Who handles property assessments in Erie County?
Not the county. Erie County's 25 towns and 3 cities, Buffalo, Lackawanna, and Tonawanda, each assess property locally, and each has its own Board of Assessment Review.
Erie County Real Property Tax Services, reachable at 716-858-8333, is a support office. It can point you to records and contacts, but it does not set your value and cannot change it.
This is how nearly all of New York works: local assessors set values, and homeowners challenge them with Form RP-524, the statewide grievance complaint, filed with the local board.
So the first step of any Erie County appeal is knowing which town or city assesses your home, because that determines your deadline and where you file.
What is Buffalo's December filing window?
The City of Buffalo is the big exception to New York's spring grievance calendar, and its window is the next actionable deadline in Erie County. Buffalo homeowners file for the next roll between December 1 and December 31, every year.
That timing is an opportunity if you start now. The packet you build over the summer and fall is exactly what you submit in December.
Treat the evidence rule as the whole game. The board starts from the legal presumption that the city's number is correct, so a filing without documents is effectively a filing that loses.
Here is how the Buffalo cycle works:
- File your grievance so it is received by the Department of Assessment and Taxation, 101 City Hall, by 4:30 PM on December 31. Postmarks do not count.
- Include written evidence with your filing. In Buffalo it is mandatory, because the assessment is legally presumed correct until you prove otherwise.
- The Board of Assessment Review hears cases from January through mid February.
- Decisions are mailed around March 1.
When do Erie County towns hear grievances?
Most Erie County towns use the statewide default: Grievance Day on the fourth Tuesday in May. In 2026 that was May 26, which has passed, so the next town Grievance Day is in May 2027.
You file Form RP-524 with your local Board of Assessment Review, it must be received by Grievance Day, and filing is free. If the board denies you, the next step is Small Claims Assessment Review, a $30 informal hearing for owner-occupied one, two, and three family homes.
If you grieved this May and were denied, check your town's SCAR deadline now. Petitions are generally due within 30 days of the final roll filing, typically in July.
Reassessments are also reshuffling values around the county. Amherst completed a revaluation for 2025, and Cheektowaga mailed revaluation notices in March 2026 amid public pushback. If your value jumped in a reval, that is exactly the moment to check the math.
What does your assessed value actually mean?
Many New York towns assess at a fraction of market value, so the number on your roll may look nothing like a sale price. The tiny number is not your market value.
Divide your assessed value by your town's residential assessment ratio to get your implied market value. On Long Island, for instance, a Brookhaven home assessed at $2,400 implies about $500,000 of market value, and the same logic applies to fractional Erie County towns at their own ratios.
A small assessed number also is not a discount, because tax rates are set against those fractional values. What matters is whether your share is oversized.
Ratios are published annually, and your assessor's office can tell you the current figure for your town. Use the published number, not a guess.
Your appeal argument is that your implied market value is higher than what your home would sell for today. That is the claim your evidence needs to prove.
What evidence do you need?
Whether you file in Buffalo in December or in your town in May, the board wants documents, and in Buffalo the case fails without them.
State the value you want. Work from your comparable sales to a supportable market value and put that number in your filing, so the board has something concrete to grant. Build a packet with:
- Three to five recent sales of similar nearby homes that sold below your implied market value
- The ratio math written out, from assessed value to implied market value
- Photos and repair estimates for problems like a failing roof, wet basement, or dated interior
- A recent appraisal or your own recent purchase price if it was lower than the implied value
- Corrections to the assessor's property record, such as wrong square footage or room counts
How much money is at stake?
Erie County's median home value is $262,500 and the median annual tax bill is about $4,630, an effective rate near 1.76 percent. The Buffalo metro's 1.73 percent effective rate ranks third highest among US metros with more than a million people.
Compare that to the national picture: the average US single-family bill in 2025 was $4,427 at a 0.90 percent average rate. Erie homeowners pay an above-average bill on well below-average home values because the rate is nearly double the national norm.
On the median home, a 10 percent assessment reduction saves about $460 a year, and it repeats each year the lower value stands.
STAR, the school tax exemption for owner-occupied primary residences, is separate from appealing and is not affected by it. Exemption programs and appeals are complementary ways to cut the same bill.
Is appealing worth it in Erie County?
If your implied market value is clearly above what your home would sell for, yes. Filing with the board is free, the board can only lower or confirm your assessment, and even the SCAR follow-up costs just $30.
Recently reassessed communities like Amherst deserve a fresh look even if the old number never bothered you. A revaluation resets every value at once, and errors ride along with the reset.
Buffalo homeowners have the clearest near-term opportunity: the December 1 to 31 window is coming, and because written evidence is mandatory there, the packet you build this fall decides the case.
Homespring prepares the evidence, files on your local calendar, and sees the appeal through with no upfront fee, whether your deadline is this December in Buffalo or next May in the towns. Either way, the case is won or lost on the packet, so start it early.