Davao's 2026 Market Values: What Happens to Your Amilyar

• Your lot sits inside a named subdivision → expect the steeper of the two new ladders. That is where almost all of the big percentages come from.
• You own in the old downtown core → barangays 2-A, 3-A and 11-B through 18-B carry the schedule’s floor, +101.2%.
• A notice of assessment arrives → you have 60 days to appeal, and you keep paying while it is decided.
• You want the 20% discount → pay the whole year on or before 31 March.

In November 2025 the City Assessor put a 151-page document on the city website proposing new market values for every street and subdivision in Davao. The headline number is real. Across the 1,288 residential rows that carry both a 2017 and a 2026 figure, land rises by a median of 341.9%, and realtors, developers and councillors have been arguing about it as though it were a tax bill ever since. It is not one. The schedule is not enacted, the increase is nothing like evenly spread, and none of it decides what you pay next year.

Is the 2026 Schedule of Market Values Already Law?

No. Every page of the document Davao City published on 24 November 2025 carries a diagonal “PROPOSED SMV” watermark, and the city still files it under a page headed “Proposed”. Nothing shows it approved. Not the city site, not the press.

That matters more than it sounds, because the approval route changed in 2024. Davao’s last schedule was enacted by the council itself, as Ordinance 0257-17. Republic Act 12001, signed 13 June 2024, ended that: Section 38(a) repealed the provision of the Local Government Code that made a schedule of market values something a Sanggunian passes. Preparation now sits with the city assessor under Section 15, after two public consultations and two weeks of website publication. A city’s proposal then goes to the Bureau of Local Government Finance central office. Certification is the Secretary of Finance’s, under Section 16, against the Philippine Valuation Standards, and the Act is careful to add that the Secretary “shall not exercise control over the content of the SMV”. Publication is the last step, and an approved schedule takes effect fifteen days after the DOF publishes it.

Which makes the question everyone keeps asking about the Sanggunian the wrong one, because the council does not pass the schedule any more. What it still decides is the assessment level and the tax rate, and Section 17 gives it 30 days from an approved schedule to receive a revenue and tax impact report carrying three options for adjusting both.

Press and council leave two different trails, and they run out on two different dates. Press coverage of the Davao schedule stops on 28 May 2026, when SunStar reported Councilor Danilo Dayanghirang asking for the BLGF, the Assessor’s office, CREBA and tax experts to be brought to the June session. The Sangguniang Panlungsod’s own published record runs four months further, to the 33rd regular session of 18 August 2026, and carries no schedule of market values anywhere in it.

How Far Land Values Moved, by Class

The 2017 schedule sorted residential land into twelve sub-classes, R1 down to R12. The 2026 schedule does something different. It keeps eight regular residential classes and adds a second, parallel ladder for subdivision land — and the four cheapest 2017 classes have no successor on either one.

Read the regular column and the alarm drains out of it. The top rung gains 56.7%, the steepest gain on that ladder is 101.2% at R4, and the bottom rung goes down: RR8 is priced at ₱1,200 where R8 was ₱1,320.

Then count how much of Davao is actually on it. RR1 is assigned to no parcel anywhere in the 151 pages: the top rung exists only in the summary table above. RR2 carries five rows, RR3 three, RR5 one. Of the 369 residential rows that stay regular, 182 are RR4 and 176 are RR6, RR7 or RR8. The reassuring end of that ladder is empty; the crowded end is the bottom.

Now read the subdivision column. Every rung rises harder. The middle of it rises hardest of all: SR5 sits 253.5% above the R5 it replaces, and SR4, SR6 and SR7 between them carry 706 of the 919 rows that crossed over.

The Reclassification Nobody Has Reported

Here is where the 341.9% comes from, and it is not the ladder. It is which ladder your lot lands on. Of the 1,288 rows residential in both years, 919 land on the subdivision ladder and 369 stay regular. Their medians split accordingly: +341.9% for the rows that crossed over, +246.2% for the rows that did not.

R7 was the modal class of 2017, with 502 rows. Of those, 454 are now subdivision land. So the obvious question is what puts a street on one ladder rather than the other, and the schedule answers it in Section I.A, in criteria printed for all sixteen classes.

Those four abolished classes are why the tail runs so long. A ₱310 lot classed R12 in 2017 has nowhere to go but up, and where it sits inside a subdivision the schedule puts it on SR7 at ₱7,400. That is an increase of 2,287%. Deca Homes and Mulig Homeowners Village, both in Barangay Mulig under Toril District, go further still: ₱310 to SR4 at ₱15,100, a rise of 4,771% and the largest single move in the document.

One honest caveat on the chart above. Cheaper classes rise harder as a tendency, not as a rule: R4 gains less than R1, and on the regular ladder R8 falls outright. Anyone describing this schedule as uniformly regressive is smoothing it.

What actually separates the two ladders

Section I.A of the schedule prints criteria for every class on both ladders, and it never mentions a subdivision plan, a title annotation or a registration of any kind. What it lists is road surface, the grade of housing around you, how regular the jeepneys are, which class you sit next to, and which utilities reach you.

Set the two sixth classes side by side and the criteria very nearly coincide. Both read “along all-weather roads”, both read “public water and electric facilities are seldom available”, and both read “transportation facilities are often available”. The housing test differs by a single noun, “buildings” against “houses”, and the two lines left over are each class pointing at its own ladder. Sixth Class Regular Residential is priced at ₱4,300. Sixth Class Subdivision Residential is priced at ₱9,500.

The seventh classes do it again. Both sit on all-weather roads, both draw water from pump wells, both describe land partly mixed with informal settlers. RR7 is ₱2,900 and SR7 is ₱7,400, two and a half times more, for land the schedule describes in nearly the same words.

Your Barangay, and the Number Behind It

Barangay medians are published nowhere, by the city or by anyone covering the schedule. These come from grouping every residential row under the barangay heading it sits beneath, then taking each group’s median. Cabantian leads at +1,043.9% across 38 rows. Poblacion is not one number: 19-B runs +602.3% while the old core sits at +101.2%.

Named rows tell the same story more plainly, and four of the sharpest sit in one barangay. Ladislawa Subdivision, in 19-B, goes from ₱15,890 to ₱37,000, a rise of 132.9%, because it was already first-class residential and moves to the top of the subdivision ladder. Camella Northpoint, on the same page, jumps from ₱4,920 straight to SR1 at ₱37,000, up 652%. Bajada Hilltop Village goes from ₱2,150 to ₱15,100, as does Sandawa over in Barangay Bucana. Juna Subdivision goes from ₱4,920 to ₱25,100, and is listed twice at the same figures, under Bucana and under Matina Crossing.

What It Does to Your Amilyar

Only two multiplications sit between a schedule value and a bill, and both numbers are published. Market value times an assessment level gives assessed value. Assessed value times the tax rate gives the tax. Get both and the arithmetic for residential land collapses to something you can do in your head.

The rate comes from the City Treasurer’s signed notice for 2026: 1.5% basic plus 1% for the Special Education Fund, collected simultaneously, under the 2017 Revenue Code of Davao City. Both sit inside the ceilings in RA 7160, which allows a city up to 2% basic and states the SEF as a flat 1%.

The assessment level comes from Ordinance No. 0257-17, Section 11, the ordinance that enacted the 2017 schedule. Residential land is assessed at 4%. Residential buildings run a graduated ladder that copies RA 7160 Section 218 straight across, from 0% under ₱175,000 to 60% above ₱10 million. Davao taxes the ground under your house at a fifth of what the Code would allow, and the house itself at the maximum.

One caveat rides on all of it. Section 11 was enacted with the 2017 schedule, and RA 12001 expressly contemplates the Sanggunian revisiting assessment levels alongside a new one. So 4% is what applies today, not necessarily what applies under the 2026 schedule.

When You Pay, and the Discount Most Owners Skip

Amilyar falls due on 1 January and can be paid in four equal instalments without interest: 31 March, 30 June, 30 September, 31 December. The Treasurer’s notice adds two discounts that RA 7160 Section 251 permits but does not require.

Two details catch people out. Any payment is applied to old delinquencies, interest and penalties first, and only what is left counts against the current year. And you can pay at any of the ten district treasury offices, not only at City Hall on San Pedro Street.

If You Think Your Assessment Is Wrong

Two separate remedies exist, they run on different clocks, and neither lets you stop paying. One of them challenges the valuation and goes to an appeal board within 60 days of the notice. The other challenges the tax and goes to the City Treasurer within 30 days of the payment itself.

1. Appeal the assessment. Under RA 7160 Section 226, an owner or anyone with legal interest has 60 days from receiving the written notice of assessment to file a sworn petition with the Local Board of Assessment Appeals, attaching the tax declarations and supporting affidavits.
2. Pay under protest. Section 252 handles a dispute about the tax rather than the valuation. Pay first, have the receipt annotated “paid under protest”, file the written protest with the treasurer within 30 days of payment, and the treasurer has 60 days to decide.
3. Keep paying either way. Section 231 is blunt about it: an appeal “shall in no case suspend the collection” of the tax. Overpayment is refunded or credited once the appeal is finally decided.

The window most people assume is still open has already shut. Section 15 of RA 12001 requires two public consultations before the assessor submits a schedule, and the head of the Assessor’s valuation division, Engr. Sheila Coloma, told Mindanao Times in February that the proposed schedule had its two in the last quarter of 2025. Nobody outside the process gets a third.

What is genuinely still live is the Sanggunian’s side of it. Section 17 gives the council a revenue and tax impact report with three options for adjusting assessment levels and tax rates, and the council sets those by ordinance. That is the decision that turns a valuation into a bill, it has not been made, and it is made in public session. If your row is one of the fourteen that contradict themselves, or you were R12 and are now SR4, raise it now rather than waiting for a notice of assessment to appeal.

Most of the argument about this schedule is an argument about the wrong number. A 341.9% median is a valuation story. Your amilyar is a different one, set by an assessment level of 4% on land, a rate of 1.5% plus 1%, and a ceiling that holds year one to 6% whatever the schedule says. So read your own row. Note whether you crossed to the subdivision ladder, and take any mismatch to the Assessor’s office in writing now rather than waiting for a notice of assessment to appeal. For where property tax sits against everything else you pay to live here, see the Davao cost of living guide and the hidden costs of renting; if you are weighing ownership at all, condo versus house versus apartment is the place to start. And the assessor’s figure is only one of three official numbers the same lot carries.