Something is shifting underneath the feet of American homeowners. Not figuratively. Literally, the ground is shaking in state capitols across the country, where lawmakers are facing the loudest property tax revolt in nearly five decades. People are showing up at public meetings, circulating petitions, and in Chicago, literally burning their tax bills in bonfires. It feels almost theatrical. It’s also completely real.
Between 2019 and 2024, property taxes surged by roughly 30 percent nationwide, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, as home values shot up in response to surging demand colliding with chronically low inventory. That math hits differently when you’re a retiree on a fixed income watching your bill jump year after year. So what are the states doing about it – and who is actually winning? Let’s dive in.
The National Storm: Why Homeowners Everywhere Are Fed Up
Honestly, the numbers don’t lie. Property taxes nationally have risen by an average of nearly 14 percent since 2019, according to CoreLogic, at the same time the median price of a single-family home hit over $400,000, according to the National Association of Realtors. That combination is suffocating.
In 2024, the median property tax bill rose 16 percent. By mid-2025, it was already trending higher, driven by delayed reassessments, rising millage rates, and state budget shortfalls. Think about that: even when home prices in some markets started to cool, the tax bills kept climbing.
National experts are calling it a property tax revolt, comparing it to earlier backlashes including the one that led to California’s Proposition 13, a 1978 initiative that limited property tax rates and how much local governments could increase property valuations on homes for tax purposes. History, it seems, is rhyming again.
Texas: Record Taxes Meet Record Pushback
Texas is a fascinating case study because the state is fighting itself. Property taxes across Texas steadily climbed for the past decade, reaching a record $125.05 billion levied statewide in 2024, based on data from the Texas Comptroller. Back in 2014, the total was only $49.06 billion – a growth of over 160 percent. That’s not a slow creep. That’s a sprint.
As of June 2025, Governor Greg Abbott signed a series of bills to reshape how Texans experience property taxation. The reforms were substantial. The combined reforms from 2023 and 2025 save the average homeowner roughly $1,762 per year.
The traditional homestead exemption increased to $140,000 from $100,000, applying to school taxes and offering enhanced relief for every homestead in Texas. Seniors and disabled homeowners got an even bigger win. The additional school district exemption for seniors and disabled homeowners jumped from $10,000 to $60,000 – a 500 percent increase. When stacked on top of the standard $140,000 homestead exemption, seniors now have a combined $200,000 in school district exemptions.
Texas Homeowners Who Appealed: The Numbers Are Stunning
Here’s the thing most people miss: the legislative wins are only half the story in Texas. The other half is individual homeowners who chose to fight their assessments directly. Taxpayers fought back with tax appeals and protests in numbers never seen before, and these appeals were not just numerous but also incredibly effective in countering rising costs.
Homes in Travis County managed to roll back some of 2024’s increases, seeing an overall drop of 4.6 percent, and over one-third of all properties in the county are protested every single year. That is extraordinary civic participation. In Bexar County alone, 185,670 homeowners protested in 2024, and 88 percent won reductions.
In 2025, Houston-area homeowners increasingly took action, with one firm alone representing 127,298 residential protests – a 94 percent increase from the 65,618 protests in 2024. Still, over 1.4 million Houston-area residential properties, roughly two-thirds, did not file protests in 2025, likely leaving substantial tax savings on the table.
North Dakota: The State That’s Actually Doing It
If Texas is a revolution in progress, North Dakota is the state closest to actually pulling off the near-impossible. I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect this one. North Dakota is using earnings from the state’s $13.4 billion oil tax savings account to gradually wipe out homeowner property taxes. Last year, the Republican-controlled Legislature expanded its primary residence tax credit from $500 to $1,600 a year, and officials in December said the tax credit wiped out property taxes for 50,000 households and reduced bills for nearly 100,000 more.
The Office of State Tax Commissioner received 145,000 applications for the credit for the 2025 tax year, which represented about 95 percent of eligible households. That is extraordinary uptake. The primary residence tax credit is paid for with earnings off the state Legacy Fund, so local governments don’t lose out on any tax revenue. The Legacy Fund, recently valued at $13 billion, invests a portion of the state’s oil and gas taxes.
A random sample of 50 property tax statements from 15 counties showed an average reduction in property taxes of 46 percent, including four households paying no property tax at all. Even without those four homes, the average reduction was 41 percent. Those are real savings for real families.
Florida: The Boldest Bet in the Country
Florida is where things get almost dizzyingly ambitious. Florida House lawmakers passed a proposed state constitutional amendment to phase out property taxes for non-school purposes over 10 years. If voters approve it, it would be the most sweeping property tax elimination effort in American history.
The Sunshine State offers a rare trifecta of factors making property tax elimination a very real possibility: a governor who enthusiastically supports elimination, a Legislature actively weighing multiple proposals for the November ballot, and homeowners buckling under the pressure of high property taxes. One constitutional amendment, HJR 203, passed the House 80-30 in February 2026, though it died in Senate Appropriations before a special session was called for April.
The stakes are enormous. The moves, if adopted, could save homeowners billions but would cut local government revenue by $14.1 billion in the first year and up to $18.3 billion in successive years, according to state estimates. Economic analysis from Realtor.com projects a 7 to 9 percent jump in Florida home values if property taxes are eliminated – an outcome that could further hinder affordability for first-time buyers.
Georgia: So Close, Yet So Far
Georgia’s story is a cautionary tale about how hard these fights really are. Republicans in the Georgia House unveiled a complex effort to phase out homeowner property taxes by 2032. The ambition was real. The bipartisan support, however, was not.
A state constitutional amendment that could have cut property taxes for homeowners by 75 percent or more failed when all but one Democrat voted against it. Such amendments in Georgia require a two-thirds vote by legislators, and the plan needed at least 21 Democratic votes. It didn’t get them. The Peach State’s high-profile homeowner property tax phase-out plan hit a wall after lawmakers had already scaled it back from full elimination. Relief, however, remains on the table, with House lawmakers reviving a narrower version focused on capping annual property tax increases and expanding homestead relief.
Georgia House Speaker Burns had wanted to wipe out $5.2 billion in homeowner property taxes – more than a quarter of the $19.9 billion in property taxes collected in 2024. That’s an enormous number, and it explains why the political resistance was so fierce.
Illinois: The Worst-Case Scenario Nobody Wants to Be
Let’s be real: Illinois is the cautionary tale. Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas stated that “Illinois in 2025 had the dubious distinction of having the highest residential property tax rate in the nation.” That is a record nobody competes for.
Across all taxing bodies in Cook County, property taxes are up 182 percent – from $6.8 billion in 1995 to $19.2 billion in 2025. Taxes in Chicago, including Chicago Public Schools, have increased 211 percent while they are up 160 percent in municipalities outside the city. Those numbers leave most people speechless.
Things are getting more confrontational by the day. Chicago homeowners have been walloped with record property tax hikes, with some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods absorbing the steepest increases even as downtown office owners see their bills fall, according to data from the Cook County treasurer’s office. The median property tax bill for a Chicago homeowner jumped 16.7 percent in a single year. More than 1,000 homeowners in Cook County, including 125 senior citizens, have since 2019 lost their homes and all of their equity over a property tax debt, even as the U.S. Supreme Court has found the practice of taking more than the tax owed to be unconstitutional.
Ohio and the Grassroots That Won’t Quit
Ohio is where organized grassroots energy is turning into real political force. A grassroots campaign gaining steam in the Buckeye State would abolish property taxes by adding an amendment to the state Constitution. Citizens for Property Tax Reform pushed to get property tax abolition on the ballot, and after failing to gather the required signatures in time for one cycle, the group is now working to place the measure on the 2026 ballot.
Ohio lawmakers advanced five property tax reform bills to the governor, which include measures to allow counties to roll back approved levies, cap tax bill growth to inflation, and alter who carries the responsibility for proving property valuations in disputes. Governor Mike DeWine, who previously vetoed similar measures, will review the bills against recommendations from his property tax working group before deciding whether to sign them.
A further bipartisan plan has also been launched to help make Ohio’s property-tax system easier for people to navigate. It’s hard to say for sure how far Ohio will go, but the momentum is undeniably building from the bottom up.
South Dakota and Michigan: More States Joining the Fight
The rebellion isn’t limited to the biggest states. Smaller states are throwing their own punches. South Dakota Governor Larry Rhoden proposed letting counties impose a half-percent sales tax and devoting the proceeds to property tax credits for homeowners, even launching a website estimating annual savings ranging from $428 to $1,227 per household.
A grassroots effort known as Abolish Property Taxes SD is pushing an initiated constitutional amendment to repeal property taxes and replace them with a new “retail transaction” tax, putting the question directly to voters in 2026 if supporters collect enough signatures. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Republican state House Speaker Matt Hall proposed raising taxes on currently untaxed services and using the money to erase the state’s share of property taxes, the state real estate transfer tax, and Michigan’s personal property tax.
Nationally, legislatures and voters in several states including Illinois, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee are considering or preparing similar ballot measures to eliminate or lower property taxes, with some votes scheduled as soon as November 2026. The movement keeps growing.
The Real Cost of Winning: What Happens When Property Taxes Disappear?
Here’s where it gets complicated, and where I think every homeowner needs to pump the brakes for just a second. Winning the property tax fight might create a whole new set of problems.
While some states are still pushing aggressive plans to phase out or eliminate property taxes, others have run into roadblocks, exposing the core problem at the center of the movement: it is much easier to promise homeowners relief than to replace the billions of dollars property taxes fund for schools, emergency services, and local governments. One issue with a shift to sales taxes is that it may shift the tax burden from richer to poorer people, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
Caps on assessments are a particularly problematic idea, according to some experts, because they may encourage homeowners who might otherwise sell their properties to hold onto them for the lower taxes, leaving fewer existing homes on the market for younger, first-time buyers. As Manish Bhatt, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, noted: “Property tax reform is going to continue to be an issue going into 2026 because it was largely not resolved in 2025 or in years prior, and taxpayers are still clamoring for relief.”
The property tax rebellion is real, it is growing, and in a handful of states, homeowners are genuinely winning. The question that will define the next decade isn’t just whether taxes go down – it’s what fills the gap when they do. What do you think: should property taxes be eliminated entirely, or is smarter reform the better path forward? Tell us in the comments.
