Calculating property tax
About this video
The video calculates Milo's 2024 property tax in Augusta County, Virginia. His $200,000 home is taxed as real property at 52 cents per $100 (0.52%), giving $1,040, and his $15,000 truck is taxed as personal property at $2.60 per $100 (2.6%), giving $390, for a total of $1,430.
You'll be able to
- convert a rate like "cents per $100" into a percent and a decimal.
- tell the difference between real property and personal property.
- calculate total property tax on a home and a vehicle.
Key words
- real property
- Land and buildings, such as a home.
- personal property
- Things you own that can move, such as a truck or a boat.
- assessed value
- The value the county gives your property for working out tax.
- tax rate per $100
- How many dollars of tax you pay for every $100 of assessed value.
Transcript
- [Instructor] We are told, "In 2024, Augusta County, Virginia, set the personal property tax rate at $2.60 per $100 and the real property tax rate at 52 cents per $100 of assessed value. The county assessed Milo's home at $200,000 and his truck at $15,000. Calculate the total amount of property tax Milo has to pay."
So why don't you pause this video and see if you can figure that out before we do this together. Okay, let's just break this up into the home, and then we will also look at the truck and then we will add it together. So first, we are going to look at the real property tax, if we're thinking about the home.
The personal property would be for, say, a truck or a boat. So for the home, we're looking at 52 cents per $100. If it was $1 per 100, it would be 1%. So this is actually 0.52%, is really what they're charging. So what we wanna do is take 0.52% times $200,000.
That's what the county is saying Milo's home is worth, $200,000. And so let's do that. That is the same thing as taking 200,000 times 0.0052. This decimal is equivalent to 0.52%. And one way that we could do this, obviously I could do this with the standard method, but if I were to just say two times 52, that would be 104.
And then, I'm not saying two times 52, I'm saying 200,000 times 52. So then I'm gonna put one, two, three, four five zeros behind it. One, two, three, four, five zeros behind it. But actually I'm not multiplying 200,000 times 52, I'm multiplying 200,000 times 52 10,000ths.
And so what I really need is one, two, three, four numbers to the right of the decimal place, so one, two, three, four right over there. And so we get that the real property tax is gonna be $1,040. Have a lot of precision here. I don't need all those zeros. And now let's think about the truck.
The truck is taxed at $2.60 per $100. That's a personal property. So that's at 2.6%. So it's going to be 2.6% times the value of the truck, which is assessed at $15,000. $15,000. So let's think about this. This is the same thing as 0.026 times 15,000. So if I...
Well, actually I could do this by hand, but I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna take the shortcut. I could have done it last time. You usually will use a calculator for this, just for the sake of time. So if I say 0.026 times 15, one, two, three, I get $390. And if I were to add that to our real property tax, so plus 1040, I get a total property tax of 1430.
So this one over here is 390. And so the total is $1,430 of property tax, and we're done.
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