Home / Indiana
Indiana works, and the circuit breaker scare turns out to be a false alarm.
The law and the data both work here. The cap is 1 percent of gross assessed value, so a lower assessment lowers your cap too rather than cancelling the benefit. Annual trending keeps values moving. The catch is that sales data access varies county by county.
So Indiana 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.
Deadlines here are set locally rather than by one statewide date, so the one that binds you is printed on your own assessment notice.
And that notice is really the thing to go find today, honestly. It'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 value, and you'll get a notice of assessment, called a Form 11, when it changes. Indiana caps your bill at 1 percent of your home's gross assessed value, so a lower value lowers that cap too.
Next, know where to file. Start with an informal meeting with your county assessor, which settles a lot of cases. The formal appeal is Form 130, filed with the assessor. If the notice was mailed before May 1, it's due by June 15 of that year. The county's Property Tax Assessment Board of Appeals hears it, and if you don't agree with their decision, you can file Form 131 with the Indiana Board of Tax Review. You don't need an appraisal to file.
Then bring the evidence that wins here. Indiana decides these on market value, so the evidence that really counts is sales of genuinely similar homes, or your own recent purchase price.
Also, check your exemptions. Check that you've got the homestead standard deduction and the supplemental deduction on the home you live in, and if you're 65 or older, ask your county auditor about the over 65 deduction and circuit breaker credit.
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 Indiana 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.