Home / Michigan
Michigan works if you bought recently, and not if you’ve owned for years.
Works for some owners here, not all. Proposal A caps taxable value, and residential taxable value across the state runs 20 to 25 percent below market in aggregate. A long-held home needs a very large cut before anything moves. A recent buyer is uncapped and fully appealable.
So Michigan 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 city or township assessor mails an assessment notice each February showing two numbers: your assessed value, which is half of market value, and your taxable value, which is what you're actually taxed on. Proposal A caps how fast taxable value can rise, so if you've owned for a while it's usually quite a bit below the assessed value.
Next, know where to file. You'll start with your local March Board of Review, either in person or by letter, and the letter's got to arrive by the board's last day. If that doesn't work, you can appeal to the Michigan Tax Tribunal's small claims division by July 31. It's free to file if your home has a principal residence exemption of 50 percent or more.
Then bring the evidence that wins here. Honestly, an appeal only lowers your bill if it pushes your assessed value below your taxable value, and for most people who've owned for years the gap's just too big for that. It works best for recent buyers, because the cap resets the year after a sale.
Also, check your exemptions. Make sure you have the principal residence exemption on the home you live in. It exempts your home from most of the school operating tax, and you'll claim it with your local assessor.
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 Michigan 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.