If you opened a mailer last week showing a new tentative assessed value on the home you own in Cicero, Clay, Manlius, DeWitt or any other town in Onondaga County, you have exactly two weeks and a deadline that will not move. Tuesday, May 26, 2026 is Grievance Day, the single date set in New York Real Property Tax Law for any property owner to file a complaint on a town’s tentative assessment roll. The form is RP-524. The hearing is in front of the town’s Board of Assessment Review. If you miss it, your only remaining options are a small-claims hearing through the state, an Article 7 lawsuit, or waiting twelve months for next year.
Grievance Day is fixed in state law as the fourth Tuesday in May for most New York towns. In Onondaga County that date is May 26, 2026. Every town in the county published its tentative assessment roll on May 1, 2026. Tentative rolls are posted on the Onondaga County Real Property Tax Services website at onondaga.gov/rpts/assessment-rolls and on each town’s individual assessor page. Towns currently listed in the county system include Camillus, Cicero, Clay, DeWitt, Elbridge, Fabius, Geddes, LaFayette, Lysander, Manlius, Marcellus, Onondaga, Otisco, Pompey, Salina, Skaneateles, Spafford, Tully and Van Buren.
The form is the same across the state. Form RP-524, Complaint on Real Property Assessment, is a four-page state Department of Taxation and Finance form. You can download it from tax.ny.gov. You list the parcel, the current assessment, the value you believe the property should be at, and the basis for the claim. The four valid grounds under state law are unequal assessment (your property is assessed at a higher percentage of full value than other comparable properties on the same roll), excessive assessment (the assessed value exceeds full market value, or you were denied an exemption you qualify for, or the wrong transitional figure was used), unlawful assessment (the property is exempt or outside the taxing jurisdiction), and misclassification (the property class is wrong, which matters in special assessing units).
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The deadline to file the RP-524 with the assessor or the Board of Assessment Review is Grievance Day itself in most Onondaga County towns. Filing by mail is allowed only if the form is physically received by the BAR no later than May 26. A few towns require advance filing several business days before the hearing. The Town of Cicero, for example, opened its BAR hearing schedule from noon to 2 p.m. and again from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Grievance Day during the 2025 cycle, and the 2026 schedule mirrors that pattern. The Town of Manlius posts its hearing schedule on the townofmanlius.gov assessment page. Every town assessor publishes a counter intake schedule for the week leading up to Grievance Day. Phone-only filings are not allowed.
The decision the BAR can make at a Grievance Day hearing is bounded. The board can deny the complaint and let the tentative assessment stand. It can grant the complaint in full and reduce the assessment to the requested value. It can grant the complaint in part and reduce the assessment to some figure between the tentative value and the property owner’s claim. The BAR’s written decision arrives by mail within roughly four weeks. The final assessment roll for every Onondaga County town is filed on July 1, 2026. That roll is what school districts use to calculate September tax bills and what the county uses for January town and county bills.
If the BAR rules against the homeowner, the next step is Small Claims Assessment Review or SCAR. SCAR is open only to owner-occupied one, two, or three family residences with no commercial use. The filing fee is $30. The deadline is 30 days from the date the final assessment roll is filed, which means by August 1, 2026 for any Onondaga County town that files on July 1. A SCAR hearing is informal, held in Supreme Court chambers, and the hearing officer can reduce but not raise the assessment. Commercial property owners and homeowners denied SCAR eligibility go to Article 7 of the Real Property Tax Law, which is a formal lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court, with the same 30-day window from the filing of the final roll.
Why this matters in 2026 is the math on the tax bill itself. The Onondaga County Legislature approved County Executive Ryan McMahon’s 2026 budget at $1.56 billion last fall. The county tax rate inside that budget is $2.93 per $1,000 of assessed value, an 11 percent rate cut compared with the 2025 figure and a 42 percent cut compared with 2018. On paper that is one of the lowest county rates in the state. The math on what an individual homeowner owes does not move automatically with that rate cut, because rate is only one half of the equation. The other half is the assessed value the town’s assessor placed on the property in the May 1 tentative roll.
Onondaga County operates on a roll that mixes towns at different assessment ratios. Some Onondaga County towns assess at 100 percent of full market value. Others assess at a lower percentage. The equalization rate, set by the State Board of Real Property Services and published by the county RPTS office, is the conversion factor. An equalization rate of 100.00 means the town is assessing at full value. A rate of 75.00 means assessments are running at three quarters of full market value, and any cross-town comparison uses the equalization factor to make properties apples to apples. The equalization rate matters most for school district levies, which span multiple towns. The Onondaga County RPTS publishes equalization rates and town and county tax rates in its Rate Books at onondaga.gov/rpts/county-town-tax-rates.
The actual grievance process is more straightforward than the legal architecture around it. Most homeowners who file an RP-524 do it themselves. The required evidence is a recent appraisal or, at a lower cost, a list of three to five recent sales of comparable homes in the same town or school district. The town assessor’s office is required by state law to provide property cards and the basis for the assessed value on request, and most Onondaga County towns make those property cards available through the Image Mate Online system at ocfintax.ongov.net/Imate, which is the public-facing version of the same database the assessor uses.
The case for filing is not academic. A $300,000 home in a town with a 2.5 percent combined school, county and town tax burden owes roughly $7,500 a year in property tax. A 10 percent reduction in assessed value, granted by the BAR, saves $750 a year for the life of that assessment cycle. The catch is that the assessor can reassess the property the following year if a sale or a renovation justifies it. In a town that does a full reval every few years, a one-time BAR reduction may not survive a full neighborhood-wide review.
The forms also create a small industry of contractors. Several New York tax-grievance firms operate on a contingent fee model, charging 40 to 50 percent of the first year’s tax savings if they win and nothing if they lose. The firm Realty Tax Challenge, Bfctaxgrievance, and similar operations publish New York property tax grievance filing deadline calendars and handle the BAR appearance for the homeowner. There is no requirement to hire one. A homeowner walking into the BAR meeting with three Zillow-confirmed comparable sales and an RP-524 in hand has the same standing.
One detail that catches first-time filers off guard is the difference between a tax bill and an assessment. The BAR is empowered only to adjust the assessed value. It cannot lower the tax rate. A homeowner who is angry at a 5 percent school district tax-levy increase has a remedy at the school district budget vote in May, not at Grievance Day. A homeowner who believes the assessor has placed too high a market value on the property has a remedy on Grievance Day, and only on Grievance Day, until next May.
The single best argument for filing this year is mechanical. Tentative rolls in many Onondaga County towns were updated this spring based on sales data through late 2025. The Greater Syracuse housing market peaked in 2024 with a median sale price around $200,000 and held those levels through 2025. Towns that did a partial revaluation may have pushed individual home values above where current comparable sales support them. The homeowner does not need the assessor to be wrong on average. The homeowner only needs the assessor to be wrong on this particular house, and the BAR fix is local to that parcel.
If you intend to file, the practical to-do list for this week is short. Open the tentative roll for your town at onondaga.gov/rpts or on the town’s own assessor page. Pull the property card from Image Mate. Search the town or school district for three comparable sales from late 2024 through 2025. Print the RP-524 from tax.ny.gov and complete pages one through four. Either hand-deliver the form to the town assessor before May 26, or appear in person at the BAR session that day. Bring two paper copies. The Board of Assessment Review keeps one, the assessor keeps one, the homeowner keeps the third with a date stamp. That is the record that proves the filing was timely if a later appeal is needed.
Reporting by Matt Keenan for CNY Signal. Sources: New York State Real Property Tax Law and grievance procedures published at tax.ny.gov/pit/property/contest/grievproced.htm; Onondaga County Department of Real Property Tax Services at onondaga.gov/rpts; Onondaga County 2026 adopted budget; Form RP-524 from NYS Department of Taxation and Finance; individual Onondaga County town assessor pages including Onondaga, Manlius, Cicero, Skaneateles and the Image Mate Online property search at ocfintax.ongov.net/Imate.
