The two values on your Notice of Valuation, and which one you can appeal

Your Maricopa County Notice of Valuation shows two large dollar figures. Most people read the wrong one, and the difference decides what an appeal can even change.

Full Cash Value is an opinion about your home

Full Cash Value, abbreviated FCV on the notice, is the Assessor’s estimate of what your property was worth as of the valuation date. It is produced by mass appraisal: statistical models applied across whole neighborhoods at once, not a person walking through your kitchen.

That matters, because mass appraisal is accurate in aggregate and occasionally wrong about a specific house. A model does not know that your lot backs onto a road, that the previous owner’s addition was never finished, or that the comparable sale down the street was a builder’s spec home with upgrades yours does not have.

Limited Property Value is what your bill is built on

Limited Property Value, or LPV, is the figure your primary property taxes are actually calculated from. It is not an opinion. It is produced by a statutory formula, and it is capped: under Proposition 117, which Arizona voters approved in 2012 and which took effect for the 2015 tax year, the LPV of most existing property can rise by no more than five percent a year.

LPV also cannot exceed FCV. So in a fast-rising market the two numbers drift apart, sometimes dramatically. Your FCV can jump twenty percent in a year while your LPV grinds upward at five. Homeowners frequently see a frightening FCV increase, brace for a matching tax increase, and then find the bill barely moved. That is Proposition 117 working as intended.

The part that catches people out

An appeal challenges the Full Cash Value. The Limited Property Value is not independently appealable, because it is not a judgement anyone made. It is arithmetic performed on prior years’ figures.

This produces a genuinely counterintuitive situation. You can be over-assessed on FCV, win an appeal, and still see very little change in this year’s tax bill, because your LPV was already sitting well below your FCV and the cap was doing the work anyway.

It also means an inflated FCV is not always harmless. Because each year’s LPV is derived from the previous year’s, and because FCV is the ceiling the limited value is allowed to climb toward, an FCV that runs persistently high can pull the limited value along behind it. The effect is slow and cumulative rather than immediate.

Where the smaller numbers come from

The notice also shows assessed values, which are much smaller. Those are the taxable portion. For an owner-occupied home, classified as Legal Class 3, the assessment ratio is ten percent. A Limited Property Value of $304,000 becomes an assessed value of about $30,400, and the tax rate is applied to that, not to the headline figure.

If the assessed figures on your notice are not almost exactly ten percent of the values above them, that is worth asking the Assessor’s office about directly. It usually means the property is classified as something other than an owner-occupied residence, which is a different conversation from a valuation dispute, and often a more consequential one.

What to do with this

Read the FCV first and ask one question: would a well informed buyer have paid that for this house, on that valuation date? If the answer is comfortably yes, there is nothing here to pursue, and the honest answer is to do nothing.

If the answer is no, the evidence that matters is recent sales of genuinely similar homes near you. Not a county-wide average, and not an online estimate. Actual sales, close by, comparable in size and type, recent enough to reflect the same market.

One practical point on timing: the appeal window runs from the mailing date printed on the notice, not from the day you opened it. The notice states its own deadline. Take that date from the notice itself rather than from any article, including this one.