Has Your County Increased its Gross Assessed Value Per Capita?

Assessed Value (AV) is an important indicator, established by the assessor, to determine what the dollar value is of taxable property. AV is a combination of real and personal properties. Real property is defined as land and buildings whereas personal property is utility, business and farm depreciable equipment, to further this, gross assessed value (GAV) is the assessed value before deductions are detracted. To calculated the gross assessed value per capita GAVPC, the GAV is divided by the population in the selected geography. In this case, the selected geography is the number of people within the Indiana counties.

In the past two fiscal years, the State of Indiana has seen GAVPC steadily improve. Eighty-six counties, or 93%, have seen their GAVPC increase. Roughly 15% of Hoosier counties have a GAVPC over $100K, and 98.9% of Hoosiers have a GAVPC over $50K. The value of seeing the change of GAVPC is plentiful. Having an increase is always a positive sign of the county. This allows for property values to go up which can lead to a chain reaction of other changes. An increase in property values will lead to an increase in taxes. With an increase in taxes, counties then have opportunities to reinvest in the area which can lead to improvements of quality of life. GAVPC is generally an indicator to assess the county quality. Please note this data is in nominal dollars and publicly available data and comes directly from the Indiana Gateway for Government Units.

The Purdue Center for Regional Development (PCRD) has developed a new dashboard that showcases the past two fiscal years of GAVPC. To use the dashboard, hover over the county and click it. The charts and text boxes with adjust with results for the county. To select a region of counties, for example, the NIRPC region, hold down the control button on the keyboard and select the three counties Lake, Porter, and LaPorte. In addition to GAVPC, GAV data is also available within the dashboard.

Gross Assessed Value Per Capita is just one of over 100 variables PCRD has for the state of Indiana within its online data platform, Rural Indiana Stats (RIS). RIS also has GAV data in addition to over 15 tax-related variables within its local government fiscal data section. RIS is designed to provide individuals, leaders, organizations, and agencies with access to a basic set of data that can use to guide and inform their program and investment activities. It is designed to offer access to a core set of statistical data on Indiana’s 92 counties.