It is broken out on your property tax bill. Just not in what may be a user-friendly way. You'll have a land value, and then a separate value for the structures that may be called something like improvement value.
For example, take a look at a random tax assessment I pulled up at https://qpublic.schneidercorp.com/Application.aspx?AppID=960&LayerID=21179&PageTypeID=4&PageID=9059&...
You can see it has "land value" as well as "building value". Added together that's the total taxable value of the property. Understand this for only for the purpose of determining how much tax will be assessed for the owner to pay. It serves *no* *other* *purpose* on this planet.
Now if you look at https://putapps.putnam-fl.com/palookup/main.php which is a property tax bill from a completely different county, you can see they have it broken out as "Just Value of Land" and "Improvement Value".
So you can rest assured that it's broken down on your tax bill one way or another.
Why does TurboTax need this information?
The numbers on the tax bill are "NOT" used by TurboTax to figure any tax liability or tax deduction. It's used to figure what percentage of your overall cost that you "actually paid" for the property, is allocated to the land.
For example,if you paid $250,000 for your property, nowhere on your sales paperwork does it show a breakdown of what was paid for land, and what was paid for structures on the land.
If on your property tax bill it shows a tax value of $20,000 for the land and $80,000 for the structure, that's a total tax value of $100,000. So 20,000 divided by 100,000 equals 0.2 meaning the land value is 20% of it's total tax value.
So if you paid $250,000 for the property, 250,000 times 0.2 equals 50,000 indicating that of the total $250,000 you paid for the property, $50,000 is what you paid for the land. Therefore in the asset entry screen for that specific asset you enter $250,000 in the "cost" box, and $50,000 in the "cost of land" box.
The program will do the math "for you" to depreciate the $200,000 you paid for the structure over whatever period of time applies, depending on the asset classification of that structure.
