How do property tax appeals work in the Illinois collar counties like DuPage, Lake, and Will?
How do property tax appeals work in the Illinois collar counties like DuPage, Lake, and Will?
Outside Cook County, Illinois collar counties like DuPage, Lake, and Will run a single Board of Review appeal where the deadline is 30 days after the township assessment roll is published — then you can appeal that decision to the state PTAB within 30 days.
Illinois has 102 counties, and Cook is the only one with a separate two-stage Assessor-then-Board-of-Review system. In the collar counties — DuPage, Lake, Will, Kane, McHenry — and the rest of the state, the appeal process is simpler: you appeal to the county Board of Review (BOR), which is the primary administrative venue.
The deadline is publication-based, not notice-based. In DuPage County, for example, "the period during which an appeal may be filed ends thirty days after the publication of the township assessment roll." Assessment changes are published in local newspapers, and the 30-day appeal window runs from that publication date, not from when you personally receive a change-of-assessment notice. Confirm your township's publication date and BOR deadline on the DuPage County Board of Review page; Lake, Will, and other counties publish equivalents on their own supervisor-of-assessments sites.
Who can file and how. The BOR accepts a complaint filed by the owner, the taxpayer, or an Illinois-licensed attorney with proper authorization. The county forwards your complaint to the township assessor, who prepares a response presented at the BOR hearing. Most collar counties accept online or paper filing through their supervisor-of-assessments office.
Escalation is the same statewide. A collar-county BOR decision is appealable to the state-level Property Tax Appeal Board (PTAB) within 30 days of the decision notice under 35 ILCS 200/16-160, or you may pay under protest and file a tax-objection complaint in the circuit court. The 35 ILCS 200 Property Tax Code framework — including the 10% residential level applied through each county's own classification practice and the state equalization factor — applies across Illinois, but the first stop is your county Board of Review, and its deadline is the one you must not miss.
Practical tip: because collar-county deadlines key off township-roll publication, watch the legal-notices section of your local paper and your county's assessment-status page rather than waiting for mail.