In fiscal year 2025, local governments will grow property taxes by more than 6%.
The start of a new fiscal year on July 1 means the start of new property tax levies for cities, counties, and school districts across Iowa. ITR Foundation has compiled the year-over-year changes in both property taxes and population/enrollment for each of those taxing authorities in the state. In total, local governments will be increasing their property tax collections by more than six percent as cities (+6.6%), counties (+7.6%), and school districts (+5.4%) will combine to take in more than $6 billion in property taxes.
Since some local government officials make the claim that growth is driving up the amount of property taxes they collect, we have calculated property tax changes on a per person (and per student) basis. Those calculations show that in total, property taxes across Iowa have increased even faster on a per capita basis. It seems growth might not be the culprit to blame for more expensive tax bills after all.
Government budgets that grow faster than the taxpayers’ ability to pay demand a policy response. ITR Foundation believes the Legislature should implement a strict two percent cap on the annual growth of local government property tax collections, and we’ve modeled the impact such a cap would have in the tables below. A two percent cap would have saved Iowans $250 million in this new budget year alone. In addition to its effectiveness, this solution was shown to be incredibly popular in our recent polling, with 70 percent of Iowans supporting it.
Iowans can use the following searchable and sortable tables to learn about the changes in their own communities and see the impact of a two percent cap on the growth of property taxes.
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