Marion County Tax Statements Just Landed. Here's What To Do With Yours

The statement in your mailbox this month is not a formality you file away, it is the single number you need to go back and drop into your cash flow worksheet before you do anything else with your rental numbers this fall. Not last year's tax line sitting stale in your spreadsheet, not a rough guess based on a percent of assessed value, the actual dollar figure printed on this year's Marion County statement. That is the only tax number that belongs in a real cash flow calculation, and I tell every investor client the same thing every October.

Marion County mails somewhere around 124,000 of these statements every year, and they typically go out between October 15 and October 25, so if you own a duplex, fourplex, or small apartment building anywhere in Salem or Keizer, yours should be sitting in the mailbox or arriving any day now. If it has not shown up by November 1, the county's own guidance is to call the Tax Office directly rather than guess at the number (Marion County Tax Office payment information). That is worth doing. Waiting around and estimating instead is exactly the habit I am trying to talk you out of.

Know What Is Printed Before You Touch Your Worksheet

Before you update anything, read the statement itself, because it actually shows you three different numbers and only one of them matters for your cash flow math. The first is real market value, or RMV, which under Oregon law is supposed to represent what your property would sell for between a willing buyer and a willing seller as of January 1 of that year (Oregon Department of Revenue real property assessment guidance). The second is your Measure 50 assessed value, which is capped separately from RMV and usually grows more slowly. The third, and the only one you actually care about for this exercise, is the tax amount due at the bottom of the statement. That figure is the sum of every taxing district that touches your property, the county, the city, the school district, the community college, any local option levies or bonds voters approved. RMV and assessed value are useful if you ever want to challenge a valuation, but they are not what leaves your bank account, so do not confuse the two when you sit down to update your numbers.

Pull the Actual Tax Due, Not an Estimate

Find the total tax amount on the statement and write it down by itself, separate from insurance, separate from maintenance, separate from anything else. This is the mistake I see most often: an owner takes last year's tax figure and just bumps it up a few percent in their head because it is faster than digging out the actual mail. That shortcut quietly throws off your expense ratio and your cash flow, and you are making decisions on numbers that were never real to begin with. I said this same thing when I walked through rents and comps for buyers looking at small apartment buildings this fall, the only numbers that belong in the conversation are verified ones, not guesses dressed up to look like analysis (how I evaluate whether a rental property produces positive cash flow). Property tax is no different. You know it worked when the number in your worksheet matches the number printed on the statement, dollar for dollar, not a rounded version of it.

Update Your Expense Ratio With the Real Number

Once you have the actual annual tax figure, the update itself takes about five minutes. Here is the formula, in plain terms, the same one I run for investor clients every fall.

• Annual gross rent = monthly rent collected times 12
• Total annual operating expenses = new annual property tax plus everything else (insurance, maintenance, management fees, a vacancy reserve), not counting debt service
• Expense ratio = total annual operating expenses divided by annual gross rent
• Net operating income (NOI) = annual gross rent minus total annual operating expenses
• Monthly cash flow = (NOI minus annual mortgage debt service, if you have a loan) divided by 12

Say you own a fourplex in Keizer collecting $3,600 a month in gross rent, so $43,200 a year. Your new tax statement shows $6,400 due for the year. Your other operating expenses, insurance, a maintenance reserve, a management fee, and a vacancy allowance, add up to $9,800. Total annual operating expenses come to $16,200, which puts your expense ratio at 37.5 percent of gross rent. NOI is $27,000. If your annual mortgage payment (principal and interest) runs $18,000, your monthly cash flow lands at $750. That is the whole exercise. Swap in your own rent, your own statement figure, and your own other expenses, and you have a real answer instead of a rounded guess. If you are working through this for the first time on a property you are still deciding whether to buy, this is the same math I walk buyers through when they are sizing up their first duplex or fourplex (how to evaluate a multi-unit property before you buy it).

Compare This Year's Number Against Last Year's

Now line the two figures up side by side, last year's actual tax due against this year's actual tax due, and look at the percentage change. This is where the story usually gets told. For the 2025-26 cycle, Marion County's roll was certified on October 2 and statements went out October 14, and that particular year carried a new local option levy along with increases tied to the Salem-Keizer school bond and the Chemeketa Community College bond (Marion County 2025-26 tax roll certification notice). That is a real example of how a statement can move meaningfully in a single cycle for reasons that have nothing to do with your property's condition, a levy passed at the ballot box shows up on your bill the next fall regardless. I cannot tell you today what this year's certified roll looks like or when the exact 2026-27 mail date falls, that has not been published yet as I write this, so treat any number you see quoted for the current cycle as unconfirmed until your own statement or the county's own notice tells you otherwise.

Decide What To Do If the Number Moved the Wrong Way

If your expense ratio crept up more than you expected, do not panic and do not assume you have a bad property, run the comparison first. Check whether the increase is proportional to what other owners in Salem or Keizer are seeing, or whether it looks specific to your parcel, which sometimes signals a valuation worth questioning with the assessor's office directly. Either way, the fix is never to fudge next year's projection to make the deal look better on paper, it is to either raise rents within the legal limit (Oregon's maximum allowable increase for multifamily tenants sits at 9.5 percent for 2026, with next year's figure due out in October), trim an operating expense you actually control, or accept a thinner margin going into next year with your eyes open. This is also exactly the kind of shift that changes whether a fixer-upper purchase still pencils the way you thought it would when you first ran the numbers (calculating the true carrying costs on a property before you commit).

Every Fall I Run This Same Exercise With My Investor Clients

This is not a once and done chore. Every October when these statements start hitting mailboxes across Salem and Keizer, I sit down with investor clients and update their worksheets with them, line by line, the same steps above. Most owners are running a full time job, a family, and a rental on the side, and going back to rebuild a cash flow model every year is easy to let slide. I would rather catch a tax increase in October than have a client discover it in March when the numbers just do not add up anymore.

Questions people ask

How do you go about finding the market rent for certain properties?

I pull verified comps of what similar units are actually renting for right now in Salem and Keizer, not a rounded average, and I look at what is currently listed and what has recently leased in the same neighborhood and unit type. Rent, just like your tax figure, only means something if it is a real number you can point to, not a guess.

What are the benefits of buying multifamily and investment property?

I tell every new investor the same five, not in any particular order: monthly cash flow, long term appreciation, equity growth from tenants helping pay down your mortgage, the tax advantages that come with deductions and depreciation, and the diversification of building wealth outside a single asset. Different buyers care about different ones, and that is fine, the point is the property is working for you in more than one way at once.

If your statement just landed and you want a second set of eyes on what it does to your numbers, or you are trying to decide whether a property you are eyeing still cash flows once you drop the real tax figure in, bring me the statement and your current rent roll and we will run it together.

Jordan Sparks

Principal Broker, Sparks Property Group at SMI Real Estate. Specializing in Multifamily and Investment property in Salem, Keizer, and the Willamette Valley. Licensed in Oregon, #200610098.

jordan@smire.com · 541.646.0650

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