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California works if you bought recently, and not if you’ve owned for years.
Works for some owners here, not all. Proposition 13 caps increases at 2 percent a year, so a long-held home is usually assessed far below market and an appeal has nothing to reach for. But Proposition 8 requires the assessor to enroll the lower of your capped value or current market value every single year, so somebody who bought at the 2021 or 2022 peak can be genuinely over-assessed. That relief has to be re-earned annually.
So California decides these on market value, which means the evidence is recent sales of genuinely comparable homes. What really matters is whether that whole set of sales sits below your assessed value. If they bracket your assessment instead of falling under it, boards usually side with the assessor, because nothing's been clearly disproved.
Now a few things lose almost everywhere. Comparing your assessment to a neighbor's assessment usually doesn't count where the argument's market value. One sale on its own can pretty easily be dismissed as an outlier. And the size of your increase, or the size of your bill, isn't really evidence about what your home's worth.
September 15 in counties that mail by August 1, otherwise November 30. Los Angeles County is November 30.
Miss it and you generally wait a year, so honestly the date matters more than the paperwork does.
And wherever you are, the single most useful thing you can actually do today is go find your assessment notice and read the date printed on it. That's what starts your clock, it's usually a much shorter window than people expect, and there's no getting it back once it's gone.
First, look up your own record. Your county assessor's website shows your home's assessed value. Under Proposition 13 that value only grows about 2 percent a year from what you paid, so if you've owned for a while it's usually far below market already, and an appeal can't push it any lower than what the market says.
Next, know where to file. The usual first step is asking the assessor for an informal decline in value review, which California calls a Proposition 8 review. Many counties have their own form and their own cutoff for it, so it's really worth checking your assessor's site. The formal appeal is the Assessment Appeal Application, form BOE-305-AH, filed with your county's assessment appeals board. The window runs July 2 to September 15 in counties that mailed value notices by August 1, and to November 30 in counties that didn't, so your county's own site is really the place to check.
Then bring the evidence that wins here. What matters is your home's market value on January 1. If sales of homes genuinely like yours, close to that date, came in below your assessed value, you've got a case. If they're above it, Proposition 13's probably already done more for you than an appeal could.
Also, check your exemptions. The homeowners' exemption takes $7,000 off the assessed value of the home you live in. That's only about $70 a year at the 1 percent base rate, but it's free and it doesn't expire. You file form BOE-266 once with your county assessor, by February 15 for the full amount.
Los Angeles County runs a 12 to 24 month backlog on appeal hearings.
We only turn a state on once we've read its appeal rules and its actual board decisions, because that's how we make sure what we tell you is right and not generic. It takes a few days per state, and honestly it's the reason our answers are worth anything.
In the meantime our free check runs in parts of Illinois, Washington, Ohio, Georgia, Colorado, North Carolina and Oregon, and in every town in New Jersey. If you leave your email on the check page, we'll write to you the day California goes live, and we won't email you before that.
We've screened all fifty states and DC on the same two questions. Does winning a lower market value actually lower your bill, or is there a cap sitting in between? And can you even put the evidence together from public records?
This comes from our own fifty-state screen, where we checked each state's cap, whether sale prices are public, whether there's an argument based on assessed values, and how many appeals actually get filed. Where we've quoted an appeal count, it's from the state or county that published it. If you spot an error, please write to hello@propertytaxbuddy.com and we'll correct it and say what changed.