Philly Homeowners Skip $1,400 Homestead Break Each Year
A citywide map of Philadelphia single-family properties with no Homestead Exemption on file. Each missing exemption is ~$1,400 a year.
Philly has a Homestead Exemption rule, eliminating property taxes on owner-occupied homes for the first $100k of property value. Based on a project I’m working on with one ward leader to get his constituents signed up, I built a map to figure out which other areas might benefit most. Email me for property-level analyses. At the city’s current 1.3998% tax rate, the exemption is worth about $1,400 a year after tax—roughly equivalent to a $2,200 one-time pay bump before taxes.
Each small dot represents 25 properties. At lower zoom levels, the map groups nearby dots into numbered circles; zoom in and those groups separate back into the same 25-property dots. The dots are deliberately synthetic: they show concentration without publishing individual addresses.
The citywide version makes the same pattern visible across every ward. The map is a starting point for outreach, not a list of confirmed eligible homeowners.
A missing exemption can mean an owner-occupied home that has not applied. It can also mean a rental, an absentee owner, or an address record that does not line up cleanly. The public map keeps those cases together because the next step belongs to people who know the blocks: check the property, talk to the owner, and help with the application where it makes sense.
Notes and sources
The source is the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Property Assessment data published through OpenDataPhilly. I used single-family properties with valid 2025 and 2027 assessments and no Homestead Exemption on file. Properties whose mailing street resembles their property street are marked as likely owner-occupied; that is a prioritization signal, not proof of eligibility.
The public map contains ward and census-tract totals plus synthetic dot positions. It does not publish addresses, parcel numbers, mailing addresses, or property-level tax information. The data was pulled in July 2026.