Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas announced on June 19 that property owners in the county can view their property tax bills online more than a week before paper copies are scheduled to be mailed out at the beginning of July. Tax bills are due on Aug. 1.
Property owners can view and download copies of their bills by visiting cookcountytreasurer.com, clicking on “Your Property Tax Overview” and entering their Property Index Number. If they don’t have the number, they can search by entering their property’s address.
On June 20, Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough released the 2018 Cook County tax rates for the county’s more than 1,400 taxing bodies — the final step in the process before tax bills are mailed out, her office said.
“Calculating and publishing these tax rates is a massive effort towards transparency and fairness in taxation, and I want to commend the staff of the Clerk’s Office and the municipal offices for working together and getting this part of the process done in an extremely efficient manner,” Yarbrough explained in a statement.
The clerk said that property taxes billed for taxing bodies in the county totaled nearly $15 billion this year, which breaks last year’s record high of $14.4 billion.
“As a result, it is expected that individual taxing districts may receive increased property tax revenues due to this 3.7 [percent] increase over last year,” the clerk’s office explained. “Changes to individual tax bills will vary, but in general, single family homes in the northern and central parts of the City of Chicago may see increased tax bills. Property taxes for single family homes in the suburbs and the southern part of the City remain mostly flat.”
The 2018 average composite tax rate for Forest Park was 11.845—a number essentially on par with the year prior, which was 11.381. The rates for most individual taxing bodies that are partially or fully in Forest Park increased.
Michael Romain
