How to find out if a Kansas City property is getting a tax abatement

Kansas City grants property-tax breaks under half a dozen state laws, and its open-data portal keeps a map for five of the programs. None of the five has changed since August 2021.

The county knows. Jackson County’s assessor records every abatement as a code on the parcel, and its public Parcel Viewer prints that code in a line most people scroll past.

The thirty-second version

• Open Jackson County’s Parcel Viewer and search the address.
• Read the Exemption line. A code that starts with D, such as D05, D06, D03 or D09, is an abatement or a tax-increment marker. The decoder is below.
• Compare Total Assessed Value with Total Taxable Value. On an abated property, taxable is lower.
• Find the plan in the City Council’s legislation.
• Skip the city’s abatement maps. They stopped in 2021, and the 353 map stops a decade before that.

How to look it up in a browser

1. Open jcgis.jacksongov.org/parcelviewer.
2. Type the address in the search box and pick the property from the list.
3. In the panel that opens, under Basic Information, find Exemption. Blank means no exemption or abatement is recorded.
4. Scroll to Property Values. The viewer shows six years. Where Total Taxable Value is lower than Total Assessed Value, part of the property’s value is not being taxed.
5. Look up the code in the table below.
6. To find which plan granted it, open kansascity.legistar.com and search for 353, Planned Industrial Expansion, or Urban Renewal, with a street near the property. Plan titles describe their areas by the streets around them.

We tested the lookup on September 25, 2026 through the county service the viewer draws on. An office building coded D06 showed an assessed value of $692,160 for 2026 and a taxable value of $346,080, exactly half, as the county’s own description of D06 says it should be.

The viewer covers Jackson County only. Kansas City also reaches into Clay and Platte counties, which keep their own records. Clay County’s parcel search is at gisweb.claycountymo.gov/ps. We did not verify whether either county shows abatement codes.

What the codes mean

The viewer prints the code alone. The words live in the county’s parcel data, and these are its own descriptions:

Codes beginning with E are ordinary exemptions: E02 is city-owned, E07 a school, E09 religious property. A parcel can carry more than one code, separated by a bar.

One gap in the table. The county has no separate code for Kansas City’s planned industrial expansion areas, known as PIEA. Those parcels appear to be recorded under the 353 codes. Of the Kansas City parcels carrying a 353 code on the county’s roll, 2,373 sit inside the city’s PIEA map and 1,114 inside its 353 map. The two maps overlap, and 165 sit inside both.

# Count every Jackson County parcel carrying each exemption or abatement code
curl -s -G 'https://jcgis.jacksongov.org/arcgis/rest/services/ParcelViewer/ParcelsAscendRelate/MapServer/2/query' --data-urlencode "where=Exemption IS NOT NULL" --data-urlencode 'outStatistics=[{"statisticType":"count","onStatisticField":"parcel_number","outStatisticFieldName":"n"}]' --data-urlencode "groupByFieldsForStatistics=Exemption" --data-urlencode "f=json"

The city’s maps stopped in 2021

The portal publishes five layers under the abatement programs: mgdr-zk3a for Chapter 353, cccz-4w9q for PIEA, 2nbc-eaxr for enterprise zones, gvjh-dbi6 for urban renewal, and gc58-xcx9 for neighborhood improvement districts. Socrata, the platform the portal runs on, records their rows as last written between August 15 and August 22, 2021. All five were created on the same day in April 2019.

The 353 map was already old when it went up. It holds 80 development plans. The newest ordinance number on it is 110617, the 39th and State Line plan, approved in September 2011. The Council’s legislation records at least five 353 plans approved since, none of them on the map:

The PIEA map’s newest plans are from 2020. The Council has approved at least six PIEA plans that are not on it, from the Offices at Overlook in December 2020 to 25 Campbell in February 2026. One of them, the KCI Intermodal plan passed October 26, 2023, covers about 4,063 acres and authorizes tax abatement.

# Check when the city's 353 abatement map last changed
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/mgdr-zk3a.json' | python3 -c "import json,sys,datetime as d; m=json.load(sys.stdin); print(d.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(m['rowsUpdatedAt']))"

# List the 353 development plans the Council has passed since 2011
curl -s -G 'https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/kansascity/matters' --data-urlencode "\$filter=substringof('353 Development Plan',MatterTitle) and MatterIntroDate ge datetime'2011-01-01'" --data-urlencode '$select=MatterFile,MatterPassedDate,MatterStatusName,MatterTitle'

Hundreds of Westside houses are abated, and no city map shows it

We took every Kansas City parcel the county’s roll codes as a 353 abatement and placed each one on the city’s 353 and PIEA maps. 379 fall inside neither.

Most are in one place: 333 are in ZIP code 64108, west of Broadway, and 283 of those are single-family houses. That fits the Westside Owner-Occupant Residential Property plan, ordinance 220806, which the Council passed as amended on September 29, 2022. Its title describes Census Tract 153, bounded by I-670 and W. 25th Street on the north, Broadway, Southwest Boulevard, and Summit Street on the east, W. 31st Street on the south, and the railroad tracks and the state line on the west, and it authorizes “certain tax abatements within the plan area.”

That plan passed thirteen months after the city’s maps stopped. A Westside homeowner checking the city’s portal would find no 353 area over the house. The county’s roll says there is one, and the county is who sends the tax bill.

The other 46 are scattered, including 26 houses in one subdivision in ZIP code 64127, and several apartment and industrial buildings.

We didn’t have the plan’s boundary as a map, so we can’t say every one of the 333 is inside it. The count comes from the county’s parcel service, which carries the 2024 roll. We then looked up all 379 in the Parcel Viewer, which shows 2026 values, on September 25: 370 still carry a 353 code there. Both figures will change as the roll does.

The urban renewal map calls a live plan expired

The urban renewal file has a status column: Active, Expired, or Terminated. It lists the Grand Avenue South Urban Renewal Area as Expired. The Council approved a third amendment to that plan on June 25, 2020, “for the purpose of extending its duration to December 31, 2027.” The file last changed almost fourteen months later and still says Expired.

The map also lacks the East Kansas City Urban Renewal Plan, which the Council approved on June 29, 2023. It covers the area bounded by Cliff Drive on the north, I-435 on the east, Bannister Road on the south, and Troost Avenue on the west. On the county’s roll, 188 Kansas City parcels coded D03, the Chapter 99 abatement urban renewal uses, fall outside every area on the city’s urban renewal map. At least 160 of them are east of Troost, between that plan’s northern and southern edges.

# Show the status the city's urban renewal map gives Grand Avenue South
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/resource/gvjh-dbi6.json?$select=name,ordnum,status&$where=name%20like%20%27Grand%20Avenue%20South%25%27'

What the other two maps are

The enterprise zone file holds three zones and no dates. The neighborhood improvement district file holds seven districts, the newest from 2009. Strictly speaking, a neighborhood improvement district isn’t an abatement at all. It’s a special assessment that adds to a property’s taxes to pay back the cost of public improvements.

What would fix it

The five maps could be republished, or they could say they stopped in 2021 and send readers to the county’s Parcel Viewer. Until then, the county’s code is the only public record that answers the question for a single property. If you rent and want to know whether your building is abated, look up the building’s address rather than your unit’s.