Governor Josh Stein signed SB 889 into law, requiring counties that conducted 2026 property revaluations to continue using their prior values through fiscal year 2026-27. The new, higher values won't take effect until FY 2027-28, and once they do, they hold until the next full reappraisal cycle. What began in Issue 2 as a story about twelve counties facing steep valuation increases has, through a series of floor amendments and a companion rewrite of a related bill (SB 474), shrunk to roughly nine counties, and even that number is somewhat contested. During floor debate, one House sponsor summarized the situation with unusual candor: "I think it's still nine counties in it, maybe eight."

SB 889 Revaluation Freeze: Estimated FY27 Revenue Loss by County
Total estimated loss exceeds $9M across eight counties in FY27, per legislative fiscal notes. New (2026) values apply starting FY 2027-28. Source: Carolina Journal, fiscal notes on SB 889.

The fiscal notes attached to the bill put the total FY27 revenue loss at more than $9 million across eight affected counties, led by Guilford County at $4.3 million and Buncombe County at $2 million. Counties spent the weeks before the signing adopting their budgets under genuine legal uncertainty; the UNC School of Government's guidance, published through its Coates' Canons blog on June 9, instructed counties to budget on current law while the freeze legislation was still pending, meaning several counties built FY27 budgets around an assumption that could have changed at the last minute depending on how the legislature acted.

For property owners in the affected counties, the immediate effect is straightforward: one more year of paying taxes on the old, lower valuation, followed by the full 2026 revaluation landing all at once in FY28. That's the detail worth planning around now rather than in a year. A revaluation that would otherwise have phased in gradually as part of a normal reappraisal cycle instead lands as a single-year jump, and property owners who don't budget for that step-up in advance are going to experience it as a shock even though the underlying valuation change was public and known well before it takes effect.

For districts and municipal service districts operating on the ad valorem property tax base in these counties, the effect compounds: FY27 base growth that would normally have flowed through to district revenue is now frozen out entirely, and the FY28 catch-up will need to be communicated carefully to avoid property owners reading a deferred, previously-known change as a sudden, unexplained one.

Watch line: Whether any of the affected counties reopen their already-adopted FY27 budgets in response to the final bill language, and how each county's finance office chooses to communicate the FY28 double-step, frozen year followed immediately by revaluation, to owners who are likely to experience it as a single-year shock regardless of how much advance notice they received.

Duplicate check: Closes the thread from Issue 2's original twelve-county coverage and Issue 4's report on Senate passage. Read alongside RW-P-3 (the companion levy-cap constitutional amendment) and BO-F-6 (Asheville's unrelated but geographically adjacent sales-tax discovery).