Every spring the county Board of Tax Assessors puts a value on your Georgia commercial property, and your tax bill follows that number. You can challenge it — for free — and the strongest argument for most commercial owners is written directly into the statute: uniformity. If comparable properties are assessed below yours, Georgia law treats that as a ground of appeal in its own right. Here is how the appeal actually works, what the 45-day clock means, and what the two-year freeze does and does not promise.
Uniformity is written into the statute
Under O.C.G.A. §48-5-311, a property owner may appeal to the county Board of Equalization on several grounds, and §48-5-311(e)(1)(A) names uniformity of assessment expressly. That matters because it changes what you have to prove. You are not required to argue what your building would sell for. You can argue that the county valued the comparable buildings around you lower than it valued yours — and the evidence for that is the county's own assessment records. Like Utah's equalization appeal, a Georgia uniformity case is built from comparable assessed values: when like properties carry unlike assessments, the higher one is out of line, and the Board of Equalization can bring it back.
You are not asking the Board to believe your opinion of value. You are asking it to apply the county's own numbers consistently — to bring your assessment in line with the comparable properties the county itself valued.
The 45-day window — your county's notice starts the clock
Each year the county mails an annual assessment notice (the PT-306). From the date that notice is mailed, you have 45 days to file an appeal — the exact deadline is printed on the notice itself. The trap is that Georgia counties do not mail on the same day: the notice wave runs roughly April through June, county by county, so your neighbor in the next county over may have a deadline weeks away from yours. Read the notice the day it lands, find the printed deadline, and count backward from there. Miss the 45 days and you wait a full year.
Filing itself is simple and free — there is no filing fee. The appeal goes in on the statewide form (the PT-311A), checking uniformity as a ground, and an owner may file and pursue it through an authorized representative — §48-5-311(e)(6)(A) says so directly.
What happens after you file
The Board of Tax Assessors reviews the appeal first and can change the value on its own. If it does not resolve the matter, the appeal is certified to the Board of Equalization — a panel of trained citizen members, independent of the assessors' office — which schedules a hearing. You or your representative present the comparable assessments and the adjustments behind them; the assessors defend their value; the Board decides. The cases that win are the ones where the written evidence is already done: a defensible set of comparable properties, honestly adjusted, with your assessment sitting above them on the county's own records.
The two-year freeze, honestly
You may have heard that filing a Georgia appeal "locks" your value for two years. That is the old pitch, and it is no longer the right way to say it. Under §48-5-299(c) as it stands today, the freeze follows when the appeal actually produces a reduction in value and you or your representative attend the hearing or submit written evidence. Do that, and the new, lower value holds for the next two years. File a hollow appeal with no evidence and no reduction, and there is nothing to freeze. The freeze is a real and valuable feature of a won appeal — a reduction that pays three years running — but it is earned by the evidence, not by the act of filing.
How we build the case
We read every commercial and industrial parcel in Gwinnett County off the county's own public records — 13,436 of them — and lined each one up against its peers' assessments. 3,269 of them, nearly three in ten, sit 10% or more above the peer-median assessment. The median commercial value on the roll is about $911,000, and at Georgia's effective commercial tax rate — roughly 1.3% to 1.6% of value, since the state taxes 40% of fair market value at metro millage rates around 33 to 41 mills — an over-assessment compounds on every bill until someone challenges it.
A higher number, by itself, is not proof. Properties differ for real reasons — size, age, condition, location — and a fair comparison has to account for them. So before we ever tell you that you have a case, we adjust the comparables for size, age, and location and measure you against genuine peers' assessed values. If the gap survives the adjustments, you have something the Board can act on; if it does not, we tell you that too. We do not name owners, we do not guess, and we work only from the county's own public records. More metro counties — Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb — are coming as records requests land.
Who files, and what it costs
The model finds the case; it does not file it. An authorized representative reviews the analysis, files the appeal, and works it through the Board of Equalization — the statute's own mechanism for an owner to appeal through someone acting on their behalf. That human gate is deliberate: a person who is accountable for the filing stands behind it.
On cost: filing is free, and our arrangement is contingency. There is no upfront fee. You pay only if your value comes down, and our founding-year rate is ten percent of your first-year tax savings. If the value does not drop, you owe nothing.
One honest caveat. We are a new company, and every figure we produce is derived from public records. It is a well-founded estimate of whether a uniformity argument exists — not a promise of any particular outcome. The Board decides. What we can promise is that we will read the county's own numbers carefully and tell you plainly whether the math is on your side. If you want the broader picture across states, our guides walk through how each one works.