# How to get tax assessor data through an API

> Your options for programmatic access to US county tax assessor data: county bulk downloads, scraping, and normalized APIs, with what each costs in time and money, and a working example.

Source: https://www.parceled.ai/guides/tax-assessor-data-api  
Publisher: Parceled (https://www.parceled.ai)  
Updated: 2026-10-06

There are three ways to get tax assessor data into software: download each county's roll yourself (free but slow, inconsistent and county by county), scrape county websites (fragile and often against terms), or use a normalized property data API that has already collected and standardized thousands of counties. Parceled is one such API: one key returns assessor values, year built, building size, owners and sales for any covered US parcel at 2 credits ($0.02) per record.

## What are the options?

| Approach | Good for | Drawbacks |
| --- | --- | --- |
| County downloads | One or two counties, research | Thousands of formats; manual refreshes; some counties charge or do not publish |
| Scraping county sites | Gaps no vendor covers | Breaks when sites change; rate limits; terms of use |
| Normalized API (Parceled and others) | Apps, agents, multi-county work | Per-record cost; coverage varies by county |
| Enterprise bulk licenses | Full national files on premises | Five- to six-figure contracts |

## Example: assessor record for a coordinate

```bash
curl 'https://www.parceled.ai/api/v1/parcels?lat=32.7767&lng=-96.7970&include=parcel,taxAssessor' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer prc_live_...'
```

Or let an AI agent do it: connect the [Parceled MCP server](https://www.parceled.ai/install) and ask "what year was the house at this address built and what is it assessed at?".

## How should I evaluate an assessor data API?

- **Coverage you need**, county by county, not a national headline number. Parceled publishes [coverage by county](https://www.parceled.ai/coverage).
- **Field fill rates.** Year built and building area are not published by every county.
- **Freshness** of each county's roll.
- **Pricing model.** Per record, per field, or flat subscription; whether empty results are billed.
- **Bulk filtering.** Can you search by attributes, or only fetch one address at a time?

## Frequently asked questions

### Is there a free tax assessor API?

A few counties offer free APIs for their own data. For multi-county access, Parceled's free tier includes 100 calls a month.