The 25 largest tax-exempt property records in Des Moines

The 25 largest records in the Des Moines exempt-property database account for approximately $1.40 billion in net exempt assessed value. That is more than half of the $2.528 billion represented by all 796 records.1

The concentration is not spread evenly across property types. Hospitals and higher-education institutions occupy much of the top of the list. The first seven hospital parcels alone carry $613.9 million in net exempt value. By comparison, all 237 records categorized as Religious total $503.1 million.1

Those are descriptive facts, not an argument about whether either group should be taxed.

The largest three

The Mercy parcel is a useful example of why the word net matters. Its full assessed value is $262.3 million, but $35.3 million remains taxable. Ranking it at $262.3 million would overstate the exemption by that amount. This site ranks partially exempt parcels by full value less the portion still on the roll.1

A campus is not one property

Institutions frequently appear more than once because a campus occupies many legal parcels. Drake University, for example, appears repeatedly near the top of the list: an arena, dormitories, academic buildings, athletic facilities, and land can each have a separate parcel identifier. That is not duplication. It is how the Assessor’s inventory is organized.

For the same reason, adding every row with the word “Drake” produces an institutional total, while asking for the largest property produces a parcel ranking. Both can be useful, but they answer different questions. The Top 25 [blocked] page ranks parcels. The database [blocked] lets readers search an institution name and see every matching record.

The annual-tax comparison

If the top-ranked Central Iowa Hospital Corp parcel were taxed using the 2025 residential rollback and the 2024 Des Moines City / Des Moines Schools levy, the calculated annual property tax would be approximately $5.16 million. Under the commercial rollback, it would be approximately $10.43 million.2 3

Those figures do not represent an unpaid bill. They are counterfactual comparisons. The exemption currently removes the parcel’s value from taxation; the calculation asks what the same value would produce under two published rollback rates.

Why the top 25 should not stand in for the whole database

Large institutions are easy to see. The bottom of the roll is different: small congregations, community organizations, low-rent housing, vacant lots, auxiliary buildings, and parcels without a street address. Hundreds of those smaller records produce the remainder of the citywide total.

The top 25 is therefore an entry point, not the investigation. The complete dataset is searchable and downloadable so the public can examine the long tail as closely as the headline properties.

References

1. Polk County Assessor — Commercial Inventory for Polk County
2. Polk County Assessor — Iowa rollback rates
3. Polk County Assessor — Des Moines jurisdiction regular levies

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Editorial disclosure

This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance, then checked against the cited public records. The data transformations and arithmetic are documented on our Methodology [blocked] page. AI does not decide whether a property qualifies for an exemption; that authority belongs to the Polk County Assessor and Iowa tax authorities.