A Rural County’s Tax Squeeze

Last month, Sarah Lee of Lillington got a shock when she opened the new property appraisal notice for her 1,040-square-foot manufactured home. 

Four years ago, when Harnett County last conducted revaluations for tax purposes, her home was appraised at $31,312. The county appraised the home at $134,097 in 2026.

Lee’s home’s annual tax values had varied since it was built in 2003 and priced at $57,050, according to Zillow data. The COVID pandemic and local development drove home prices up in the county, which is between Raleigh and Fayetteville. But Lee was not prepared for a $100,000 increase over just four years.

“We’ve been paying in the range of $300 per year in taxes, and I don’t feel this much increase is fair,” she said.

When property values increase, officials typically lower the tax rate to maintain stable funding for government services. The current tax rate in Harnett County is 59.1 cents per $100 in value, and the county has not yet set a new rate for the coming years. 

But Lee still expects to pay more in property taxes, which she said would hurt. Lee and her husband, Robert, already downsized from two cars to one as inflation drove their costs up. He is a state government employee and she volunteers as a family advocate, helping reunite children in government care with their parents.

“I feel like my husband and I are contributing positively to our community, and I’m not the kind of person that shirks responsibility as a citizen,” she said.

Lee is not alone. Homeowners across Harnett County have been complaining in social media forums and lining up at county commission meetings to express their outrage over their rising home values. According to the N.C. Department of Revenue, Harnett is one of 12 counties going through a reappraisal in 2026, and property owners across the state have balked at the increased valuations.

State lawmakers have pounced on the issue. Both House and Senate leaders have called for property tax relief for homeowners, which is expected to be a top agenda item in the legislative short session that begins later this month. Local leaders, meanwhile, are concerned those changes might constrain their ability to fund schools, road repairs, infrastructure upgrades, and other needs in growing communities.

“Putting this budget together for the many years that we have, we understand our revenue sources and the demand for the services, and until you trade shoes with somebody trying to provide those services, limiting tax revenue makes it very difficult,” said Deputy Harnett County Manager Coley Price.

Who Bears the Burden

North Carolina law requires counties to update property values at least once every eight years. Harnett County does it every four years. For this round, field appraisers reviewed more than 73,000 parcels, including residential, commercial, agricultural, and industrial properties.

Marge Moreton, market manager at the Fuquay-Varina Growers Market, said the value of her home in the Kipling community near Lillington increased by $50,000 this cycle. She points to the county’s sprawling landscape of housing developments as the main culprit for the rising home values.

Proximity to the wealthier Wake and Johnston counties has helped turn Harnett into a bedroom community. Its population has swelled by about a third in the last 15 years, from 115,000 in 2010 to 153,800 in 2025, according to the U.S. Census. Developers are snapping up swaths of farmland and green spaces to convert to subdivisions.

Longtime residents complain that the growth has led to declining and overcrowded schools, increased road traffic, and a strain on public utilities. According to the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners, property taxes are the largest funding source for counties to provide essential services and programs, accounting for approximately 61% of general fund revenue. Other sources are sales tax collections, state and federal grants, fees and permits, and special taxes.

Price says school construction, expanding water and sewer capacity, and improving roads sit atop the county’s list of priorities, but they are expensive projects.

“The middle school we’re building is costing about $85 million, and our next school on the radar will be Highlands High School,” Price said. “We’re getting estimates on that ranging from $120 million to $150 million.”

A new water plant with a 20-million-gallon water capacity is estimated to cost $400 million, Price said.

The county’s poverty rate is 13.2 percent, slightly higher than the state overall. Moreton says she worries about the cost of living, and she lobbied the county commissioners to build a permanent farmers market in Lillington that will provide vouchers to low-income seniors for fresh produce in the summer. 

“With electricity bills that are through the roof, rising property values, and social services and healthcare being slashed, I don’t know what is going to happen,” she said.

North Carolina offers property tax relief for seniors and disabled homeowners, including a homestead exclusion for residents 65 or older whose 2025 income doesn’t exceed $38,800 and an exclusion that exempts up to $45,000 of the appraised value for veterans with a service-connected disability.

Harnett is considered a moderately stressed “Tier 2” county with annual wages averaging $45,888, according to the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina. The designation allows the county to receive grants that help pay costs associated with economic development, including infrastructure and job development.

But despite its residential growth, the county remains largely rural. The industrial boom across the county line in Holly Springs—home to behemoths like FUJIFILM Biotechnologies, Seqirus, and Amgen—hasn’t reached Harnett County. Last September, the county broke ground on its first Class A industrial building, which is eventually projected to offer more than 800,000 square feet of space across six buildings.

Some residents say the county needs to encourage a stronger commercial sector to take the pressure off homeowners. Neighboring Johnston County also transitioned from a rural area to a bedroom community, and over the last decade, it has lured manufacturing and pharmaceutical facilities, a path local leaders think Harnett County could follow.

“The burden of trying to pay for schools, infrastructure, roads, EMS, law enforcement, and other services is on the backs of our residential taxes,” says Joe Langley, who is retired and serves on the board of the Chamber of Commerce in Angier. “Additional businesses would help pay for some of the infrastructure and schools we need and support growth.”

Langley owns about 40 acres of property outside of Angier. Most of it is farmland, which he rents to a local farmer for $3,000 a year, he says. He gets tax breaks from the state for the farmland because it’s in use, but he also owns two houses. One of them was valued at $282,176 in 2022, according to Zillow. County records show his new appraisal for 2026 coming in at $394,912.

“I get offers on my farmland all the time,” Langley says. “And let’s just say the offers are in the range of $25,000 an acre, which means I’m sitting on a million dollars worth of land, and I’m renting it out for $3,000 a year because I don’t want to sell it, and it’s all the farmer can afford.”

Constitutional Amendment

In 2025, as complaints about property revaluations heated up around the state, N.C. House Speaker Destin Hall appointed a committee of 29 lawmakers to offer ideas for homeowner relief. 

On March 18, the committee voted to draft a constitutional amendment that would require the General Assembly to enact legislation that would restrict how much local governments can increase property taxes. The proposed amendment doesn’t spell out how those increases would be restricted; lawmakers would determine how to do that in future legislation.

The committee is expected to finalize the proposed amendment and approve it today.

To make it onto the November general election ballot, the amendment would need to be approved by at least three-fifths of both the House and the Senate by early September. 

The House committee is also considering limiting tax exemptions for some categories of nonprofits, including hospitals, and closing loopholes in property tax exemptions for low- and moderate-income housing units.

In February, state Senate Leader Phil Berger proposed a one-year moratorium on property tax revaluation changes to give the General Assembly time to consider potential legislative changes.

He formed an ad hoc committee of 10 Republican senators to study property tax options. Sen. Jim Burgin, who represents Harnett County, is among them and says the committee is meeting today to discuss possible legislation. He predicted that bills will be filed in the short session that convenes on April 21.

“I think you’re going to see a moratorium bill introduced, and you’re going to see some very thoughtful ideas about dealing with property tax,” he said.

According to Kiplinger, most states impose some types of property tax limits. North Carolina currently caps its property tax rate at $1.50 per $100 valuation. 

State Rep. Erin Paré, whose district includes Holly Springs and Fuquay-Varina, says her constituents have been crying out for property tax relief, especially senior citizens on fixed incomes. Wake County conducted reappraisals last year.

“They’re retirees, and many have owned their homes for a long time,” she said. “They’ve paid property taxes diligently for many years, and their home values have gone up dramatically.”

She described the proposed constitutional amendment as a way for North Carolina’s voters to give the General Assembly the authority to cap property tax increases, without limiting ways to do so.

“It’s prudent and appropriate for the people to tell us they want us to do that,” she said.

But state Rep. Maria Cervania, a Wake County Democrat who represents portions of Cary and is a former Wake County commissioner, said she is not sure a constitutional amendment is the answer to taxpayers’ concerns. She said voters have already charged their representatives with looking out for their best interests. She also said tax limits might restrain cities’ and counties’ revenue without measurably relieving homeowners’ burdens.

“People in Harnett County, Wake County, and others across the state love their communities because of what their property taxes pay for,” she said. “We’re already struggling with paying our law enforcement and teachers and educating our children while keeping up with our parks and infrastructure, so we need to be careful with our decisions.”

Paré counters that counties should rein in their expenses. 

According to the UNC School of Government, the state requires counties to pay for things such as public schools, law enforcement, jails, court facilities, and social services. 

In addition, counties may fund emergency medical services, fire protection, water and sewer services, solid waste collection and disposal, community colleges, libraries, parks and recreation, hospitals, and tax collection.

“Once you get into adding on expenses, and that’s decision making at the local level, then these budgets are pretty big,” Paré said. “I think there’s a lot of people that would like to see those expenditures be brought back down to what the core functions local government is supposed to be paying for.”

Kevin Leonard, executive director of the N.C. Association of County Commissioners, says a constitutional amendment giving the legislature the power to limit county taxation could fundamentally change local government.

“The debate that the legislators are having, which is disguised as a property tax debate, is really about the basic roles of government,” he said. 

“I think voters need to decide where they want decisions that affect their backyards to be made,” he said. “If they want those decisions to be made in Raleigh, they may lose their voice because they aren’t necessarily going to travel to the state capital to speak out, when they can just go to their county commissioners meetings and make their voices heard.”

Make an Impact

One problem counties face, especially those that are low-income or rural, is that they have few options for generating revenue besides property taxes. Mecklenburg County voters last year approved a plan to raise its sales tax to pay for a sweeping transportation improvement plan, but that option hasn’t gotten much attention in the significantly more rural Harnett County.

Property owners have zeroed in on the idea of charging impact fees on developers and homebuilders. These are one-time charges on new developments to fund things like roads, schools, and parks.

Price, the deputy county manager, says he and county manager Brent Trout have presented resolutions on relief measures to Burgin and state Reps. Howard Penny Jr. and Joseph Pike, also Republicans.

“We are looking for some relief from the burden this tremendous amount of growth is putting on us,” Price said. “And whether that’s sales tax or impact fees for schools, we’re looking at every single angle.”

The North Carolina Supreme Court held in 2016 that counties and municipalities could not charge impact fees when approving a subdivision. Under North Carolina law, counties and municipalities only have the authority the state legislature specifically grants them, said Ted Hennessey, a partner with Robinson Bradshaw whose clients include real estate developers and construction firms.

In 2017, the General Assembly passed a law letting local governments impose fees on new developments for prospective services, like water and sewer infrastructure. They must follow a lengthy process, including a written engineering analysis, a public comment period, and a formal resolution or ordinance, Hennessey said.

“There is an element of guesswork here, but it seems reasonable to forecast that the trend since 2017 has been to grant local government more authority to impose fees on developers to address the infrastructure costs associated with new development,” he said. “Limiting the ability of local government to increase property taxes may increase incentives to shift such costs to developers.”

Burgin, on the other hand, told The Assembly he doesn’t think local impact fee legislation would pass, and he said he thinks there are other ways to reduce property tax burdens, including  spurring industrial growth in the county.

“The county has grown at a disproportionate rate, and you can’t put it all on the backs of the taxpayer,” he said. “If you don’t have that economic engine of commercial investment, it’s hard for residential to pay the load.”

Lee, whose property value jumped by $100,000, has appealed her valuation and is waiting to resolve it. She wonders if she will be able to afford higher taxes after the new rate is established. She hopes any amenities the tax revenue buys, like parks, stores, and transportation improvements, will extend to her part of the county.

“As a citizen, I would be supportive of paying for things that we need while we’re growing, but if we don’t receive those things, it doesn’t really give us any incentive to pay more taxes,” she said. “I’m happy to pay my share, but it has to be fair.”