Seven charts built from the county's own budgets and payment records. Budget figures are marked (B) and are projections, not money already spent.
A rate is what you pay per $100 of assessed value. Debt service is what the county pays each year on money it has already borrowed. (B) marks a budgeted figure rather than an actual. Every chart names its source underneath, and carries a confidence label.
Dollars per $100 of assessed value, 2025
Change from 2025 to 2026. The Board set $0.89 as a ceiling in January 2026 — it can go lower, not higher. It hasn't moved. Your assessment has.
Some neighborhoods saw a double-digit increase, not just the 4.65% average. If your assessment rose and the rate held, your bill rose with it — that is a real increase in what you pay, even though no one voted to raise the rate. County officials are correct that they "didn't raise the rate." That is a different statement from "your taxes didn't go up."
Principal and interest, $ millions. Note 2024.
The 2024 figure is unexplained. The county's own projection for that year was $101.5M. It sits between $98.0M the year before and $114.8M the year after. We have asked what happened and will publish the answer here.
Cumulative growth since 2019. County spending has risen almost three times as fast as prices.
Two separate measures over the same years, shown on their own scales
Read this carefully. These are two separate measures and we are not claiming one caused the other. Percentile is relative — Chesterfield can improve in absolute terms and still fall in rank if other divisions improve faster. There is no 2020 data because of COVID, and the pandemic sits in the middle of the decline. What we are asking is for the county to explain the trend, not asserting we already know why.
$ millions, 2019–2026
Roughly 80% of this revenue is residential, and has been for two decades. If economic development were shifting the burden commercial, this is where it would show.
Total county spending ÷ population
A 54% increase per resident across seven years — well ahead of both inflation and population growth over the same period.
$ millions, General Fund, excludes Education
Software spending rises 43% in a single year to 2026. Three departments send 80–100% of their outside spend to one vendor apiece.
2024 total spending, $ millions. The three largest General Fund departments.
Annual increase in residential assessed value, county-wide
The county revises the prior year's base upward before calculating each new increase, which makes every year's number look smaller than it was. 2024 is the extreme case — the county reported 8.88%, the real increase was 15.35%. It also means these figures cannot be chained together. String the county's own five annual numbers end to end and you arrive at 44.2%, when residential assessed value actually rose 58.8% between 2021 and 2026. We are not saying any single year's figure is wrong. We are saying they cannot be added up, and a resident who tries will land roughly 14 points short of what happened to their own assessment.