Travis Bunn

Founder, AppealDesk · Published March 27, 2026 · Updated August 19, 2026

Pennsylvania Has Not Reassessed Some Homes in Decades. Your Escrow Payment Still Changes Every Year Anyway.

Updated August 2026

In August 2026, a Court of Common Pleas judge ordered Allegheny County to do something it had not done since 2012: reassess every property it taxes. For fourteen years, Pittsburgh-area homeowners have been billed against 2012 market values, frozen in place, while their escrow payments moved anyway. That is not a bug in Pennsylvania's system. It is the system working exactly as written. Pennsylvania is one of the only states with no statutory requirement that a county ever reassess property on a schedule, and unless a specific triggering event forces the issue, a county's base year can sit untouched for a generation.

Yet homeowners in stale-base-year counties do not open a mortgage statement that says "no change." Their escrow payment shifts most years, sometimes up, because what actually drives your tax bill in Pennsylvania is the millage rate your school district, municipality, and county set annually, applied to an assessment that may not have moved in a decade or more. This guide covers how to tell whether that frozen assessment is actually costing you money, using the one tool Pennsylvania gives homeowners for exactly this problem: the Common Level Ratio.

A Base Year Is Not a Deadline. It Is a Frozen Reference Point.

Under 53 Pa.C.S. Section 8802, your county's "base year" is the year of its most recent countywide reassessment, or an even older year if the county has not reassessed since. Allegheny County's base year has been 2012. Some Pennsylvania counties are pegged to base years from the 1990s or earlier. There is no statute that forces a county to pick a new one. A county can, if it chooses, run a full reassessment. Nothing in Chapter 88 obligates it to.

Section 8843 goes a step further: it explicitly bars the county assessment office from "spot reassessing" a single property outside of a countywide revision, meaning the assessor generally cannot walk out and re-value your house in isolation just because you sold it or your neighbor thinks it looks nicer than the file shows. The main exceptions that legitimately move an individual assessment between countywide reassessments are new construction, a permit for an addition or major renovation, and, in some counties, a change of ownership that triggers a reassessment under local practice. An appeal you yourself file is also carved out of the spot-reassessment ban; the prohibition targets the assessor initiating a change, not you contesting one.

Compare that to almost every other state in this series, where a homeowner can ask a simple question: "how many years since my last reassessment?" and get a useful signal about whether they are likely over- or under-assessed. In Pennsylvania that question tells you almost nothing on its own. A base year from 2012, 2002, or 1988 does not mean your assessment is wrong. It means your assessment was pegged to a moment, and the only way to know if that peg still makes sense is to run the math.

The Common Level Ratio: How You Compare a 2012 Number to a 2026 Market

Every year, the State Tax Equalization Board certifies a Common Level Ratio (CLR) for each of Pennsylvania's 67 counties, based on a median sales-ratio study comparing recent verified sale prices to assessed values, before July 1. The Pennsylvania Bulletin is explicit about its purpose: CLRs "are to be used in appeals only and not to create value." The 2024 county figures ranged from 5.68 to 90.70, reflecting how differently each county's frozen base year has drifted from today's market. The Department of Revenue separately publishes a CLR factor list (the mathematical reciprocal of the ratio), used for realty transfer tax, so if you look up your county make sure you are reading the CLR itself, not the transfer-tax factor.

Under 53 Pa.C.S. Section 8842, your county has also adopted a "predetermined ratio," the percentage of market value it intends assessments to represent (commonly 100%, sometimes lower). When you appeal, the board first finds your property's current fair market value, then applies a ratio to convert that into an assessed value it will compare against your existing assessment. Here is the part that matters: if the CLR differs from the county's predetermined ratio by more than 15%, the board must use the CLR instead of the predetermined ratio. In a county with a stale base year, that 15% gap is often already blown wide open, which is exactly why the CLR, not the predetermined ratio, is usually the number that decides your appeal.

The math, worked through (hypothetical example)

Say a Pennsylvania homeowner's county has a base year old enough that its CLR has drifted to 65%, meaning assessed values in that county now run at roughly 65% of true market value on average, well outside the 15% band from the county's 100% predetermined ratio. This homeowner's assessed value is $220,000 (Pennsylvania's statewide median), and a recent appraisal puts current fair market value at $310,000.

• Step 1: Multiply current fair market value by the county CLR: $310,000 x 0.65 = $201,500.
• Step 2: Compare that figure to the current assessed value: $201,500 (implied by CLR) is less than $220,000 (actual assessment).
• Conclusion: The homeowner is over-assessed relative to the CLR standard and has grounds to appeal down toward roughly $201,500.

At Pennsylvania's statewide average effective rate of 1.53%, an $18,500 reduction in assessed value works out to roughly $283 less in annual tax, or about $24 less per month once it reaches your escrow. (CLRs and predetermined ratios vary widely by county, and effective rates vary by municipality and school district, so treat these figures as illustration of the mechanism, not a quote for your property.) The essential move is always the same: current fair market value, times your county's CLR, compared against what you are actually assessed at.

Why Your Escrow Payment Moves Even When Your Assessment Does Not

Every county, municipality, and school district in Pennsylvania sets its own millage rate annually, and school taxes typically make up the largest share of a Pennsylvania bill. None of that requires touching your assessed value. A school board can raise its millage 3% this year with your assessment sitting exactly where it sat under the 2012 (or 2005, or 1998) base year, and your tax bill, and therefore your escrow requirement, goes up anyway.

Your mortgage servicer does not care why the bill moved. Under RESPA (12 CFR 1024.17), the servicer runs an escrow analysis at least once per computation year (Section 1024.17(c)(3)), looks at what it actually paid the county, and adjusts your monthly payment for the year ahead. A millage increase against a flat assessment produces the same escrow bump as a reassessment would. This is the trap: homeowners in stale-base-year counties often assume a rising escrow payment means their home was reassessed upward, call the assessor to ask what changed, and are told nothing changed on the assessment side at all. The rate changed. The base year assessment is unrelated to a CLR appeal analysis you have never run.

The Deadline: August 1 or September 1, Except Philadelphia

Under 53 Pa.C.S. Section 8844(c), the default statewide annual appeal deadline is September 1. County commissioners may move that deadline earlier, to no sooner than August 1, provided the county publishes notice at least two weeks ahead under Section 8841(d)(1). In practice, some of Pennsylvania's 67 counties use the August 1 option and the rest sit on the September 1 default, so the first thing to check with your own county assessment office is which one applies to you this year, because it can change if the commissioners adopt or drop the earlier date.

Philadelphia runs on its own calendar entirely. The Board of Revision of Taxes (BRT), not a county Board of Assessment Appeals, hears Philadelphia appeals, and its statutory deadline is the first Monday of October of the year before the tax year at issue, with narrow 30-day extensions available if you bought the property after October 1, received a late assessment notice, or are under an agreement of sale after October 1. If you own in Philadelphia, do not assume the August/September window that applies to the rest of the state applies to you. It does not.

Where and How to File

Outside Philadelphia, you file with your county's Board of Assessment Appeals. Bring evidence of current fair market value: a recent appraisal, comparable sales, or documented property condition issues, since the board's first job is establishing that number before the predetermined-ratio-versus-CLR math ever comes into play. From there, Pennsylvania gives you four possible levels: the County Assessment Office for an informal review, the Board of Assessment Appeals for a formal hearing, the Court of Common Pleas, and the Commonwealth Court, each one exhausted before you move to the next. Most homeowners never need to go past the Board of Assessment Appeals hearing.

In Philadelphia, you file directly with the BRT: an Appeal Application delivered by mail, in person at 601 Walnut Street, or by email, followed by supporting documentation (photographs, an appraisal, income and expense statements for rental or commercial property) generally due within 45 days of your scheduled hearing, and a hearing that can be attended in person or by video.

What RESPA Does With the Savings Once You Win

Winning a CLR-based appeal lowers your assessed value, which lowers your tax bill, which flows into your escrow account the same way any tax reduction does anywhere else, on your servicer's schedule rather than the county's. Three federal rules govern that process, and they apply in Pennsylvania exactly as they do everywhere else:

• The off-cycle analysis option. A servicer may, but is not required to, run an escrow analysis outside its normal annual cycle (Section 1024.17(f)(1)(ii)). Send your revised assessment notice and ask.
• The surplus refund rule. If an analysis shows a surplus of $50 or more, the servicer must refund it within 30 days if you are current on your mortgage (Section 1024.17(f)(2)(i) and (f)(2)(ii)).
• The cushion cap. Servicers may hold a cushion of no more than one-sixth of estimated annual disbursements, roughly two months' worth (Section 1024.17(c)(5)). A lower tax bill shrinks the allowed cushion too, which is why a post-appeal refund is often larger than the tax savings alone.

You will also get an annual escrow statement within 30 days of your computation year's end (Section 1024.17(i)). Check it against your revised tax bill the first year after a successful appeal; it is the easiest way to confirm your servicer actually picked up the change instead of continuing to budget off the old number.

What a Countywide Reassessment Actually Does to Your Escrow

Allegheny County's court-ordered reassessment, due to begin by 2027 and finish by 2032, is the exception that shows the rule. When a county finally does reassess countywide, every property gets a new base-year value at once, state law requires the shift to be revenue-neutral overall (millage rates typically drop as assessments rise, so total collections do not spike), but individual bills still move up or down depending on how much a given property had drifted from its old base year. If your county reassesses while you are reading this, expect a new escrow analysis to follow within a year, and expect your specific bill to depend far more on how undervalued or overvalued your particular home had become under the old base year than on any statewide trend.

Until that happens in your county, the CLR math above is the only lever available to you between reassessments, and Section 8843's ban on spot reassessment means the county cannot simply update your file on its own initiative even if it wanted to. Our Pennsylvania property tax appeal guide covers the county-by-county filing details in full.

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