline | Generally flexible | 30 days, strict |
The exemption is worth more, is certain rather than probable, takes less work, and can sometimes be backdated. There is no version of this comparison where the appeal should come first.
The twenty-minute check
- Find your bill and read the exemption lines.
- Own and occupy? You should have the general homestead exemption — "Owner Occupied" on an Illinois bill.
- 65 or over? Senior homestead exemption, and separately the freeze if income qualifies.
- A veteran with a service-connected rating? Check the tier against your current rating; at 70% or above the property may be fully exempt.
- A qualifying disability? Persons with disabilities exemption.
- Improved the property in the last four years? Home improvement exemption.
- Anything missing? Apply, and ask whether prior years can be recovered.
Then, and only then, consider the appeal
Once the exemptions are right, ask whether the assessment itself is:
- Divide assessed value by your ratio. Is the implied market value plausible?
- Divide improvement assessed value by floor area. Compare against four neighbours.
- Check the recorded characteristics against the actual building.
If any of the three produces something, file. If not, you have finished for the year — and that conclusion is worth having.
Why the order gets reversed
Because appeals are what people have heard of. Firms advertise them, news stories cover them, and "appeal your property taxes" is what people search for. Exemptions are a form on a county website that nobody markets, because nobody makes money from them.
That asymmetry in attention has nothing to do with which is worth more to you.
Doing both
These are not alternatives. In most cases you should end up doing both — claim every exemption you qualify for, and appeal if the assessment itself is out of line. The argument here is only about order, because the exemption is certain and the appeal is not, and because the exemption sometimes recovers money you have already paid while an appeal never does.
A note on effort
The exemption check takes twenty minutes and is mostly reading. Building a defensible uniformity appeal takes an evening: finding four genuinely comparable properties, pulling their floor areas and improvement assessments, calculating the per-square-foot figures, checking the spread, and writing a page that a stranger can verify without looking anything up.
Spending the evening before you have spent the twenty minutes is the mistake this article exists to prevent.