As the Dec. 1 due date for Cook County property owners to pay their taxes looms, taxpayers will have a new way to find out where their money is going and which government body is taking more — or less — tax dollars than before.
Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas has launched a new online tool, “Where Your Money Goes,” showing how much money from an individual property owner’s taxes goes to each school district or other local unit of government.
Paper tax bills already show a breakdown of how much of your bill is funneled to each taxing body. But the new tool compares how much in total dollars each property’s bill increased or decreased for each of those taxing districts between 2021 and 2022. It also provides a link to that taxing body’s homepage.
Property owners can search by address or PIN at the treasurer’s website.
“Taxpayers upset about how much they owe now have an easier way to find out where their money goes,” Pappas said in a news release. “People should pay attention to how the amount of money sought by schools and other taxing bodies, combined with changes to property assessments, affects individual bills.”
A single family homeowner in the 9900 block of Leland Avenue in Schiller Park, for example, had its 2022 bill go up to $9,199, an increase of $2,447 from the year before. The treasurer’s guide shows the biggest chunk of the increase compared to the year before — $910 — is going to Schiller Park School District 81, which oversees elementary schools and a middle school, and an additional $603 is going to Leyden Community High School 212.
The owners of Willis Tower, who are slated to pay a $51.3 million property tax bill this year, can see that the bulk of their increase compared to the year before is being paid to the Chicago Board of Education. For the 2021 tax year, $21.8 million of their bill went to CPS. In 2022, that number rose to $23.3 million.
Bills are calculated based on levies set by local governments and school districts, as well as valuations made by the county assessor, appeals at the Board of Review and the state’s Property Tax Appeal Board, and a relatively new “recapture” provision in the Illinois tax code that allows school districts and many local governments to recover money refunded to property owners who successfully appealed their taxes from the year before.
Taxpayers typically see the biggest changes following reassessments, which happen every three years for different parts of the county. For the 2022 tax year, the biggest shock was for homes outside the city of Chicago and north of North Avenue, where the median bill rose by 15.7%, according to a separate analysis released in October by Pappas’ office.
In all, property taxes across Cook County for the 2022 tax year rose more than $909 million, to $17.6 billion. That’s a 5.4% increase compared with the year before, but below the 8% rate of inflation for 2022.