State rollback is up for Iowa homes, but impact on your tax bill unclear

The state's taxable value on homes will increase slightly next year, which should tell you next to nothing about next year's property tax bill.

The assessment limitations, or "rollback," on residential property, will be 50.7518 percent, up from 48.5299 percent last year, the state Department of Revenue announced last week.

Developed to cushion inflation's impact on property taxes, the rollback's growth is limited to no more than 4 percent a year. Just what effect the adjustment will have on individual tax bills, or on local governments' levies, will depend on several other factors.

"It doesn't mean anything to us at this point," said Dawn Jindrich, Linn County's budget director. "All that's going to depend on the overall valuation and the levy rate the supervisors set."

The revenue department made no adjustment to the limits on commercial and industrial property because assessed values didn't increase enough to trigger the rollback change. The agricultural limit dropped to 57.451 percent from 69.015 in 2010.

"Agricultural land and buildings went up 25 percent in assessed value this year," said Cary Halfpop, chief appraiser for the revenue department's property tax division. "That's why the rollback has to take such a big drop."