How your property is assessed

Establishing the Assessed Valuation for Elmore County Properties

Determining the assessed value of properties in Elmore County is the assessor’s responsibility. Idaho law requires all property be assessed at market value each year (Idaho Code 63-205). To do this, the Assessor’s Office develops valuation guidelines that are based on sales prices of similar homes in the county. Some factors influencing what a buyer would pay for your home and land are size, quality, age, condition and of course, the location of your home. We use this information to estimate how much a buyer might pay for your home if it were to sell on January 1 of the current year.

The value of your property may change each year depending on real estate market changes. An appraiser from our office must visit your property as least once every five years. In the other four years, we use information from property sales and from the inspections of other similar properties to estimate the current value for your property.

Idaho Law and the Idaho State Tax Commission establish the many rules and requirements that the Assessor must follow in determining the assessed values for the current year. The main factor is sales of properties. The Assessor’s Office is required to establish a market value for each property within the county as of January 1st of the current tax year. The Assessor’s Office is required to only use valid sales information on properties that sold from October 1 two years prior to the current tax year through September 30 of the year prior to the current tax year in determining valuations for current tax year. The sales are studied and if necessary the sales are time adjusted to the January 1 of the current tax year. With the State mandated rules, we are required to always use last year’s valuation base to determine current assessment values.

Once the values are finalized, an assessment notice with the current valuation will be mailed to each owner by the first Monday of June. The resulting information is reviewed by the Idaho State Tax Commission under State of Idaho rules and regulations and, if within acceptable ranges, those assessed values are approved for the current tax year. These finalized assessment values will be used by each taxing district in the next step in the property tax process.