A Georgia Board of Equalization hearing notice sets your hearing's date and format. What to send back, by when, and whether you need to attend.
# Georgia Board of Equalization Hearing Notice: What to Send
A Georgia Board of Equalization hearing notice sets the date, time and format of the hearing on your property tax appeal. Before that date, send back any reply form that came with it, send your written evidence by your county's cutoff, and ask for the assessors' evidence at least 10 days ahead, the timing Georgia law sets.
If you filed the appeal yourself, plan to attend in the format the notice offers and to send written evidence too; the section on attending explains why. Full Service customers can skip to the section on AppealAlly near the end.
The notice tells you when and how the county Board of Equalization (a panel of local residents that hears property tax appeals) will hear your case. Georgia law requires the Board to set a hearing date within 15 days of receiving your appeal and to notify you in writing, then to hold the hearing no sooner than 20 days and no later than 30 days after that notice (O.C.G.A. 48-5-311(e)(6)). Those clocks start when the Board receives your appeal, not when you filed it. The notice goes by first-class mail to you and to any authorized agent you've asked the county to send it to.
Every notice must also tell you that you can ask for the other side's evidence, and under Georgia law, hearings run between 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. on a business day. Cobb County's clerk says its notice also lists the Board members who will hear your appeal (Cobb clerk's Board of Equalization page). What else you'll see depends on the format:
Whatever the format, if a password is blank or a link doesn't work, call the Board's office before the hearing day.
Confirm the dates on your county's letter.
Send back only the items below that apply to you.
The timeline below shows each step.
Georgia law sets the 10-day and 7-day windows when either side asks for the other's evidence. Your county also sets its own cutoff for your evidence.
Confirm the dates on your county's letter.
Ask the Board's office about another format, use your one reschedule, or send an authorized agent, and send your written evidence whichever you choose.
Georgia law lets the appeal administrator, who is the clerk of superior court, hold a hearing by audio or video, but only at the clerk's discretion and with the consent of all parties. Ask early, and don't count on one. Fulton County, for one, offers optional in-person or virtual hearings; call its Board office to choose.
Georgia law also gives you a one-time option to change the hearing's date and time to one acceptable to you and the assessors, and further changes need good cause or both sides' agreement. Each county sets how far ahead to ask, and how:
Counties set withdrawal rules too. Gwinnett doesn't accept withdrawals by phone, and Fulton needs them in writing at least 24 hours before the hearing.
What happens if you don't show up also differs. Cobb's clerk says a missed hearing results in "No Change in Value." Habersham's page says the Board holds the hearing as scheduled and notifies both sides of its decision.
On a homestead, attending also affects the 299(c) hold on a lowered value, explained in the next section. O.C.G.A. 48-5-299(c)(1) says the hold "shall not apply to a valuation established by an appeal decision if the taxpayer or his or her authorized [agent] failed to attend the appeal hearing or provide the board of equalization, hearing officer, or arbitrator with some written evidence supporting the taxpayer's opinion of value."
Read one way, the hold is lost only if you neither attended nor sent written evidence. Read the stricter way, missing either one could cost it. So if you filed the appeal yourself, we suggest doing both: attend in whatever format the notice offers (or send an authorized agent if you can't), and send your written evidence by the county's cutoff.
Not above the value the assessors set, with one exception. The Board can lower your value but cannot raise it above what the county assessors set (O.C.G.A. 48-5-311(e)(9)), unless you filed the appeal while a 299(c) hold was in effect on that value.
A 2026 annual assessment notice may print a 299(c) note beside a value that's already under a hold from an earlier appeal. If you appealed a value marked that way, the no-raise limit doesn't cover your appeal. The comparison below shows the two cases.
The limit on raising your value covers most appeals. It doesn't apply when you appealed a value already under a hold from an earlier appeal.
On a homestead, when a Board decision lowers the value, the assessors can't raise it for the next two years, subject to the law's exceptions, including the attendance rule above. This is the 299(c) hold, often called the three-year freeze because it covers the tax year under appeal plus the next two, and it applies only if the value is reduced. A no-change result, whether it comes from the assessors or the Board, starts no hold; HB 581 struck the words "or is unchanged" from 48-5-299(c), effective January 1, 2025. How the 299(c) hold works after the 2025 change covers the rest.
Yes. If you and the assessors sign an agreement on the value, the appeal ends on the date of that signed agreement, so the hearing no longer goes ahead. On a homestead, a lower value set by a signed agreement carries the 299(c) hold too, unless both sides agree otherwise in writing. Check the value before you sign, then ask the clerk's office to confirm the hearing is off the calendar.
The Board announces its decision at the end of your hearing. The written decision must be signed and delivered to you by hand with a written receipt, or by registered or certified mail or statutory overnight delivery (O.C.G.A. 48-5-311(e)(6)(D)(i)).
If you disagree with the decision, either side can take it to superior court. Georgia law sets 30 days after the decision is delivered to file a written petition for review with the board of tax assessors (O.C.G.A. 48-5-311(g)). The law routes the petition through the assessors: you mail or file it with them, and they later file it with the clerk of superior court.
Confirm the dates on your county's letter.
Call your county's Board of Equalization office and check the mailing address the assessors have on file. Cobb's clerk says its Board uses the address the Tax Assessor's Office supplied, that keeping it correct is the owner's job, and that a missing scheduling letter is not grounds for rescheduling.
If you chose the Board of Equalization and the assessors made no change, their no-change notice also sent your appeal on to the Board without a second filing, so the Board's hearing notice is the next notice the law requires. Look for your hearing on the county's online appeal search if it has one, since a hearing can show up there before the letter arrives. The full timeline of a Georgia appeal shows where this step falls.
Once you authorize us, the county sends its notices to us as your agent as well as to you. If you're a Full Service customer holding a hearing notice, you don't need to attend or send anything back unless we ask.
This article is general information drawn from public sources: O.C.G.A. 48-5-299 and 48-5-311, the state's Board of Equalization hearing rules (Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. 560-11-12) and the Board of Equalization pages of Gwinnett, Fulton, Cobb, Rockdale and Habersham counties, all read September 29, 2026. A few details come from patterns in county letters, described without naming the county. Georgia law sets the 15, 20 to 30, 10, 7 and 30-day periods above; county cutoffs, reschedule windows and practice vary, and any calendar date you count out yourself is estimated. It isn't legal or tax advice. The dates on your own hearing notice govern, and your county's Board of Equalization office can tell you what applies to your hearing.