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Methodology and sources

Last updated October 12, 2026

Tax sale information goes stale fast and is often repeated second-hand: seminar slides quote a rate that changed years ago, aggregator sites copy each other's auction dates, and a "two-year redemption period" turns out to start on a date nobody mentions. This page explains where each kind of information on TaxLien.io comes from, how it is checked, and where its limits are.

1. State rules: the statute first

Every one of the 51 state pages is written from the statute itself — the interest rate or redemption premium, the redemption period, how the auction is bid, and what happens to money left over after the debt is paid. We read the text on the legislature's own website where it is available, and on a public mirror such as Justia or FindLaw when it is not. Each claim on a state page carries its section number, for example "§ 197.432(6)" in Florida or "§ 48-4-42(a)" in Georgia, and the statutes are listed at the bottom of the page.

The statute is then checked against the office that runs the sale — the county treasurer, tax collector, sheriff or a state agency such as Arkansas's Commissioner of State Lands — because practice and statute do not always match. When they disagree, the page says so instead of choosing one silently. Court decisions are cited where they changed the rules, such as Tyler v. Hennepin County, 598 U.S. 631 (2023), on surplus proceeds, and Jones v. Flowers, 547 U.S. 220 (2006), on notice to owners.

2. Sale dates: the county's own notice

Each entry in the auction calendar comes from the county's website, its published legal notice or the platform the county uses to run the sale, and links to that source. Each row also shows the date we last checked it. Dates that appear only on aggregator or subscription sites are not added until an official source confirms them; on October 2, 2026, entries that could not be confirmed that way were removed rather than kept as estimates. Once a sale has taken place it is marked as held, and page titles say so, so a past date is never presented as upcoming.

Counties postpone and cancel sales, sometimes the week before. A date on this site is a starting point for your own check with the county, not a guarantee.

3. County figures: U.S. Census Bureau data

County pages include population and housing figures generated by script from two public Census Bureau products:

Survey estimates come with margins of error. Any figure whose coefficient of variation is above 30% is dropped instead of shown, which is why some smaller counties have fewer figures than others. The sentences that interpret these numbers follow fixed rules — above or below the state median, for instance — and the source tables are named under every block.

4. Written county guides

For 37 counties so far, we have written a guide to that county's sale: when and where it is held, how to register, deposit and pay, what the buyer receives, and the mistakes that cost bidders money there. Each guide lists its sources — the county's sale terms, the state statute, the official notice — and the date it was checked. New guides are added one county at a time, starting with the counties people search for and those with a sale coming up.

5. What we keep out of search results

Some pages are built mostly from data: a county page without a written guide, or a table comparing two states side by side. They are useful when you arrive from the calendar or a state page, but on their own they mostly repeat what other pages already say. Unless they had already appeared in Google search results, those pages carry a noindex tag, are left out of the sitemap and carry no ads. A county page moves into search results when its written guide is published.

6. Calculators and estimates

The yield calculator and the redemption tracker apply the statutory rule of each state they support — for example Florida's 5% minimum on redeemed certificates (§ 197.472(2)) or Iowa's 2% a month (§ 447.1). The calculator lists the states it does not support, with the reason — usually a return that depends on facts it cannot know — instead of guessing. The results are estimates of what the statute allows, not predictions of what you will earn: bid-down auctions, early redemptions and county fees change the real figure.

7. What this site does not do

Found an error?

Send it through the contact page with the page address and the source that shows the correct information. How corrections are handled is described in the editorial policy.