About Wyoming Property Tax

House

In Wyoming, the task of collecting property taxes is delegated to the County Treasurer's Office. The taxes fund our hospital and schools, health department, hospital and airport and help build and maintain our roads.

A property tax in Wyoming is an ad valorem tax. Therefore, the more your property is worth, the higher your taxes are. In order to tax the property, a taxable value must be determined.

The County Assessor assigns the property a Fair Market Value (link fair market value to calculation). The fair market value is multiplied by a Taxation Rate to calculate the taxable value. The taxation rate depends on how the Assessor classifies the property.


Properties are classified in one of 3 areas:

Gross production of minerals and mine products (taxed at 100%)

Property used for industrial purposes (taxed at 11.5%)

All other property, Real and Personal (taxed at 9.5%)

Hopefully, the information provided here can shed some light on the process of determining how the taxes are calculated and how the taxes are distributed.

How Taxes Can Increase 

The basic idea is based on two values. The Fair Market Value (FMV), and the Mill Levy, which is the amount each taxing entity gets to keep.

As the FMV goes up, the value of real estate in the towns goes up, and the taxes go up. The County Assessor determines the fair market value of your property based on comparable sales of similar property in your area. So, if houses in your neighborhood are selling for more this year then they were last year, your house may have a higher fair market value and your taxes could increase.

The second reason is the Mill Levy. As there are more taxing entities, there are more Mill Levies. You can see the biggest difference in Glenrock, where they have more separate districts, like the Hospital, Solid Waste, and Cemetery. So while Glenrock has 74.238 (in 2019) mills (or $74.238 per thousand taxable value on the property), Douglas has a lower levy at 66.965.

In 2018 there was a very slight decrease in the Mill Levies across the County when compared to 2017. The 2021 Mill Levies saw another increase over 2020.  The levels constantly fluctuate as districts adjust the Mills and as more districts are added or removed.

The current 2021 Mill Levies are provided below.