New Open Dataset Scores All 51 U.S. Tax-Sale Jurisdictions — Finds 22 Are Effectively Closed to Everyday Investors

Richmond, TX — TaxLienSimple has released a free, open dataset classifying all 50 states and Washington, D.C. by how they sell delinquent property taxes — as tax-lien certificates, tax deeds, or redeemable deeds — with the statutory interest/penalty rate, redemption period, and the controlling statute and official source cited for every jurisdiction. It is published under a CC-BY license with a permanent DOI (10.5281/zenodo.21185506).

Key findings

• 22 jurisdictions sell tax-lien certificates, 19 are deed states, 8 use redeemable deeds, and 2 are hybrids.
• Only 29 of the 51 state-and-D.C. rule jurisdictions are practically accessible to retail investors — meaning 22 are effectively closed to everyday buyers.
• The widely advertised “18% return” is state-specific, not universal. Mechanics vary from flat annual interest to penalty structures to bid-down auctions where competition drives the real yield well below the headline.
• The dataset corrects commonly-cited but wrong data, including Florida — routinely mislabeled a “tax deed state” but actually a lien-certificate state first under Fla. Stat. §197.432 — plus West Virginia, Connecticut, and Arizona.

Each jurisdiction is also scored 0–10 across nine investing dimensions (effective yield, penalty structure, redemption speed, auction access, competition, capital-entry cost, process safety, legal stability, and over-the-counter availability), with a composite score.

The dataset is free to download (CSV and JSON) at taxliensimple.com/dataset, and is mirrored on Zenodo, Hugging Face, Kaggle, and GitHub.

Cite: TaxLienSimple (2026). US State Tax Lien & Deed Investing Dataset. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21185506