Property 'value' does not exist on type 'EventTarget'

Here is the simple approach I used:

const element = event.currentTarget as HTMLInputElement
const value = element.value

The error shown by TypeScript compiler is gone and the code works.

Since I reached two questions searching for my problem in a slightly different way, I am replicating my answer in case you end up here.

In the called function, you can define your type with:

emitWordCount(event: { target: HTMLInputElement }) {
  this.countUpdate.emit(event.target.value);
}

This assumes you are only interested in the target property, which is the most common case. If you need to access the other properties of event, a more comprehensive solution involves using the & type intersection operator:

event: Event & { target: HTMLInputElement }

You can also go more specific and instead of using HTMLInputElement you can use e.g. HTMLTextAreaElement for textareas.

In my case, I had:

const handleOnChange = (e: ChangeEvent) => {
  doSomething(e.target.value);
}

And the issue was that I did not provide a type argument to ChangeEvent so that it knows e.target was an HTMLInputElement. Even if I manually told it that target was an input element (e.g. const target: HTMLInputElement = e.target), the ChangeEvent still didn't know that made sense.

The solution was to do:

// add type argument
const handleOnChange = (e: ChangeEvent<HTMLInputElement>) => {
  doSomething(e.target.value);
}

You need to explicitly tell TypeScript the type of the HTMLElement which is your target.

The way to do it is using a generic type to cast it to a proper type:

this.countUpdate.emit((<HTMLTextAreaElement>e.target).value./*...*/)

or (as you like)

this.countUpdate.emit((e.target as HTMLTextAreaElement).value./*...*/)

or (again, matter of preference)

const target = e.target as HTMLTextAreaElement;

this.countUpdate.emit(target.value./*...*/)

This will let TypeScript know that the element is a textarea and it will know of the value property.

The same could be done with any kind of HTML element, whenever you give TypeScript a bit more information about their types it pays you back with proper hints and of course less errors.

To make it easier for the future you might want to directly define an event with the type of its target:

// create a new type HTMLElementEvent that has a target of type you pass
// type T must be a HTMLElement (e.g. HTMLTextAreaElement extends HTMLElement)
type HTMLElementEvent<T extends HTMLElement> = Event & {
  target: T; 
  // probably you might want to add the currentTarget as well
  // currentTarget: T;
}

// use it instead of Event
let e: HTMLElementEvent<HTMLTextAreaElement>;

console.log(e.target.value);

// or in the context of the given example
emitWordCount(e: HTMLElementEvent<HTMLTextAreaElement>) {
  this.countUpdate.emit(e.target.value);
}