Across the eight-county Minneapolis metro, owners filed 21% fewer Tax Court petitions for the 25pay26 cycle — assessment year 2025, payable in 2026. Among commercial, industrial, and apartment property, petition volume fell 28%. What follows is the breakdown: which property types pulled back, what the sales market and assessments did over the same period, and what the petitions that settled produced.
The filing window for the 25pay26 tax year closed April 30, 2026. Across the eight metro counties — Hennepin, Ramsey, Anoka, Dakota, Washington, Scott, Carver, and Chisago — owners filed 3,227 Tax Court petitions on all property types, down 21% from 4,062 the year before. This piece covers commercial, industrial, and apartment (CIA) property specifically, where petition volume fell further: 2,538 cases, down 28% from 3,512, with about $14 billion less in market value under petition. Unless a chart says otherwise, every figure that follows is for CIA property.
A petition is an annual filing — each January 2 assessment date is its own legal event — so the count resets every year as a read on how many owners contested their assessment. For 25pay26, far fewer did. The decline breaks down cleanly by property type, and it tracks what the sales market and the settled petitions did over the same period.
Among the petitions that reached a settlement, the reduction held steady. The median stipulated reduction ran 9.0%, 9.6%, 12.1%, 11.4%, and 9.1% across the last five cycles, and 93% of settled parcels received some reduction.
Petitions down 28% in a year — and among those that settled, the reduction held right where it has been for five years running.
The decline varied by property type. Owners petitioned 44% fewer apartment parcels, against 26% fewer industrial and 18% fewer commercial. Apartment assessments had also been reduced the year before — median apartment EMV fell 4.65% heading into 24pay25, then held flat for 25pay26.
Two things moved alongside the petition count. First, commercial sales volume thinned. Second, assessments closed the distance to sale prices. The Minnesota Department of Revenue's sales-ratio framework — assessed value divided by sale price, where 100% means assessments sit exactly at market — tracks the second. For arm's-length CIA sales across the metro, that ratio fell to 0.84 in 2022, when post-COVID prices outran lagging assessments. Assessors raised values through the 23pay24 and 24pay25 rolls, and by 2024–2025 the ratio had settled back to 0.91.
These are market-wide filing counts. They describe the season, not any single assessment. Every EMV is the county's market-value conclusion for one parcel on January 2, and whether it overstates that parcel's value is a question answered by that parcel's own sales, income, and comparable evidence — not by how many other owners filed. The next window, for the 26pay27 tax year, closes April 30, 2027.
| County | 24pay25 | 25pay26 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hennepin | 1,975 | 1,588 | −19.6% |
| Ramsey | 884 | 611 | −30.9% |
| Anoka | 418 | 314 | −24.9% |
| Dakota | 308 | 300 | −2.6% |
| Washington | 211 | 182 | −13.7% |
| Scott | 179 | 167 | −6.7% |
| Carver | 63 | 51 | −19.0% |
| Chisago | 24 | 14 | −41.7% |
| Metro total | 4,062 | 3,227 | −20.6% |