This post is part of a Civic Parent’s series, Take Your Seat at the Table: A Taxpayer’s Guide to Demystifying Your Municipal Budget. This series is a plain-language walk through New Jersey’s Municipal User Friendly Budget (UFB).
Page 1 of the User Friendly Budget aims to put the Municipality in context of your entire tax bill. This page is busy; there is a lot going on, so let’s ease in.
Don’t lose the forest for the trees.
Think of UFB Page 1 as the 30,000-foot, bird’s-eye view of your city’s property-tax “forest.” Your personal tax bill is just one small fraction of what’s summarized here. And this “forest” contains three species of trees — Municipality, Schools, and County — each growing and changing year-on-year at its own pace, influenced by politics, demographics, state pressures, and more.
The complexity of what impacts the “forest growth” abounds. I won’t go into depth here on that nuance. But I will share a few insights to underscore the point.
Jersey City is a good case study in two local governments growing rapidly and at different paces. Residents know Jersey City as Greenville, Downtown, West Side, Journal Square, the Heights, and so on. But public data informs a different lens through property tax dollars needed to fund the Municipality, Public Schools, and County.
I’m going to use two sources to walk through some basic data. The 2024 User Friendly Budget for Jersey City and the latest Property Tax Tables from the NJ Department of Community Affairs.
Public property tax data informs us that in 2015, Jersey City required $449 million in total property tax from residents and that:
- 26% went to Public Schools
- 50% to the Municipality
- 24% to the County
By 2024, the landscape had changed; Jersey City required just over $1 billion in property tax, with:
- 44% going to Schools,
- 38% to the Municipality, and
- 18% to the County.
In 10 years, the amount of property tax more than doubled and the distribution of tax to local services also shifted in proportion to the whole.
Year-on-year change is dynamic and it involves all three local governments.
Let’s now focus on the trees (briefly) for one year.
Page 1 of the Municipal User Friendly Budget (UFB) helps us see these the proverbial trees up close. It’s the only page in the budget where all three governments appear together; every other page in the budget focuses solely on the Municipality.
Page 1 shows two years side-by-side: the prior year (e.g. 2024) on the left and the current year (e.g. 2025) on the right. Let’s look at 2024 (the left on the visual below), since those numbers are final.
We can see total property tax of $1.013 billion in 2024. And if we look at the components of the $1.013 billion, we can see the three local governments which I’m color coding to help guide you:
- Municipal Government (BLUE) – City or Town Hall; they manage local operations, from public works to police.
- School Government (RED) – Your public school district; this funds classroom instruction, staff, and facilities.
- County Government (GREY) – The regional layer; it overlaps with both city and schools through services like courts, parks, and social programs.
The rest of the User Friendly Budget – all the topics I will cover after this post — will be “BLUE” (Municipality) trees. Also — other pieces of this complicated landscape are beyond the horizon (not part of this post) — like the size of the tax base, the number of residents paying property tax, and so on. Those are important pieces … and worth exploring … which is why I’m writing an entire series, not just a single post.
Take Your Time.
To help you sit with these numbers, I’ve built a Tableau visualization using 25 years of Jersey City property-tax data. This data is from the NJ Department of Community Affairs and it summarizes the aggregate Municipal / Schools / County “split” every year.
With Gratitude
I’m grateful to the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs (DCA) for maintaining a stable, reliable dataset on its Property Tax Tables website — an invaluable public resource that makes long-term analysis like my Tableau visual above possible.
Reflect on if you learned anything new by reading this…if so, consider sharing with a neighbor to help them learn, too.
The writing on Civic Parent is for general civic learning and public knowledge. It’s not intended as tax, accounting, or legal advice, and it shouldn’t be relied on for those purposes. If you’re looking for individualized guidance or deeper support, please visit my Need More? page to learn how to connect for tailored services or consulting.
[…] A view of all three local governments…their individual levies & related tax rates – Using UFB Page 1 to see the three local governments—city, county, and schools—and how each as its own “levy” and tax rate. […]