Tools · September 30, 2026

What a bond measure costs on the kitchen table

By Ryan Standley, Publisher / Authorized Officer, Record of Sale, LLC

A school addition or a road bond is a pile of principal, a term, and either an interest rate or a millage add-on. This page turns that pile into a rough annual debt service and a dollar figure per household.

A bond question rarely shows up as a monthly number. It shows up as a purpose, a principal, and a promise that the roof will leak less or the road will stop eating tires. The purpose can be worthy. The principal is still a loan. Somebody pays the loan back, with interest, out of taxes or out of rates, for a term that may outlast the people who voted yes. The kitchen table is where that term becomes a number next to the grocery list. This page is a way to put the number there without pretending the number is the official levy.

There are two different scraps of paper people bring home from a bond campaign. One scrap says the district will borrow so many dollars for so many years at a rate the advisor sketched. The other scrap says the measure would add so many mills. Those scraps do not answer the same question. The first one can be turned into a level annual payment, the way a fixed-rate loan has a payment. The second one can be turned into dollars only if you also know the taxable value the mills would sit on. This calculator lets you pick a path. It labels both paths as a debt-service illustration. It is not the bond counsel’s schedule, not the ballot, and not the tax bill that arrives after the sale.

The filled-in example is a made-up school addition, not a district you can drive to. Principal $48,000,000.00. Term 20 years. Interest 4.25 percent a year. 18,500 households. Taxable assessed value across those households: $4,200,000,000.00. On the interest-rate path, the level annual payment is $3,610,552.07. That is $195.16 a year per household, or $16.26 a month if you divide the household share by twelve. On each $100,000 of that taxable base, the same annual payment is $85.97. If you ignore the interest rate and instead type a millage add-on of 0.85 mills against the same base, the illustrated levy is $3,570,000.00 a year, $192.97 per household, and $85.00 per $100,000. Those two answers are not supposed to match. They are two ways of pricing a story. Change the boxes until the story is the one on your flyer.

Keep a pencil next to the laptop. Write down which path you used. If you tell a neighbor “it’s about twenty dollars a month,” say whether you mean the amortized payment split by households, or a millage split by households. Neighbors repeat the number and drop the path. The path is the part that keeps the number honest. A household figure also hides the fact that houses are not the same size. The per-$100,000 line is there so a person in a small house and a person in a large house are not handed the same myth. Neither line is your bill. Both lines are better than a principal with no division at all.

The ballot asks you to borrow, not to feel

When a school board or a county commission sends a bond to the voters, it is asking for permission to borrow. The proceeds build or buy something: classrooms, a bridge, a water plant, a jail. The something is the reason. The borrowing is the instrument. Campaigns talk about the reason because the reason is visible. The instrument is a stack of principal, a repayment term, a pledge of taxes or revenues, and a debt-service schedule that bond buyers actually read. You are allowed to care about the classrooms and still ask what the schedule costs. Caring about both is not cynicism. It is how a kitchen works. You can want the repair and still look at the payment before you sign.

Principal is the amount borrowed, not the amount of construction. Issuance costs, a reserve fund, and capitalized interest can mean the building receives less than the headline principal. The other direction happens too: a project budget can be larger than the bond if cash on hand or a state match fills the gap. This page uses the principal you type as the amount being repaid. If your flyer says “$48 million project” and the bond is $40 million, type the bond. If the flyer is vague, type what the resolution says. Resolutions are dull. Dull is where the principal lives. A rendering of a gym does not have a coupon rate.

Term is how long the repayments run. A 20-year term and a 30-year term on the same principal are different promises. The longer term usually lowers the annual payment and raises the total interest. This page shows the annual payment, not the lifetime interest, because the kitchen question is usually “what does this add each year?” You can multiply the annual payment by the term yourself if you want the sum of payments. That sum includes paying the principal back. It is not all interest. Do not let a flyer call the sum of payments “the cost of interest” unless someone has actually split the interest out. This calculator does not split it out. It gives you the level annual figure so the split, if you want it, has a starting point.

A level payment, said once, without a seminar

If the interest rate is above zero, the annual figure is a standard loan payment. You pretend the district pays once a year, at the end of the year, the same amount every year, for the number of years in the box. Part of each payment is interest. Part is principal. Early on, more of it is interest. Later, more of it is principal. The annual amount stays flat. That flat amount is what people mean by level debt service when they are speaking loosely. The formula is the ordinary one: principal times the rate times (1 plus the rate) to the term, divided by (1 plus the rate) to the term, minus one. You do not need to memorize it. You need to know what it assumes, because the assumptions are where a rough number parts company with a sale.

Real school bonds and municipal bonds often pay interest twice a year, and they often pay principal once a year in chunks that a schedule sets, not in a perfect household mortgage shape. A debt-service table can be lumpy. A year with a big principal maturity costs more than the year beside it. A wrapped or “sculpted” schedule can push costs into later years so the early tax rate looks gentle. This page refuses to sculpt. It shows one smooth annual payment. If the official schedule is lumpy, the smooth number is still a fair way to say “on average, over the term, the repayment is about this heavy.” It is a poor way to say “next year’s levy will be exactly this.” Next year’s levy is whatever the schedule and the rate-setting night produce.

A zero rate is allowed, mostly so you can see the floor. If nobody charged interest, the annual figure would be principal divided by years. Real public borrowing is rarely free. If a flyer says “no tax increase” and also says the district will borrow, read carefully. Sometimes existing debt is falling off as new debt comes on, and the rate stays flat while the principal changes. Sometimes a reserve or a refinancing is doing the work. Sometimes the sentence is marketing. The calculator will not detect marketing. It will show you a payment for the principal, term, and rate you type. If the rate box is a guess, label the result a guess when you repeat it.

Households are not parcels, and parcels are not equal

The per-household line divides the annual figure by the number of households you type. That is a useful shock absorber. A $48 million principal sounds like weather. A few hundred dollars a year, or a few tens of dollars a month, sounds like a bill. The shock absorber also lies in a specific way. It treats every household as an equal share. Property tax does not work that way. A household in a taxable house worth twice as much typically carries twice the bond tax, exemptions aside. A renter does not get a line on the tax roll at all, even though rent can move when the owner’s tax moves. A household on a fully exempt parcel — a church, a qualifying homestead that is exempt rather than merely discounted, a public building — may carry none of it. Equal division is a picture of the average, not a picture of your key.

That is why the page also divides by taxable value and reports dollars per $100,000 of that value. If you know the taxable value of your own place, you can scale it. A place with $200,000 of taxable value would carry about twice the per-$100,000 figure. A place with $50,000 of taxable value would carry about half. Do that scaling with the taxable value, not the real-estate listing price, if those numbers differ in your state. The bond is repaid from the roll the mills actually touch. Listing price is a different conversation, the one the assessment page on this shelf is for.

In the example, 18,500 households and $4,200,000,000.00 of taxable value imply an average taxable value of about $227,027.03 per household. That average is a made-up place with a lot of taxable value behind each front door. Your county may be nothing like it. If you know households but not the tax base, leave the base blank and you will still get a per-household figure on the interest-rate path. You will not get a per-$100,000 figure until a base exists. If you know the base and an average taxable value, you can leave households blank and the page will divide base by average to estimate households. Estimated households are only as good as the average. A trailer park and a ridge of new houses can share a county and not share an average that means anything at a single kitchen table.

The millage path is a different question

Switch the toggle to millage add-on when the flyer gives you mills and withholds the interest rate. Mills are dollars per $1,000 of taxable value. The annual illustration is then the tax base times the mills, divided by 1,000. Principal and term stay on the screen so you remember what the measure says it is borrowing, but they do not enter that multiplication. A millage is a tax rate. It raises whatever the base raises. It might have been set to cover a planned debt service. It might have been rounded up so the rate looks simple on a postcard. It might include a cushion. It might be a cap — “not to exceed” — rather than the rate anyone intends to charge in year one. Read the verb on the flyer. “Not to exceed 0.85 mills” is a ceiling. A ceiling is not a payment.

On the example base of $4,200,000,000.00, 0.85 mills raises $3,570,000.00 a year. Divided by 18,500 households, that is $192.97 a year per household. Per $100,000 of taxable value it is $85.00, which is the millage translated into a unit people can compare with a mortgage escrow. You can check that last one by hand. Each mill is $100 on $100,000 of taxable value, because $100,000 divided by 1,000 is $100. So 0.85 mills is $85 on each $100,000. The page is not hiding a trick. It is doing that multiplication and then spreading the same levy across households if you provided a household count.

Do not average the interest-rate answer and the millage answer into a compromise. They are not two measurements of one object. They are two objects. Use the interest-rate path when you are asking what it costs to repay this principal on a smooth schedule at this rate. Use the millage path when you are asking what this add-on rate would raise on this tax base. If a campaign gives you both, you have a rare gift: you can see whether the mills would raise about the same money as the smooth repayment, or a lot more, or not enough. A gap is a question for the work session. Maybe the mills are only the county’s share. Maybe the base they used is not the base you typed. Maybe the schedule is lumpy and the millage is sized for the heavy year. Ask. Do not smooth the gap away with an average that nobody voted on.

What the monthly number is for

Dividing by twelve is a courtesy to the way people pay for everything else. Property tax often is not monthly. It may be two installments. It may be escrowed. A school bond might be collected on a fiscal year that starts in July, while your brain starts in January. The monthly equivalent on this page is the annual household share, or the annual per-$100,000 share, divided by twelve and rounded to the cent. It is so you can set the bond next to a phone bill or a prescription and see the scale. It is not a new line on your mortgage statement. If a lender later changes escrow, that change is the lender’s analysis, which can include shortages from prior years. Do not expect the monthly figure here to equal the change in escrow to the penny.

Scale cuts both ways. A payment that looks small monthly can be large as a share of a tight budget, and a payment that looks large as a principal can be small on a wide tax base. Both reactions are allowed. The page’s job is to stop the conversation at the principal alone. “Forty-eight million” does not tell a parent whether the add-on is closer to a pizza night or a car payment. The divided numbers do. They still leave the purpose of the bond outside the arithmetic. A small payment for a building the district does not need is not a bargain. A large payment for a roof that is finished failing is not automatically a mistake. Arithmetic does not vote. It keeps the vote from being only a rendering and a slogan.

If you are explaining this to a teenager at the same table, the honest version is short. The district wants to borrow a pile of money. Borrowed money gets paid back with interest. The payback is spread over the years in the box. We divided the yearly payback by the number of households, and we also divided it by the tax base so bigger taxable properties carry more. The number is a sketch. The real bill depends on the official schedule, the exemptions on our account, and whether the rate is set at the ceiling or lower. That paragraph is enough. You do not need to teach the formula. You need to keep the sketch from being passed around as a tax receipt.

Exemptions, growth, and other things a sketch leaves out

Homestead exemptions shrink the taxable value the mills touch. If you typed a tax base that is already net of exemptions, leave it. If you typed a market-value base, the millage path will overstate the levy. The interest-rate path does not use the base to compute the payment. It uses the base only to spread the payment. Spreading a real payment over an inflated base makes every household’s share look too small. Garbage in, polite chart out. Use the taxable base the assessor would actually extend the rate against. If you cannot find it, say you used a guess. A labeled guess is a better civic act than a precise-looking fiction.

Growth cuts the other way. New houses and new stores add to the base over a 20-year term. If the base grows, a fixed debt service can mean a falling rate, or a rate that stays put while more payers share the load. This page does not grow the base. It uses the base you type as if it held still. That is the conservative kitchen view: what the payment looks like if no cavalry arrives in the form of a subdivision. It will overstate the later-year rate if the community actually grows, and it will understate the pain if the community shrinks or if a large taxpayer leaves. You can run the page twice, once with today’s base and once with a base you are willing to defend, and see the range. A range is more honest than a single postcard number. It is also less likely to fit on a yard sign. That is the yard sign’s problem.

Refinancing, early payoff, and federal or state subsidies are outside the boxes. A bond that is later refinanced into a lower rate costs less than the original sketch. A bond that is paired with a debt-service fund already sitting in the bank may not need the full tax rate the principal suggests. A bond repaid from sales tax or from utility rates is not a property-tax millage at all, even if a flyer still talks about “taxpayers.” If the security is not property tax, do not type a property-tax base and pretend the division is the property-tax bill. Type households only if you are illustrating a per-household share of a payment that households ultimately bear some other way, and say that plainly. The label on this page — debt-service illustration, not official levy math — is doing real work. Do not peel it off when you copy the number into a group chat.

How to check a flyer without starting a fight you did not mean

Take the flyer and underline every number. Principal. Term. Rate or mills. Any tax base they used. Any household count they used. Put those underlines into the boxes. If your result is close to theirs, they probably did a similar sketch, and you can spend your time on whether the building is needed. If your result is far from theirs, somebody is using a different base, a different term, a tax-credit assumption, or a “per pupil” figure that is not a per-household figure. Per pupil and per household are not cousins. A district with large families, or with many rental units, or with a big commercial base, will look cheap per pupil and different per household. Ask which denominator they divided by. Denominators are where cheerful numbers go to hide.

Ask one more question at the hearing: is the millage a plan or a cap? A plan can be reset lower when the bids come in under budget or when the sale prices at a better rate. A cap is the legal maximum, and living under a cap is not the same as living at the cap. Voters who think they approved the cap as the bill will feel tricked if the bill is lower, which is a strange trick, or feel tricked later if a future board moves up toward the cap because the authority already exists. The worksheet or the ballot language usually says which one it is. This page cannot read the ballot. You can. Type the number the ballot actually authorizes, and then type the number the superintendent says they expect, and keep both results. Two results are a conversation. One result is a button.

If you publish anything — a letter, a post, a handout at a meeting — put the path in the first sentence. “Smooth repayment of this principal at this rate, divided by this many households.” Or “this millage on this taxable base.” Put the date, because bases change. Put the fact that exemptions on a particular house are not in the average. Ryan Standley would rather you carry a boring sentence than a viral one. Notice Nearby will place a paid hearing notice or a paid announcement if you buy a Public Register Placement. The calculator is not that product. It does not certify the election, does not replace a newspaper a statute may require, and does not make the debt service official. It makes the debt service discussable, which is the step before official.

The bond in the boxes is a made-up teaching example, not a district’s official issue. The results are a debt-service illustration, not official levy math. Ryan Standley wrote this page as Publisher / Authorized Officer of Notice Nearby. Notice Nearby is a paid public-notice register operated by Record of Sale, LLC, an Oregon limited liability company. This is an educational illustration. It is not a tax bill, not an appraisal, not a levy certification, not official debt math, and not legal, tax, or financial advice. Nothing here is Legal Publication, and a calculator does not satisfy a newspaper statute or any other notice statute.