While you are finalizing your ballot, here’s a little background information. Tax rate and tax law information below is specific to Pierce County and Washington State:
Some Definitions: Bonds and levies are two different ways for a municipality to raise revenue. A bond is debt which must eventually be repaid with interest. So if you vote for a bond, you are authorizing the government to incur this debt on your behalf. A levy is a tax that governments impose on local property owners in order to raise money for services. (See for instance Zacks.) Since a bond raises money quickly, bonds are typically used for construction. Levies tax money from property owners continuously over time, and are typically used for maintenance and operations.
Requirements to Pass Bonds and Levies: Bonds and Levies must meet special requirements for passage: they must be passed by a 60% majority, and voter turnout must meet minimum standards.
Purpose of Property Tax Collection: Property taxes are collected in Pierce County for purposes including school districts, weed control, conservation district principal, Ports, Emergency Medical Service (EMS), libraries, etc. (Please see: Pierce County, All Ready Moving, TNT.)
Property Tax Cost to the Citizen:
· The average annual property tax bill in 2023 was $5,579, which is 5.31% of the average household income of $104,996.
· The middle value (median) tax bill was $2,759, and the median income $85,823.
(References for the above bullet points: TNT, Patch.com, tax-rates.org and Point2Homes.)
Comparison to the Rest of the Country: Pierce County is ranked 208th of the 3143 counties in the U.S. in order of median property taxes. (See tax-rates.org.) That places our tax burden in the highest 7% of all counties in the country.
Property Tax for a Specific Location: Property taxes are tricky, because they are imposed by several governmental units with property tax authority: state, county, city, school district, and more. So what you pay varies even within a city. Unique combinations of overlapping taxing districts are called Tax Code Areas (TCAs), and there were about 3,200 TCAs in Washington as of 2021. Here’s a “simple” example of how three taxing districts can create seven tax code areas, taken from the Washington State Department of Revenue Property Tax Levy Manual:
To see the taxes for a specific property in Pierce County, WA, enter your address here.
What part of property tax goes to schools in Pierce County? Because of the wide number of TCAs as explained above, that varies for each property owner by tax code area. So we looked for sources that could give an average for the county.
According to a 2022 TNT Article, about 60 percent of state and local property taxes in Pierce County come from school taxes, up a bit from 57 percent in 2013 (see TNT, November 2013).
We took a look at some of the sources for that 60 percent. From Pierce County information here, the largest share of Pierce County property taxes, 35.306%, are local school taxes:
In that diagram we can’t see the portions of the state and county taxes that go to schools. However the Washington State Department of Revenue (DoR) states that about one third of property tax goes to funding education.
Trees: Besides property taxes, Article IX, Section 3 of the Washington State Constitution directs that school funding come from some other sources. In part, it establishes a
“…common school construction fund to be used exclusively for the purpose of financing the construction of facilities for the common schools. The sources of said fund shall be: (1) Those proceeds derived from the sale or appropriation of timber and other crops from school and state lands…”
(emphasis added). This provides for a non-tax source of revenue.
Most of us don’t think too often about an office called Washington Commissioner of Public Lands. But the Commissioner leads the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which manages State trust lands. If the Commissioner manages the trust lands well, more money will be available for schools - and less required from taxes. We hope you’ll keep that in mind when voting for the office later this year.
How are our Schools Doing? Since most of our district is made up of Tacoma, we looked up the Tacoma Schools Report Card from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), and found the following:
We hope you found this information helpful. Please let us know by sending feedback here.