2 counties indexed. ArcGIS FeatureServer and MapServer URLs, with supported search fields per layer.
| County | Endpoints | Searchable fields | Status | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jefferson County | 1 | Parcel ID · Owner Name · Street Name | LIVE | OPEN |
| Shelby County | 1 | Parcel Number · Owner Name 1 · Property Address | LIVE | OPEN |
Alabama property assessment is handled by elected Tax Assessors (or Revenue Commissioners, depending on the county) operating independently in each of the state's 67 counties. The Alabama Department of Revenue sets classification rules and valuation standards but does not maintain the parcel data itself — each county Assessor owns its source records. Alabama classifies real property into four classes, with Class II (agricultural) and Class III (general real property) constituting most residential and commercial parcels. Assessed value is a statutory fraction of fair market value, and the fractional ratios differ by class, which means assessed value alone is not a direct proxy for market value.
Alabama does not operate a unified statewide parcel REST service. The Geological Survey of Alabama (GSA) coordinates statewide GIS data collection and acts as the state's geospatial clearinghouse, but cadastral parcel data remains county-controlled. The Alabama Department of Revenue maintains a directory of county Public GIS Websites and Citizen Access Portals but these are links to independent county systems, not a federated layer. Most larger Alabama counties run their own ArcGIS Server infrastructure or publish to ArcGIS Online; smaller rural counties often rely on vendor portals. Jefferson County (Birmingham metro) operates one of the most complete public REST layers in the state, exposing owner name, address, and value fields. Coastal and metro counties (Mobile, Madison, Baldwin) have invested more heavily in public GIS access than many rural counties.
Alabama counties use two distinct office structures for property assessment. Most counties have a separate Tax Assessor and Tax Collector. Some counties — including Jefferson — have consolidated these into a single Revenue Commissioner's office. The GIS and parcel data is always the responsibility of whichever office handles assessment; the REST endpoint host names (jccgis.jccal.org for Jefferson, for example) reflect the county government's IT infrastructure rather than any statewide naming convention. This means endpoint discovery requires county-by-county research.
Jefferson County's public MapServer layer exposes OWNERNAME as a fixed-width padded string. A query returning 'SMITH, JOHN A ' is working correctly — the trailing spaces are part of the stored value. String comparison with UPPER() LIKE works as expected because SQL pattern matching ignores trailing padding, but if you are writing the owner value to a database or CSV, trim the field on read. Other Alabama counties that expose owner name may not share this behavior, but Jefferson is the only county currently in the atlas.
Alabama assesses real property at a fraction of appraised (fair market) value that varies by class: Class I (utilities) at 30%, Class II (agricultural) at 10%, Class III (general real property, including most residential and commercial) at 20%. The AssdValue field in Jefferson County reflects this fractional assessment, not the full appraised value. If you need an estimate of market value from the REST layer, multiply AssdValue by the appropriate class multiplier. The ZONING_BOE field records the zoning designation as determined by the county Board of Equalization.
Largest county in Alabama (Birmingham metro, pop. ~670,000). The county GIS layer at jccgis.jccal.org exposes OWNERNAME, PARCELID, address fields, ACRES_APR, AssdValue, and ZONING_BOE on its public MapServer. Owner-name queries via UPPER(OWNERNAME) LIKE work reliably. Data is maintained by the Jefferson County Tax Assessor and updated nightly. The county open data portal is at data-jeffco-al.opendata.arcgis.com.
Jefferson County owner search: ?where=UPPER(OWNERNAME)+LIKE+UPPER('%25SMITH%25')&outFields=PARCELID,OWNERNAME,PROP_MAIL,Street_Name,Property_City,AssdValue&returnGeometry=false&f=json. Parcel ID lookup: ?where=PARCELID='XXXXXXXXXX'&outFields=*&f=json. Street name search: ?where=UPPER(Street_Name)+LIKE+UPPER('%25MAIN%25')&outFields=PARCELID,OWNERNAME,Bldg_Number,Street_Name,Property_City&returnGeometry=false&f=json. Add &resultRecordCount=25 to page results.
Last updated 2026-05-24.
2 Alabama counties are indexed in the UrbanKit atlas with verified public REST endpoints: Shelby and Jefferson. Each exposes an owner-name field you can search directly on the public layer.
Shelby and Jefferson expose an owner-name field on the public REST layer. Shelby, for example, uses the NAM1 field — a case-insensitive search is ?where=UPPER(NAM1)%20LIKE%20UPPER('%25SMITH%25')&outFields=*&f=json. Open a county's page here for its full field list and a ready-to-run sample query.
Shelby publishes parcels at https://maps.shelbyal.com/gisserver/rest/services/LegacyServices/Cadastral_2022/MapServer/91 — a MapServer (layer 91). It indexes by Parcel Number, Owner Name 1, and Property Address. Owner-name search: UPPER(NAM1) LIKE UPPER('%25SMITH%25').
Alabama's indexed counties (Shelby and Jefferson) publish county-hosted ArcGIS MapServer layers. MapServer supports the same /query operation for owner, parcel-ID, and address lookups as FeatureServer — for read-only parcel lookups the two are interchangeable.
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