Indiana Pays a Flat 10% or 15%, Not 25%: 9,013 Parcels Owe $37,275,458.72

Indiana is a tax lien state. County treasurers and auditors run an annual tax sale, investors buy a tax-sale certificate on the delinquent taxes, and the winner holds a claim to be repaid rather than a house. That is the short answer. The part that gets quoted wrong is the yield: Indiana's redemption penalty is a flat 10% or 15% of the minimum bid, the two tiers are alternatives rather than a total, and neither one annualizes. Underneath the statute sits the file: 9,013 tax-delinquent parcels in our Indiana data carrying $37,275,458.72 in unpaid taxes.

So which is it, tax lien or tax deed?

A lien. Indiana counties sell a tax-sale certificate at an annual sale, most commonly in the fall. The certificate is not the property. It entitles the holder to repayment with a statutory penalty and interest or, if the owner never redeems, the right to petition a court for a tax deed.

Four facts define the Indiana version of that arrangement:

1. Sales are annual, most commonly in the fall, run by the county. Larger counties sell online through SRI's platform or GovEase; smaller counties may hold an in-person auction. Registration and a deposit are required beforehand.
2. Bidding goes up, not down. The opening bid covers the delinquent taxes, penalties and costs, and bidders raise the price from there. The highest bidder takes the certificate. Everything paid above the minimum is the overbid.
3. Redemption is one year from the date of sale for most property. Certain county-acquired certificates and some vacant or abandoned parcels carry a shorter 120-day window.
4. A deed is a court order, not a formality. If the owner does not redeem, the buyer must serve statutory notice and petition the court. Only then can a tax deed issue.

Put those together and Indiana reads as a short-dated, flat-penalty instrument. One year of exposure, a fixed payout on redemption, and a court step at the end for the small minority that go the distance.

The penalty is flat, and 10% plus 15% is not 25%

This is the part of Indiana most worth getting right, because the usual quotation of it overstates the return by ten percentage points.

What the statute actually pays. Redemption costs 110% of the minimum bid if it happens within the first six months, or 115% of the minimum bid in months seven through twelve. That is a 10% penalty or a 15% penalty - one or the other, whichever window the owner redeems in. They are two tiers of the same single payment, not two payments stacked on top of each other. An owner who redeems in month eleven pays 115%, not 125%.

Why "25%" keeps appearing. Add the two tier numbers together and you get 25%, which reads like a first-year total but is not one. There is no point in the redemption year at which a certificate holder has been paid both tiers, because the second tier replaces the first rather than following it. If you are modelling an Indiana certificate at 25% for year one, you are modelling ten points of income that the statute does not create.

And it is flat, not annual. The penalty is a fixed percentage of the minimum bid, not a rate that accrues per day or per month. That cuts both ways, hard. A parcel redeemed in month one pays the same 10% as a parcel redeemed in month six - so an early redemption produces an enormous effective annualised yield, and a redemption at the eleventh hour produces 15% for a full year of committed capital. Time is not on your side in Indiana the way it is in an accruing-interest state; it is the owner's choice of month that sets your real return, and you have no influence over it.

The overbid is where Indiana returns actually go to die

Indiana's premium auction has a quiet asymmetry that decides most real-world outcomes, and it follows directly from the sentence above: the redemption penalty is calculated only on the minimum bid.

Everything you bid above the minimum is the overbid. It is held for the owner and refunded to them on redemption. It earns you 5% per year in the meantime - and 5% per year is the number attached to the largest part of the cheque on any competitively-bid parcel. Taxes you pay later to protect the certificate also earn 5% per year.

Work an example in the shape of our actual file. The median delinquent parcel in Marion County owes $1,916.00. Bid the minimum and redeem at month five, and the penalty is 10% of $1,916.00. Win the same parcel by bidding $12,000 because the house behind it is worth six figures, and the penalty is still 10% of $1,916.00 - while the extra $10,084 sits there earning 5% per year and comes back to the owner. Same parcel, same redemption, and the return on capital collapses.

That is the whole game in Indiana. In a state where bidders compete the rate itself downward, competition costs you yield. Here your competition costs you nothing on the penalty and everything on the denominator, because the penalty is pinned to a number nobody bids on. Keeping the overbid low is not a tactic in Indiana - it is the strategy.

One note on how the rate is described elsewhere. This page follows our approved state reference on the flat 110% / 115% mechanic. If you meet a table that presents Indiana as paying 25% in the first year, treat that as an addition that the statute does not perform.

How many Indiana properties are actually tax delinquent?

Here is our count, read from the live county database on 26 August 2026:

• 9,013 tax-delinquent parcels in our Indiana file, and 9,013 of them carry a dollar amount owed - 100% priced, with no unpriced records at all
• 2 Indiana counties with delinquent records in our data, out of the 92 counties in the state: Marion and Tippecanoe
• $37,275,458.72 owed in total across those records
• $4,135.74 average owed per parcel, against a measured median of $1,827.05
• $0.22 on the smallest debt in the file, and $756,247.00 on the largest
• 8,687 of the records carry a street-numbered address; the other 326 are identified another way, and none are blank

A property counts as delinquent here when the county's own file shows money owed on it. The two counties split as follows:

County	Parcels	Total owed	Median owed
Marion	6,643	$29,114,421.00	$1,916.00
Tippecanoe	2,370	$8,161,037.72	$1,590.81

Marion is 73.7% of the parcels and 78.1% of the dollars; Tippecanoe is the remaining 26.3% and 21.9%. The two rows sum to 9,013 parcels and $37,275,458.72, which is the whole file.

Two counties out of 92 is the honest limit of this page, and the two files are not the same kind of file. Marion's records come from the county's tax-sale dataset, so they are parcels carried to the sale rather than every parcel in the county with a balance. Tippecanoe's come from the county's own delinquent record report, sitting inside a full parcel roll we also hold. Nothing on this page should be read as a statewide delinquency rate for Indiana.

Marion's parcels are covered forty times over - and that is the problem

We hold an estimated value on 6,598 of Marion County's 6,643 delinquent parcels. Those 6,598 parcels owe $28,281,261.00 between them and carry $1,150,459,200.00 of estimated value: the file is covered 40.7 times over. The median parcel is worth $105,400 and owes $1,916.00, a ratio of 41.2 to 1 at the middle of the file.

Spread across the whole valued set:

Value against taxes owed	Parcels	Share of valued parcels
Under 5x	201	3.0%
5x to 20x	908	13.8%
20x to 100x	4,259	64.5%
100x and up	1,230	18.6%

Those four bands sum to 6,598 parcels, which is the whole valued set. 6,274 parcels - 95.1% of it - carry more than ten times their tax debt in value, and only 56 parcels, 0.85%, are worth less than they owe.

Read that next to the overbid rule and the two halves of this page collide. Cover of forty to one is exactly the condition that produces heavy overbidding: every serious bidder can see the same gap, and the auction is the mechanism for competing it away. The certificate still pays 10% or 15% of a $1,916 minimum bid no matter how high the room drives the price. An Indiana file this well covered is not an invitation to bid up - it is a warning that everyone else will.

One nuance worth carrying into a bid list. The 2,041 Marion parcels owing under $1,000 have a median estimated value of $16,200, against $105,400 across the valued file as a whole. The cheapest tax debts are not small debts on good houses; they are small debts on vacant lots and low-value parcels. A screen sorted by lowest taxes owed selects for the least valuable property in the county, which is the opposite of what most people think they are doing when they run it.

We hold no estimated values for Tippecanoe County yet, so every figure in this section is Marion only.

A file whose middle is genuinely the middle

The distribution of the 9,013 priced records, read straight from the file:

Amount owed	Parcels	Share of parcels
Under $500	1,690	18.8%
$500 to $1,999	3,114	34.6%
$2,000 to $4,999	2,769	30.7%
$5,000 and up	1,440	16.0%

Those four bands sum to 9,013 parcels, which is the whole file. The 1,440 parcels owing $5,000 or more hold $24,347,069.41, which is 65.3% of every dollar in the file. At the very top, 27 parcels - 0.30% of the file - owe $100,000 or more and carry $7,713,643.78, 20.7% of all the money.

What makes Indiana unusual in this series is how mild that concentration is. The average Indiana debt in our file is $4,135.74 and the measured median is $1,827.05: the average is 2.3 times the median. Our Illinois page measured 5.3 times and our Colorado page measured 4 times on the same test. Indiana's middle band is also its biggest - 34.6% of parcels owe between $500 and $1,999 - so the typical parcel here really is typical, and modelling the file at its average distorts far less than it would in either of the two states this series covered before it.

Tippecanoe gives us something rare: a real delinquency rate

For most counties we hold a delinquent list and nothing to divide it by. Tippecanoe is different. We hold the county's full parcel roll - 65,421 distinct parcels - and the county's own delinquent record report sitting inside it. That makes the denominator real:

• 2,370 of 65,421 Tippecanoe parcels carry a delinquent balance - a measured delinquency rate of 3.62%
• Those parcels owe $8,161,037.72, an average of $3,443.48 and a median of $1,590.81

Tippecanoe is also the only Indiana county where we can count how long a balance has been outstanding, and the shape is a clean escalation:

Years delinquent	Parcels	Total owed	Average owed
1 year	1,776	$5,169,248.08	$2,910.61
2 years	433	$1,791,103.05	$4,136.50
3 years	161	$1,200,686.59	$7,457.68

Those three rows sum to 2,370 parcels and $8,161,037.72, which is the whole Tippecanoe file. First-year balances are 74.9% of the parcels. The 161 three-year parcels are 6.8% of the county's delinquent list but carry 14.7% of its money, and they owe more than twice the county average each.

Against a one-year redemption period, a three-year balance is a parcel that has been through the process and come out the other side still delinquent. That is a title or property signal rather than a cash-flow signal, and it is where Indiana's 120-day resale window and county-acquired certificates start to matter. Our Marion records carry no year-outstanding detail at all - every row arrives stamped as a single year - so they are excluded from this section entirely rather than blended into it.

How to work the Indiana file

You can browse our Indiana coverage county by county on the Indiana county hub. The Marion County file described above sits on the Marion County page and the Tippecanoe file on the Tippecanoe County page. If you want the wider Indiana picture - what a delinquent parcel record actually contains, and how to work one - our Indiana tax delinquent property guide covers the process end to end, and the redemption period lookup puts Indiana's one-year and 120-day windows next to every other state's.

Three filters do most of the work on a file shaped like this one:

1. Set a ceiling on the overbid before you set a floor on the property. Your penalty is fixed to the minimum bid, so the only variable you control at the auction is how much dead capital you attach to it at 5% per year. Decide the maximum premium per dollar of minimum bid in advance and hold to it.
2. Do not sort by lowest taxes owed. In Marion the 2,041 parcels owing under $1,000 have a median value of $16,200 against $105,400 across the file. That filter selects vacant lots, not bargains.
3. Treat years outstanding as a risk field. In Tippecanoe, three-year balances carry more than twice the county's average debt and have already survived a redemption cycle. They are cheap for a reason that is usually attached to the title.

One more thing to price in before you bid: 109 of the Marion parcels carry a deceased-owner signal in our data and 3 carry an heir signal. Against a one-year clock and a statutory notice requirement, a dead record owner is not a footnote - it is the thing most likely to make your notice fail.

Start a free LienSuite account to browse the Indiana file with those filters, or to be notified when we add another Indiana county.

Indiana tax sale questions, answered

Is Indiana a tax lien state or a tax deed state?

A tax lien state. Indiana counties sell a tax-sale certificate on the delinquent taxes at an annual sale, most commonly in the fall. The buyer holds a claim to be repaid, not title. A tax deed can follow if the owner never redeems, but only after statutory notice and a court petition, not automatically.

What interest rate do Indiana tax liens pay?

It is a penalty rather than a rate. Redemption costs a flat 110% of the minimum bid within the first six months, or 115% in months seven through twelve - a 10% or 15% penalty, whichever window applies. It does not accrue day by day and it does not annualize. The overbid you paid above the minimum earns a separate 5% per year, as do any taxes you pay later to protect the certificate.

Do Indiana tax liens pay 25% in the first year?

No. The 10% and 15% tiers are alternatives, not a running total: an owner redeeming in month eleven pays 115% of the minimum bid, not 125%. There is no point in the redemption year at which both tiers have been paid. Adding them together overstates a first-year Indiana return by ten percentage points.

How does bidding work at an Indiana tax sale?

It is a premium, or overbid, format. The opening bid covers the delinquent taxes, penalties and costs, and bidders raise the price upward, with the highest bidder taking the certificate. Most counties run the auction online through SRI's Zeus Auction platform or GovEase, with registration and a deposit required beforehand.

What is the overbid, and why does it matter so much?

It is the amount you bid above the minimum of taxes, penalties and costs. It is held for the owner and refunded if they redeem, and it earns you 5% per year in the meantime. Because the redemption penalty is calculated only on the minimum bid, every extra dollar of overbid dilutes your return without increasing your payout. Keeping it low is the single biggest lever on an Indiana certificate.

How long is the redemption period in Indiana?

One year from the date of sale for most property. Certain parcels the county acquired and resold, and some vacant or abandoned properties, carry a shorter 120-day redemption window.

Can I end up owning the property in Indiana?

Only if the owner fails to redeem and you complete the statutory process. You receive a tax-sale certificate, not a deed. After the redemption period runs out you must serve notice and petition a court, and only then can a tax deed issue.

How many tax delinquent properties are there in Indiana?

Our Indiana file holds 9,013 tax-delinquent parcels as of 26 August 2026, across Marion and Tippecanoe counties, owing $37,275,458.72 in total - an average of $4,135.74 and a median of $1,827.05. That is two of Indiana's 92 counties, so it is a two-county figure, not a statewide one.

Which Indiana county has the most tax delinquent property?

Marion County, home to Indianapolis, with 6,643 delinquent parcels owing $29,114,421.00 - 73.7% of the parcels in our Indiana file and 78.1% of the dollars. Tippecanoe County, home to Lafayette, holds the other 2,370 parcels and $8,161,037.72.

How big is a typical Indiana tax debt?

The median is $1,827.05 and the average is $4,135.74. 18.8% of parcels owe under $500, while the 16.0% owing $5,000 or more hold 65.3% of all the money. The smallest debt in the file is $0.22 and the largest is $756,247.00.

Which Indiana counties does LienSuite cover?

Two with delinquent inventory - Marion and Tippecanoe - in the database and priced as of 26 August 2026. The other 90 Indiana counties are not in our delinquent file today.

Where these numbers come from

Every parcel count, average, median and dollar figure on this page was read from LienSuite's live county database on 26 August 2026, aggregated from 206 county sources and refreshed on an ongoing basis. "Tax delinquent" means the county's own file shows money owed on the property.

The figures are county-scoped passes over the Marion and Tippecanoe records, not estimates. The four owed bands sum to 9,013 parcels, which is 100% of the file, and the median of $1,827.05 is a true median measured across both counties in one pass rather than a blend of county medians; the quartiles are $732.48 and $3,674.00. The per-county counts reconcile exactly against the county counter that drives the storefront: it reports 6,643 for Marion and 2,370 for Tippecanoe, the same two numbers used here. The 92-county denominator is read from our own county tracking table, which lists 92 Indiana counties, two of which carry delinquent inventory.

Each county arrives from a single county feed - Marion from the county's tax-sale dataset, Tippecanoe from the county's 2026 delinquent record report - so there is no second feed to double-count against. Parcel numbers are distinct within each county: 6,660 distinct parcels across 6,660 Marion records and 65,421 distinct parcels across 65,421 Tippecanoe records. Marion holds 6,660 records in total of which 6,643 carry an amount; the other 17 are excluded from every figure here. Tippecanoe's 65,421-record roll is a full parcel roll, which is what makes the 3.62% delinquency rate in this page a measured rate rather than an estimate.

Of the 9,013 delinquent records, 8,687 carry a street-numbered address and 326 identify the property another way; none are blank. The city field is empty across the whole Indiana file today, which is why this page carries no city breakdown - we publish the columns the counties actually sent us. Estimated values cover 6,598 of the 6,643 Marion parcels and none of the Tippecanoe parcels, so every value, cover-ratio and value-band figure on this page is Marion-only and says so where it appears.

For scale: Marion is the 66th largest delinquent county file we hold anywhere in the country, out of 462 counties carrying 1,914,265 delinquent parcels between them.

Figures move as counties publish new rolls, and the county counts behind this page were last refreshed on 26 August 2026. If you believe a figure here is wrong, write to [email protected] and we will check it against the source file.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not legal, tax, or investment advice. Indiana tax sales, redemption and tax deeds are governed by Indiana Code 6-1.1-24 and 6-1.1-25, and both statute and county practice change over time. Sale calendars, online auction platforms and registration deadlines are set county by county. Always confirm the current procedure with the county treasurer or auditor, and consult a licensed Indiana attorney before bidding.