This story is excerpted from the MT Lowdown , a weekly newsletter digest containing original reporting and analysis published every Friday.

We’ve heard from several Montana homeowners who are perplexed by the numbers on reappraisal notices mailed to them by the state Department of Revenue over the last month.

Those notices, for those unfamiliar, inform property owners that the department has updated the valuations used to calculate property tax bills, something it does on a two-year cycle. Here’s an example of a 2025 notice for a relatively typical home in Helena:

There are two key types of numbers to look at here:

The assessed value , which, by law , represents the department’s effort to estimate the property’s full market value. For the current cycle, it reflects the estima

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