Two buyers walked away from closing on the same Tuesday this spring, one in Cabot and one in Jacksonville, both with homes priced within a few thousand dollars of each other. The Cabot buyer had crossed the county line on purpose, repeating the line every real estate blog in Central Arkansas repeats back to first-time buyers: Lonoke County taxes less than Pulaski County, so buy on the Lonoke side if you can. Six weeks later, comparing escrow estimates over coffee, the two of them realized the math didn't run the way either of them expected.
It's not that the "Lonoke is cheaper" idea is fiction. It's that the county line is the wrong place to look for the number that actually moves your bill. The real difference sits one layer down, in the school district millage, and it's driven by something you won't find on a listing sheet: a federal desegregation order that took Jacksonville's district a decade and six new school buildings to satisfy.
The Line Item on the Closing Disclosure Nobody Budgeted For
Arkansas assesses real property at 20 percent of market value, then applies the local millage rate to that assessed figure. A mill is one-tenth of one percent, so the math is simple once you have the right number to multiply.
Here's the number most cross-shopping buyers never pull: Cabot School District's total millage sits at 39.50 mills, made up of 25.00 mills for maintenance and operations and 14.50 mills for debt service. Jacksonville North Pulaski School District's total millage runs to 48.3 mills, split between 25.0 mills of maintenance and operations, 22.4 mills of debt service, and a small dedicated 0.9 mill for technology maintenance.
That's an 8.8-mill gap, and it's entirely on the school side of the bill. Run it against a $250,000 home. Assessed value comes out to $50,000. At the 8.8-mill difference, that's roughly $440 more per year in school taxes alone for the Jacksonville side of that comparison, before you've added a single dollar of county or city millage on top.
Buyers rarely see this line broken out before closing. Sellers and agents talk in terms of a single combined property tax estimate, and that combined number gets treated as a fact about the county rather than a fact about the specific school district a specific address sits inside.
Why Jacksonville's Rate Is Higher, and Why That's the Point, Not the Problem
The 22.4 debt service mills in Jacksonville aren't a random policy choice. They're the mechanism the district used to fund a court-ordered building program. In October 2025, a federal court declared the Jacksonville North Pulaski School District legally desegregated, closing out a court order that had required the district to bring its facilities up to the same standard across the board. Getting there meant building six new schools over the preceding decade.
Superintendent Jeremy Owoh, speaking to the court's ruling, described the goal behind the construction plainly: the district needed to make sure "that all buildings were equal so that all students were able to matriculate through buildings of the same caliber." The 22.4 debt service mills are what paid for that. It's not a tax the district is levying because it can. It's a tax the district is levying because it built.
Cabot never carried that obligation, so its debt service mills sit lower. That's a real and defensible difference, but it's a difference in what the money bought, not a signal that Jacksonville runs an inefficient or inflated tax structure. A buyer who understands the six-schools story reads the higher millage as evidence of newer buildings, not as a red flag.
| Cabot School District | Jacksonville North Pulaski School District | |
|---|---|---|
| Maintenance & Operations | 25.00 mills | 25.0 mills |
| Debt Service | 14.50 mills | 22.4 mills |
| Dedicated (technology) | none | 0.9 mills |
| Total | 39.50 mills | 48.3 mills |
Cabot's own school board put its rate back on the ballot in 2025, as required annually under the Arkansas Constitution, and voters continued the existing rate rather than requesting a change. Jacksonville's rate has held at 48.3 mills through the same period. Neither number is moving on its own in the near term, which means the gap between them is stable enough to plan around rather than a moving target.
The County Average That Doesn't Describe Either City
Here's where the tidy story breaks down further, and it's the part most comparisons skip entirely.
Pulaski County's countywide effective property tax rate runs around 0.74 percent, with a typical annual bill near $1,735, the highest average bill of any Arkansas county. That countywide figure is a blend across every school district inside Pulaski County, including districts with meaningfully lower millage than Jacksonville North Pulaski's 48.3.
Cabot's own effective tax rate, measured at the city level rather than blended across a whole county, runs at roughly 0.79 percent, which sits above that Pulaski County countywide average, not below it.
Read that twice, because it's the actual thesis here. The Pulaski County average is quietly diluted by lower-millage districts elsewhere in the same county, which makes the countywide number look more favorable to Jacksonville-side buyers than a Jacksonville-specific bill would actually be. Meanwhile Cabot's number, measured city by city rather than blended across Lonoke County, comes in higher than the county-versus-county comparison would suggest. The county line isn't lying to you exactly. It's just answering a broader question than the one you're actually asking.
What This Actually Means If You're Cross-Shopping the Two
If you're comparing Cabot and Jacksonville on price alone, you're comparing two suburbs that currently sit in a similar band. Cabot's median sale price ran $255,000 over the three months ending April 2026, up 3.9 percent from the same period the year before, with homes selling in a median of 73 days and 131 homes closing that April compared with 113 the year prior. That's a market with real, current momentum, not a stale comparison point.
None of that momentum tells you what your school tax line will look like on either side of the county line. The only way to answer that question accurately is to ask for the specific millage rate tied to the specific address, not the countywide average and not the reputation the county has built over years of blog posts repeating the same shorthand.
For buyers using VA loans or working against a fixed BAH, this matters more than it does for an all-cash buyer, because the annual tax line feeds directly into what a lender will qualify you for and what your monthly payment actually looks like once escrow is set. An extra few hundred dollars a year sounds small until it's the difference between qualifying at your target price and needing to adjust it.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Assume
Does a higher school millage always mean a worse deal? Not on its own. Jacksonville's higher rate is funding recently completed construction rather than ongoing overhead, which is a different kind of tax than one funding operating shortfalls.
Will Jacksonville's rate come down now that the desegregation order is closed? The debt service mills are tied to the bonds issued to build those six schools, and those bonds don't disappear the moment a court order does. Any change would depend on the district's own bond schedule and a future ballot decision, not on the court ruling itself.
How do I find the exact millage for a specific address? The county assessor's office for either Pulaski or Lonoke County can confirm the district and total combined millage for a specific parcel before you write an offer, which is the only way to get a number you can actually budget against rather than a county-level estimate.
If you're weighing Cabot against Jacksonville, or any two suburbs where the county line looks like it's doing more explaining than it actually is, that's exactly the kind of question worth working through before you write an offer, not after you're staring at a closing disclosure. Ellen Weiner at Ellen Gets You Home works both sides of that comparison regularly and can pull the specific millage for the specific address you're looking at, along with what it actually means for your monthly payment. Schedule a free consultation and get the real numbers before the county line talks you into an assumption.
