About Us

What Sets county-cad.us/ Apart — The Manual-Verification Standard

Property tax assessment is the kind of domain where stale information costs real money. A wrong protest deadline costs an entire year. A wrong agency phone routes you to the wrong office during peak protest season. A broken portal link sends you in circles when you have a 14-day window to file a Notice of Protest. We built this site so that doesn’t happen.

Every county-level property assessment office in our directory is verified by a human editor against the agency’s own published page — not auto-scraped, not pulled from a stale third-party database, not generated. We go further than typical: we manually capture screenshots of the live agency portal at the time of verification, so the version of the interface and procedure we describe matches what you actually see when you click. When the agency redesigns its site, we re-verify and re-capture. When a county’s protest deadline is mailed, we update the page within days.

What This Site Is For

Property tax assessment in the United States is overwhelmingly a county-level function. There is no federal property tax. State frameworks set the rules — the assessment standard, the exemption categories, the protest and appeal procedure — but the actual valuation of your home, your business, or your land is done by a county-level office. That office is called different things in different states: a “County Appraisal District” (CAD) in Texas, a “County Assessor” in California and most western states, a “County Property Appraiser” in Florida, a “County Assessor” or “Tax Assessor” in most other states. The function is the same: produce the assessed value that, multiplied by the millage or tax rate, becomes your property tax bill.

county-cad.us/ is the practical reference for that county-level layer. Every county page lists the verified office name, the agency's official URL, the property search portal, the exemption application portal, the protest filing tool, the ARB or assessment appeals board contact, the address, and the phone number — all manually verified against the agency's own page, all screenshot-verified at the time of capture.

We are completely independent. We are not affiliated with any state Department of Revenue, the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, the California State Board of Equalization, the Florida Department of Revenue, the International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO), the National Association of Counties (NACo), the IRS, or any county appraisal district, county assessor, or county property appraiser.

The Eight Categories of Information You’ll Find on Each County Page

What You’ll Find on Each County Property Assessment Page

• Office name and structure — official name (County Appraisal District, County Assessor, County Property Appraiser, Tax Assessor — varies by state), the chief appraiser or assessor, governance structure
• Official agency URL — verified live, with manually-captured screenshot of the homepage at time of last verification
• Property search portal — direct deep-link, screenshot-verified, searchable fields documented (owner name, address, parcel/account number)
• Exemption applications — homestead, over-65/senior, disability, surviving spouse, veteran, agricultural, charitable — with eligibility rules, application form, and current-year deadline
• Notice of Protest deadline — current-year deadline, late-filing rules, postmark vs. receipt, e-file vs. paper
• Protest filing portal — direct deep-link, screenshot-verified online filing tool where available
• ARB or Assessment Appeals Board contact — chair contact, hearing locations, evidence rules, scheduling
• Mass appraisal & reappraisal cycle — annual reappraisal vs. multi-year cycle (most TX CADs annual; CA reassessment limited by Prop 13)
• Property categories handled — residential, commercial, business personal property, agricultural, mineral, special inventory
• Tax sales / tax-defaulted property — sale schedule, registration, struck-off property list
• Public-records request — state public-records / sunshine law citations, records officer contact, fee schedule
• State coordinator cross-reference — Texas Comptroller, California State Board of Equalization, Florida Department of Revenue, etc.
• Federal cross-references — IRS Pub. 530, IRS SALT cap context, VA property tax exemption coordination

How We Find and Verify — The Eight-Step Process (Updated)

1. Identify the right authoritative source. We start with the county-level office’s page on the county’s .gov domain, cross-checked against the state coordinator (Texas Comptroller, California BOE, Florida DOR) and against IAAO and NACo directories.
2. Verify the URL is live. A human editor clicks every link before publication and confirms the destination is the actual page — not a redirect to a generic county homepage, not a 404, not a stale cached version.
3. Capture screenshots manually. The verifying editor manually takes a screenshot of the agency portal interface — homepage, property search, exemption application page, online protest filing tool — and stores it for reference. When the agency redesigns, we re-capture.
4. Dial-test phone numbers. Main line, exemption line, protest hotline, ARB scheduling — each tested.
5. Verify the agency address. Physical and mailing addresses cross-checked against the county’s contact page and against USPS ZIP+4 lookup. Some counties operate field offices (Harris CAD has multiple); each captured separately.
6. Document procedures from the agency’s own published rules. Notice of Protest deadline, exemption application workflow, ARB hearing rules, evidence rules — captured from the agency’s published guidance, not a third-party summary.
7. Cross-reference state and federal layer. Texas Tax Code citations, California Revenue and Taxation Code, Florida Statutes Ch. 192–200, IRS Pub. 530, VA exemption coordination — current and live.
8. Editor sign-off. A second editor reviews end-to-end before publication, including a fresh check on the not-tax-advice and not-legal-advice notices.

Nothing on this site is auto-scraped. Nothing is generated from a stale database. Every contact is human-verified before publication and re-verified on a quarterly cycle, with heightened-review windows in the 60 days before each state’s primary protest deadline.

Texas County Appraisal Districts — The Most Distinct System in the Country

Texas operates a unique structure. The Property Tax Code (Tex. Tax Code Ch. 6) requires every Texas county to maintain a County Appraisal District (CAD) — a separate political subdivision governed by a Board of Directors selected by the taxing units in the county. The CAD employs a chief appraiser who is responsible for valuing all property in the county. An Appraisal Review Board (ARB), whose members are appointed by the local administrative district judge, hears protests. The process is more formal and more centralised than in most states. Major Texas CADs include:

California, Florida & Other State Frameworks

Outside Texas, the structure is different. California operates under Proposition 13 (Cal. Const. Art. XIIIA), which limits assessed value increases to 2% per year on most property and resets to fair market value only on transfer. The County Assessor determines value; the County Assessment Appeals Board hears appeals. The state coordinator is the California State Board of Equalization (boe.ca.gov).

Florida uses County Property Appraisers governed by Fla. Stat. Ch. 192–200. The TRIM (Truth in Millage) notice triggers the 25-day appeal window to the Value Adjustment Board (VAB). The state coordinator is the Florida Department of Revenue (floridarevenue.com/property).

Other states use varying frameworks. Most New England states assess at the city/town level rather than county. Pennsylvania assesses at county level but uses elected county Boards of Assessment Appeals. Tennessee uses County Property Assessors with state oversight from the Comptroller’s Division of Property Assessments. Each state’s framework is documented on the relevant county pages.

The State, National & Federal Layer — Key Sources

Who This Site Is For

• Homeowners — checking your assessment, applying for the homestead exemption, filing a Notice of Protest, preparing for an ARB or appeals-board hearing
• Recently-purchased buyers — understanding the reassessment that follows transfer (especially in CA under Prop 13), Florida’s “Save Our Homes” cap, Texas homestead cap (10% per year)
• Senior and disabled homeowners — over-65 / disability exemptions, freezes (TX § 11.13), school-tax ceilings, deferral programs
• Veterans — disabled veteran exemption (state-by-state rules; TX provides total exemption for 100% disabled veterans)
• Agricultural landowners — agricultural / open-space valuation (1-d, 1-d-1, Williamson Act, Greenbelt) — qualification, application, rollback
• Commercial property owners — commercial valuation methods (cost, sales comparison, income approach), equal & uniform protest grounds
• Business personal property owners — BPP rendition deadline, BPP exemption thresholds (TX $2,500), depreciation
• Mineral interest owners — mineral valuation in TX, OK, ND, WY, NM; non-producing mineral assessment
• Real estate investors — county-by-county tax burden comparison, tax sale procedures, redemption rules
• Property tax consultants and attorneys — locating the right county office, ARB scheduling, evidence rules
• Title and escrow professionals — proration, reassessment timing, supplemental assessment rules
• Researchers and journalists — public-records request workflow, county tax base data

What We Don’t Do

• We don’t provide legal advice, tax advice, or property-tax-consultant services — consult a licensed property-tax attorney, Texas-licensed property tax consultant, or CPA
• We don’t file protests on your behalf, attend ARB hearings for you, or represent any party in any property tax matter
• We don’t determine assessed value, issue tax bills, or process payments
• We don’t operate a CRA, sell background checks, or provide FCRA-permissible-purpose reports — property records are public records under state public-records law
• We don’t take complaints about specific assessments — those go to the county appraisal district, county assessor, or the state coordinator
• We don’t sell your data — see Privacy Policy

How We Pay for the Site

county-cad.us/ is funded by display advertising. Editorial content — verified contact details, walkthroughs, deadline tables, and procedure descriptions — is never altered to favour any advertiser. The official agency contact always comes first on every page, before any commercial reference. We do not accept advertising from operations that would conflict with the public-information mission, including any service that promises to "remove" your assessment record outside lawful channels, products that misuse property records for FCRA-prohibited purposes, or operations marketing as if they were a county or state agency. The full position is on our Editorial Policy and Disclaimer.

Corrections and Feedback

County office contact details change — agency reorganisations, new chief appraisers and assessors, office relocations, website redesigns, and form revisions are routine. Protest deadlines move, exemption rules amend, and appraisal cycles shift. If you spot something on the site that doesn’t match the live agency page, or you’ve called and confirmed something is wrong, please email us. Reader-reported corrections are our priority queue and get a response within seven business days, with a 48-hour expedited path for actively-broken phone numbers and addresses, and a same-day path during the 60 days before any state’s primary protest deadline.