Your Enumclaw tax rate has 22 lines in it, and the city wrote one of them

The statement that comes in the mail in mid-February has one number people read. Behind it are twenty-two rates they do not. The number they read is the total. The twenty-two are the levies that made it, from nine taxing entities, and if you own a house inside the Enumclaw city limits, the King County Assessor has already sorted you into a group with a name: levy code 1175. Everyone in 1175 pays the same twenty-two rates. This is what they are, who set them, and why the one with the city's name on it is not the one to watch.

The rate

For 2026 the total for levy code 1175 is $9.58164 for every $1,000 of assessed value. That is down from $9.58768 last year, a decrease so small that the Assessor's own report on Enumclaw carries the note that "Enumclaw saw the least amount of decrease in levy rates." The median house in the city was assessed at $564,000 this year, up 5.8 percent, so the median bill is $5,404.04, up $293.81. Values went up; the rate held still; the bill went up.

Twenty-two lines make the rate. Here is the whole list, in dollars per thousand, so that nobody has to take this piece's word for the arithmetic: state schools, two parts, 1.46154 and 0.78805; King County's regular levy, 0.49743; five county lid lifts that voters approved separately, for fingerprint identification (0.02749, a renewed levy that was off the bill in 2025), parks (0.23290), veterans, seniors and human services (0.09998), Best Starts for Kids (0.17816) and crisis care centers (0.13814). Then the county's smaller districts: transportation (0.03832), the marine (ferry) district (0.00808), conservation futures (0.06168), the county hospital line (0.15126), county bonds (0.02298), the flood control district (0.09419), the Port of Seattle (0.09877) and Medic One (0.25098). Then the local three: the Enumclaw School District's three lines, an operations levy at 1.73274, a bond at 0.61794 and a technology levy at 0.27976; the City of Enumclaw, 1.06591; the King County Library System, 0.23534; and King County Fire District 28, 1.50000.

Add them and you get 9.58164. The city's budget puts it more plainly: six different taxing jurisdictions, it says, impose levies inside Enumclaw, though its own pie chart on the next page lists nine, and the city is one of them.

Half of it is school

On the median house, schools take $2,752.34, or 50.9 percent of the bill. The state's two lines account for $1,268.77 of that, and the local district's three lines for $1,483.57.

Each of the local three was a ballot measure. The operations levy now being collected passed on February 8, 2022 with 51.29 percent of the vote. The technology levy passed in 2020 with 56 percent. The bond, up to $68.5 million for the high school renovation and a new Black Diamond Elementary, passed on April 28, 2015 with 60.05 percent, four votes over the supermajority it needed. Together the three raise $22,059,357 this year: $14,531,064 for operations, $5,182,155 for the bond and $2,346,138 for technology.

Two of them are about to be replaced. On February 10, 2026 voters renewed the operations levy at an estimated $1.74 per thousand for 2027 through 2030 (54.46 percent yes) and the technology levy at 28 cents for 2027 through 2032 (54.14 percent), on a turnout of 36.48 percent. The district told the Courier-Herald that the operations levy is about 16 percent of a projected $95 million budget for 2027, and that a $600,000 home will pay roughly $1,044 a year toward it and $168 toward technology. This site's piece on enrollment count day covers the district's growth and its bond history.

The line the city writes

The city's line is 1.06591, which on the median house is $601.17, or 11.1 percent of the bill. The Courier-Herald's version, before the November vote, was that a house worth $600,000 in 2025 and $628,800 in 2026 would pay the city about $672 this year, up from $660.

The reason the city's line barely moves is a 1 percent limit that voters first approved in 2001 as Initiative 747 and the Legislature re-enacted in 2007 after the state Supreme Court struck the initiative down: no taxing district's total regular levy may grow more than 1 percent from one year to the next, plus whatever new construction adds. Enumclaw could legally levy up to $1.60 per thousand for general government, according to its own budget, but the 1 percent limit is on dollars, not on the rate, so as values rise the rate falls. For 2026 the mayor's budget message proposed taking the full 1 percent, which was worth about $32,000, with new construction adding roughly $26,000 more. The budget's revenue table books $3,226,226 in property tax for the year.

Districts that levy less than the law allows can bank the difference and use it later. Enumclaw had banked capacity. It spent the last of it, about $330,000, in the 2025 budget, alongside a new 6 percent tax on its stormwater utility and the elimination of three positions. The 2026 message says that losing the banked capacity will limit the city's ability to respond to inflation in the years ahead.

What the city actually runs on

Property tax is not the city's biggest source of money. Sales tax is. Of the $11.4 million in taxes the general fund expects this year, sales tax is $4.53 million, property tax $3.23 million and utility taxes $2.88 million. The utility taxes are the interesting line, because Enumclaw owns five of the utilities it taxes: water and wastewater (taxed at 9.5 percent), garbage (8 percent), natural gas and stormwater (6 percent). The taxes on the city's own utilities come to $1.81 million, and the utility funds also pay the general fund about $1.2 million in overhead, so the city's utility customers send about $3.0 million a year to the general fund, roughly what its property taxpayers do. The other big utility tax, 6 percent on electricity, raises $940,000 from electricity bills, which the budget notes have risen 61 percent since January 2021.

Then-Mayor Jan Molinaro's last budget message, dated October 2, 2025, draws the conclusion for you: "The impact of past, current and future utility rate increases, including electricity, will be far greater to Enumclaw residents than the impact of property tax levied by the City of Enumclaw." That is an outgoing mayor saying that the bill his own council votes on is not the one to worry about.

The county's thirteen

King County appears on the bill eleven times in its own name, thirteen counting Medic One and the flood district, and the Assessor's own page says the county gets about 20 percent of your property taxes. On the median Enumclaw house the county's own lines come to $821.42, or 15.2 percent; add Medic One and the flood district, which the county runs, and it is $1,016.10, or 18.8 percent.

Two of those lines come back to town in a way that is easy to miss. The parks levy voters renewed in August 2025 now sends the city up to $190,000 a year, up from about $145,000, all of it dedicated to running the Aquatic Center, the pool this site's Forward Thrust piece explains. And the Medic One levy, renewed for six years, pays for the paramedics who come with the fire engine, a county service and not a district one.

The fire district's own line, $1.50, is the third largest levy on the bill, behind the combined state school levy and the school district's operations levy, and it is the statutory maximum. On the median house it is $846, or 15.7 percent. It is set by five elected fire commissioners, not by the city, and the fire explainer covers the rest.

What is not on it

Two things a newcomer from Seattle or Kent might expect are missing. There is no county road levy inside the city; that line, $1.24607 this year, appears only on unincorporated parcels, which is why a house on the plateau outside the city limits in the same school and fire districts pays $9.76180 rather than $9.58164: it swaps the city's 1.06591 for the road district's 1.24607. And there is no Sound Transit line. Enumclaw is outside the transit district, so the 0.15866 that Auburn pays is a blank in this column. Black Diamond, for comparison, pays $9.68618, with a higher city rate and the Tahoma school levies instead of Enumclaw's.

If you are over 61

The bill has a second rate, $5.42895, for owners who qualify for the senior and disabled exemption. In King County for 2026 the income limit is $84,000, including Social Security, and the Assessor's page says you must be at least 62 in the first year you apply; there is a separate deferral program for households with 2025 income of $88,998 or less. The exemption removes the voter-approved lines, including the school district's three, and the second of the two state school levies, which is why the exempt rate is so much lower, and the deeper tiers, at $72,000 and $60,000 of income, also shave part of the house's value off the regular levies. Applications go through the Assessor's senior exemption portal or its exemptions line at 206-296-3920.

Statements go out in mid-February. The first half is due April 30 and the second October 31, and the day after each is when the monthly late charges start. To see your own levy code and assessed value, look up the parcel in the Assessor's eReal Property tool; the line rates for your code are in the Assessor's codes-and-levies report.

November

Nothing local. The sample ballot for November 3, 2026 contains no measure from the City of Enumclaw, the school district, the fire district or the library system, and no countywide proposition. Enumclaw voters will decide three statewide initiatives, one of which would repeal the state's 9.9 percent tax on individual income over $1 million, and none of which touches the property tax. Nothing on this bill is scheduled to change by vote. The two candidates are a school bond, which the district's own plan anticipates by 2027, and the fire district's station bond, which has no date; both need 60 percent.