Overview:
• North Carolina law requires counties to appraise everyone’s property at least once every eight years.
• Values jumped so much between 2017 and 2025 that the county significantly lowered the tax rate.
• Despite the rate cut, some property owners still saw their tax bills rise. More frequent appraisals could ease the pain of rising tax values.
Following taxpayer sticker shock in 2025, Cumberland County will reappraise property values every six years instead of eight years as mandated by state law.
After that, the county might start doing revaluations every four years.
The Cumberland County Board of Commissioners—minus Commissioner Jeannette Council, who was absent—voted unanimously on Monday to conduct its next revaluation in 2031. That is six years after the revaluations in 2025, and is two years ahead of when state law would otherwise require the next revaluations to be conducted.
This is an effort to keep the tax appraisals more in line with real estate sales prices, commissioners said in past discussions of the topic.
The county has more than 143,000 residential, industrial, commercial, and other parcels to keep track of. Property taxes on real estate are a major source of revenue for county and municipal governments to provide public services such as law enforcement, public libraries, parks and recreation, and firefighting.
“Continued commercial, industrial, and residential development in Cumberland County is causing rapid appreciation of real property values and the Board of Commissioners have determined it would be in the best interest of the County and its citizens to advance such scheduled reappraisal,” says the resolution approved on Monday.
The tax appraisals issued in early 2025 caught many property owners off guard because the new values were significantly higher than the appraised values from the last appraisal in 2017.
Tax values on average rose nearly 65% between 2017 and 2025, the county tax office reported last year. Residential property values went up 86.2% while commercial real estate values rose 27%..
Even though county commissioners cut the tax rate in June, the large increase in property values meant that residential property owners still likely saw bigger tax bills..
“It’s kind of my anecdotal thought that these values slipped up on us a lot,” Commissioner Marshall Faircloth said at a commissioners’ meeting on February 12. “Most of the increase to me seemed to be after COVID. After COVID there was a housing shortage and things just went up.”
The COVID-19 pandemic started in early 2020. Housing prices rose considerably in the following years.
“I definitely agree that we need to shorten the cycle” from every eight years, Commissioner Pavan Patel said at the meeting. “I think it brings equity for all the taxpayers, and more in line with market values.”
More frequent tax appraisals can help the public, county Tax Administrator George Utley told the county commissioners in April.
“A shorter cycle will equalize the tax burden more frequently, and I feel like that is fairer to property owners,” Utley said. “More frequent revaluations will allow for a better understanding, better education of the public, so that they understand the process.”
On February 12, the county commissioners discussed a four-year cycle, with the next revaluation taking place in 2029, and a six-year cycle with revaluations in 2031.
Utley told commissioners that if they opt to do it in 2029, the staff would have two years and 10 months to complete the job. He would need to hire additional employees and the work would have needed to get started in December.
Utley recommended starting out with the six-year cycle and revaluations in 2031, then moving to a four-year cycle with the following revaluation in 2035.
“There are advantages to going to a four-year cycle,” he said. “I just think at this point we need that transition period of a six-year cycle.”
The commissioners on February 12 voted unanimously to consider the six-year cycle at Monday’s meeting, where they then approved it unanimously.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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