As a Monmouth County homeowner, your tax bill includes three major types of tax: municipal (local town), school, and county. Municipal taxes pay for everyday services like streetlights and police protection. School taxes pay for public education. How much you owe in these categories is easy to figure out; it's simply the assessed value of your home multiplied by your town's municipal and school tax rates, which you can find on your tax bill.

But the county tax rate has a different purpose. Instead of a multiplier applied to the value of individual homes; it's a number used to distribute the cost of county government among our 53 towns.

The New Jersey Constitution requires counties to follow theses steps to determine a tax rate: (1) The assessed value of all properties in your town is converted in a total current market value for your town. This conversion is based on a "sales ratio study", which simply compares assessments to the sales price of all recent home sales. (2) Some of the costs of county government are absorbed by the state or paid through various revenues. What's left makes up the county tax levy. This must be distributed among all the towns based on current market value. So even if homes in your town are assessed at 50% of market value for the purpose of determining municipal and school taxes, the county must - by law - equalize those homes at 100% for the purpose of determining the county tax. (3) Each town is notified of its fair share of the county tax levy. It must then distribute this amount among its homeowners - based on local assessments.

Here's an example:

I. How the county tax rate is calculated

II. What's on your tax bill