76,119 Homes Are Missing Out on Philadelphia's Homestead Exemption (improved analysis)

A couple of days ago I published my original analysis of the Philadelphia houses missing out on the Homestead Exemption: 104,719 of them. Some people I was chatting with provided constructive feedback on how to improve it, which I have now incorporated. This article improves upon that methodology and arrives at a more precise number of 76,119 homes who are missing out and where they live.

Here’s what I improved upon my analysis

The Homestead Exemption is a very simple program. The City of Philadelphia doesn’t tax the first $100,000 of your home’s value, as long as you own it, live in it, don’t have some other tax exemptions, and you file the application form for the Homestead Exemption.

So in my prior work, I took all single family homes, excluded those that already had the exemption, and then tried to exclude renter-occupied properties by matching mailing addresses to home addresses. This was actually pretty good, but thanks to a variety of people, I realized I could improve upon that. Firstly, I could more precisely exclude rented homes by filtering out homes with active rental licenses, so I did that, relying on data from the L&I department. Obviously, this still counts rented out properties where the landlord doesn’t have a rental license, which they are supposed to by law. But I can’t adjust for everything.

The second improvement I made is to exclude homeowners who have other exemptions that disqualify them from having the HE. Specifically, and most importantly, are those homes with the 10-year new build residential tax abatement. No property taxes for 10 years on new homes, which was an incentive for builders to build homes that people would buy for the tax benefit.

Most importantly, this updated analysis worsened what we see about geographic and income equity. All the least-signed-up ZIP codes are the lowest-income ones

My original analysis showed that there were a lot of rich ZIP codes and some poor ZIP codes missing out. For example, in the original analysis, ZIP code 19146 (Graduate Hospital / CCW) had 47.8% claimable homes that were missing the exemption. With the improved methodology, the number drops to 28.2%. Still not great sign-up, as one out of four people are missing out on this awesome $1400 tax benefit.

And almost all of the least-signed-up neighborhoods are disproportionately poor, and disproportionately minority. Some of them are also disproportionately older. The top of the list includes neighborhoods like Fairhill (19133), where 41.7% are missing out. Kensington, 19134, has 36.1% of eligible homes missing out.

I was not able to adjust for LOOP

There is a third program called Longtime Owner Occupants Program (LOOP), which prevents your property tax assessment from rising if you’ve lived in your house for a long time. If you have the LOOP exception, you can’t get the homestead exemption. However, the list of LOOP-houses is not public, so I wasn’t able to remove them from my analysis. The money suggests they are worth about 11% of the program: for fiscal year 2025 the city recorded $37.8 million of LOOP relief against $341.2 million for the Homestead Exemption. At some point, I might do a Right-to-Know request to the Department of Revenue to get that list and adjust for it.

The poorer the ZIP code, the more homeowners are missing out

Across the 42 ZIP codes with an ACS income value, there is a strong negative correlation between income and proportion of people who are using the benefit, around -0.34. The correlation would be even more strongly negative if it wasn’t for a weird U-shaped pattern, where the highest income zip codes seem to have lower utilization of the program.

The reason for the weird uptick for high-income zips is a new-build tax abatement. ZIP codes with more development have more homes that are exempt from tax on their value, and a home that is exempt from tax on its value has no homestead exemption to file for. 21.8% of 19146’s claimable homes are value-exempt, against 1.1% in 19142, which is why the rich ZIP codes stopped topping the list. Just an artifact or ghost of the data, you can kind of mentally ignore all the dots to the right of $80k income on the graph above.

One in four claimable homes is still missing out, disproportionately in poorer and minority neighborhoods

By my most recent math, 76,119 claimable homes are missing out on a $1400/year tax break that takes 5 minutes to apply for.

That’s about one in every four claimable homes, and disproportionately in disadvantaged neighborhoods in North Philly and Kensington. I’m on a small personal mission to fix this as much as possible. I’m already working with three RCOs and a ward leader to get these people signed up, by knocking on their doors, filling out their forms. I would love to find more partners. If you’re interested, please email me.

Notes, Sources, and Methodology

The property data is the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Property Assessment property and assessment history dataset, pulled on November 9, 2026, and the rental licences come from the city’s L&I business licence records. The eligibility rules are the city’s own: the Homestead Exemption page and the LOOP page. This piece follows up on my first look at the gap.

Methodology details. The base set is the parcel-matched method from the first piece, unchanged: the 2025 and 2027 assessment joins, the condominium and apartment exclusions, the ZIP range and the mailing-address ownership test, which recovers 94.7% of the homes that already hold an exemption. I reran the original code on November 9 and it returns the same numbers as the new code, ZIP for ZIP, so the difference between the 104,719 I published and the 104,976 I start from here is how long ago the data was pulled, not how the count was made. Everything here is the 45 ZIP codes with at least 200 claimable homes, the scope the first piece reports.

Limitations. I could not remove LOOP properties, so every count here is an upper bound on the number of homes that can still file. The value-exempt screen cannot tell a 10-year residential abatement from a nonprofit or religious exemption, and both are ineligible for different reasons. A rental licence is evidence of a rental, not proof of who lives there now, so the rental rule is published as a band: count a licence issued since 2016 and the answer is 63,732, count any licence ever and it is 56,074.

https://nickjain.com/blog/homes-missing-homestead-exemption-nov-2026-update