Houses in the Hutchinson Street District in Uptown. Photo: Thshriver, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Cook County’s 2025 property-tax bills, the ones payable this year, went up for the 32nd year in a row, County Treasurer Maria Pappas’s office said in an Aug. 24 analysis.
Local governments asked for $743.8 million in new taxes, bringing the countywide total to more than $19.9 billion, an increase of about 3.9%, the treasurer’s office said. That was above the 3.1% regional inflation rate the same release cited. Homeowners were assigned $593.4 million, or 80%, of the year’s increase, with commercial, industrial and vacant land covering the rest.
In Chicago, the picture was milder than in some suburbs but still an increase. The treasurer’s analysis, and the accompanying report, put the median homeowner bill in the city up 3.2%, to $4,597. Overall taxes in the city rose 2.2%, less than the inflation rate in the release. Business values in Chicago fell 1.6%, compared with a 0.7% decline for homes, the office said, a gap that still left homeowners with a larger median increase than commercial properties, whose median bill was up 2%.
Pappas blamed local government spending and low turnout in some suburban tax referendums, and said, “Local governments need to learn to do more with less, particularly in these precarious economic times. And taxpayers need to vote.” The bills were scheduled to reach mailboxes by Sept. 1, with payment due Oct. 1, after a delay from the usual midsummer calendar.
For Uptown owners, those are the official countywide and city figures. The next regular reassessment of Chicago property is not in this cycle; that work is scheduled for 2027.
