How many governments tax a commercial property?

Question 04

How many distinct tax districts does a single county carry?

Dozens: 44 distinct tax districts in Charleston County, 21 in Berkeley and 15 default districts in Dorchester — while Harris County runs 1,078 taxing districts in its table, of which 748 touch commercial property.

In the Charleston tri-county area, the district is the unit that sets the bill, and there are 44 of them in Charleston County, 21 in Berkeley County and 15 default districts in Dorchester County, across three adjacent counties covering 395,283 parcels. Twenty-one of those districts hold at least one parcel addressed CHARLESTON.

In Harris County, the appraisal district’s table holds 1,078 taxing districts in total, and 748 of them — 69.4% — tax at least one commercial account. Thirty-one of the 34 city codes in the table’s city block hold commercial accounts (91.2%), and 398 utility districts hold commercial accounts that sit in no city (61.1%). In Davidson County, the TaxDist column stores 22 distinct values as written and 15 once trimmed of stray whitespace — 43,132 parcels, 15.0% of the roll, carry a value with stray whitespace.

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Sources: Charleston CSV rows Charleston distinct tax districts, Berkeley distinct tax districts, Dorchester distinct default tax districts · Harris CSV rows taxing_districts_in_table, taxing_districts_on_commercial, cities_holding_commercial, utility_districts_holding_no_city_commercial · Nashville CSV rows Distinct TaxDist values as the column stores them, Distinct TaxDist values once trimmed, Parcels whose TaxDist carries stray whitespace. Counted 20 September 2026. If your CMS strips SVG files, use the PNG above; the SVG is the same chart at the same path with an .svg extension.

Question 05

Why does this vary so much between states?

Because the layers themselves are different creatures in each state: Texas builds utility districts where there is no city, Florida leaves most land unincorporated under the county, Tennessee runs a metro government ringed by separately incorporated cities, and South Carolina bills through dozens of tax districts — and each of those structures is visible directly in the counts.

The studies do not offer a causal theory beyond what their own files show, and neither does this page. What the files show is four different answers to the same question. In Harris County, the unit that multiplies is the utility district: 398 of them hold commercial accounts that sit in no city, and the no-city accounts inside a utility district carry the heaviest load measured anywhere, 9.38 jurisdictions on average. Where Texas does not incorporate, it creates districts.

In Florida, the unit that dominates is the unincorporated county itself: 82.4% of Manatee parcels and 42.1% of the Miami-Dade roll sit outside every municipality, governed and taxed by the county. In Davidson County, the structure is inverted — one metro government covering nearly everything, with 10,392 parcels in separately incorporated cities whose addresses still read NASHVILLE. In South Carolina, the multiplying unit is the tax district: 44 in one county alone.

None of this is a claim about why legislatures designed it so. It is what the parcel files contain when counted: different states stack different layers, so the same commercial building pays a different number of governments depending on which state it stands in.

This section interprets only the rows already cited under f1–f4; it introduces no new figure. Structures named here — utility districts, unincorporated county, separately incorporated cities, tax districts — are the categories the source files themselves publish.

Question 06

Can these figures be cited as national statistics?

No. Every number on this page is a count of seven named markets on stated dates, and nothing here has been weighted, modelled or projected to any larger population.

What the seven markets do jointly support is narrower and still useful: in every county record the series has examined, a commercial property’s tax bill is split across overlapping layers rather than levied by one government, a large share of commercial property sits in no municipality at all, and the address on the property is an unreliable guide to which governments those layers are.

Question 07

Where can I download the underlying data?

Every jurisdiction figure on this page is published as a single JSON file under CC BY 4.0, free to reuse commercially with attribution.

Each row carries the market, the metric name, the value, the denominator, the share, the source file, the date the source file was published and the date it was counted — re-presented exactly as stated in statistics.json, with no recomputation and no new totals. Reuse is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International: name Chris Klebl and Sterling Digital Partners and link back to this page.

The per-study CSVs hold the parcel-level working behind every row: the Harris, Charleston and Nashville files for the figures new to this page, and the Sarasota & Manatee, Miami-Dade and Mecklenburg files for the rest. Each study page publishes the script the count was run with.