Catoosa votes on a 1% sales tax that must be spent cutting property taxes. What it actually cuts is narrower than most people think, and the arithmetic is not the same for everybody.
Most people hear "sales tax to cut property taxes" and picture their whole tax bill getting smaller. That is not what this does.
This measure cuts the county and city portions of a property tax bill. It cannot touch the school portion, which is roughly three quarters of what a Catoosa homeowner pays. That is not a policy choice anyone made locally. Georgia law does not permit a school district to receive this tax.
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Start the interactive walkthrough →Why we are drawing this line so hard. The 1% FLOST is the only question voters decide in November. If it passes, that is the only thing that has actually been decided. Anything beyond it is a plan, and plans should be judged on their own merits when they are actually in front of you.
The 1% LOST you have been paying for years works the same way. In 2025 it removed 3.297 mills from the county's rate and 3.442 mills from Ringgold's. Without it, the county's rate would have been 7.938 instead of 4.641.
FLOST would be a second discount of the same kind, stacked on the same bill. State law even requires the bill itself to print the dollar amount you saved.
This is also why the county's rate can fall so far. The existing rollback already did most of the work, so there is not much rate left to remove.
| Taxing authority | Rate now | Estimated after | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Catoosa County | 4.641 | 0.45 | −90% |
| City of Ringgold | 2.445 | 0.46 | −81% |
| City of Fort Oglethorpe | 3.589 | 0.47 | −87% |
| Catoosa County Schools | 15.750 | 15.750 | no change |
County and Ringgold current rates confirmed from published digests. Fort Oglethorpe's current rate was last published in 2018 and is unconfirmed since; its after-FLOST figure now reconciles exactly against modeled 2025 revenue in Horner's own working file, so it is a real calculation rather than a guess, but still awaits certification from the city. School rate adopted July 2026.
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Used to fill in typical monthly spending for the whole household at that income level, not per person. Catoosa's median household income is $74,639. Bigger household? Adjust the amounts below up. Live alone? They're probably high for you.
Not taxed, so not listed: rent and mortgage, car purchases, prescriptions, services like doctor visits and haircuts and childcare, water and sewer.
| Household | Pays | Saves | Net |
|---|
Two patterns fall out of the arithmetic, and they are worth stating plainly because they are not opinions.
The more property you own relative to what you spend, the better you do. A sales tax is paid on consumption; the discount is delivered on property. Households that own a lot and spend modestly come out furthest ahead. Households that own nothing and spend all of their income come out behind.
As a share of income, the tax falls harder on lower earners. Taxable purchases are about 38% of spending for the lowest fifth of households and 29% for the highest. Measured against income, this penny costs roughly 0.80% at the bottom and 0.17% at the top. That is arithmetic, not an argument.
Every parcel in the county falls into a property class, and FLOST's dollar relief for a class is the millage reduction times that class's own share of the taxable digest. The county-level detail below is exact, straight from the digest breakdown. City-level relief is allocated pro-rata by each class's countywide share, which understates commercial (more commercial value sits inside city limits than outside) and overstates agricultural, so treat the city split as directional, not exact.
| Property class | Digest | Relief | % of relief |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homestead residential | $1,352,186,565 | $7,418,298 | 39.2% |
| Residential, non-homestead (rental, second homes) | $1,043,818,879 | $4,932,788 | 26.1% |
| Commercial | $737,357,053 | $3,484,537 | 18.4% |
| Industrial | $294,967,858 | $1,393,933 | 7.4% |
| Agricultural | $198,179,541 | $936,540 | 5.0% |
| Conservation / preferential | $62,813,178 | $296,837 | 1.6% |
| Utility | $61,821,541 | $292,151 | 1.5% |
| Motor vehicles | $16,637,320 | $78,623 | 0.4% |
| Mobile homes | $15,385,541 | $72,708 | 0.4% |
| Heavy-duty equipment | $2,468,035 | $11,663 | 0.1% |
| All non-homestead, combined | $2,433,687,774 | $11,500,909 | 60.8% |
Homesteads get 39% of the relief the penny buys. Everything else gets 61%. The public case for FLOST is relief for homeowners. The underlying digest numbers show most of the money goes to rentals, second homes, commercial, industrial, agricultural and utility property instead. Rental and second-home property alone gets $4.9 million a year, about two thirds of what every homestead in the county gets combined. Renters pay the extra penny at checkout. Their landlords are the ones who collect the property tax cut.
Add the relief column and it comes to $18,919,206, about $1.9 million more than the $17,031,819 the penny actually raises. That gap exists because the millage targets behind this table are sized against 2025 collections of $16,225,172 rather than the higher 2026 levy of $18,130,552. In plain terms, the penny does not stretch quite as far as this model assumes it does.
This is the FLOST stage only, which is what is actually on the November ballot. A separate proposal to exempt homeowners from school property taxes would shift this balance heavily back toward homeowners, but it is not funded by FLOST, is not on this ballot, and would need its own legislation and its own referendum in 2027.
1. Whether renters see anything. Roughly a quarter of Catoosa households rent. Research on property tax increases finds landlords pass 50 to 89 cents of each dollar to tenants over about five years. Evidence that cuts travel the same direction is much thinner, and rents rarely fall quickly. The sales tax reaches a renter the first time they buy groceries.
2. How much is paid by people who do not live here. Catoosa sits on the Tennessee line where the rate is 9.25%. Catoosa's taxable sales per person run 1.86 times neighboring Walker County's, and 1.48 times after adjusting for income, which suggests roughly a third of the base is drawn from outside. But Catoosa's sales per person is only 95% of the Georgia average, which cuts against the strongest versions of that claim. No county-specific study exists. Our estimate is a quarter to a third.
3. What a recession does. The discount is calculated from money actually collected the previous year. A bad sales year means a smaller discount the following year. Nothing in state law backfills it and no Georgia county has been through a downturn with a FLOST in place yet.
4. What happens in five years. Renewal is not automatic and it is not simply another vote. It takes a local Act of the General Assembly, a new agreement with both cities, and a new referendum. If any of the three does not happen, the penny ends and the property tax discount ends with it.
| County | Vote | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Thomas | March 2025, 88% yes | County rate 6.272 down to a tentative 2.024 mills, a 67% cut |
| Bulloch | November 2025, 72% yes | 11.35 down to 10.054 mills on six months of collections |
| Colquitt | November 2025, 81% yes | County projects more than a 50% reduction once fully phased in |
| Floyd | November 2025, 52% no | Rejected. Officials said voters did not understand the mechanism. |
| Paulding and White | November 2025 | Rejected |
Roughly 35 of Georgia's 159 counties are collecting one. Where it passed, the average yes share was about 71%. Catoosa's projected county-rate cut is larger than any of these peers, for the reason given above: the existing LOST rollback has already removed most of the rate, so a smaller dollar amount erases a larger share of what is left.
| October 5, 2026 | Last day to register |
|---|---|
| October 13 to 30 | Early in-person voting |
| November 3, 2026 | Election day, polls 7am to 7pm |
| January 1, 2027 | Collection begins if approved |
| 2028 | First bill likely to show the discount. Collection starts in 2027, but the rollback is calculated from the prior year's proceeds, so 2027's tax bill is issued before there is a prior year to base a discount on. *Based on our best reading. |
| December 31, 2031 | Tax ends unless renewed |