The municipalities of Greater Boston
Nine of these 24 municipalities take a flat slab off an owner-occupier's assessed value and 15 do not. The result is a 3.6-fold spread in the rate a homeowner actually pays, across one metro under one set of state laws, and almost none of it is visible in the rates these towns publish.
All 24, sorted by distance from Boston City Hall
Home values are Zillow's index for June 2026. The rate column is published rather than assembled: Massachusetts abolished most county government by 2000, so there is no county levy, no separate school levy and no special district to add. The Department of Revenue certifies one residential rate and one commercial rate per municipality and that is the whole stack. What the table then shows is what happens to that rate before it reaches a homeowner.
| Municipality | County | Miles | Typical home | Year on year | Published rate | Exemption | Owner's rate | Tax a year | Not lived in | Insurance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boston · coastal | Suffolk | 0 | $791,816 | -1.3% | $12.40 | $351,108 | 0.69% | $5,465 | $9,819 | $2,760 |
| Cambridge | Middlesex | 2 | $1,058,319 | -1.5% | $6.67 | $510,208 | 0.35% | $3,656 | $7,059 | $1,860 |
| Chelsea · coastal | Suffolk | 3 | $532,202 | 0.0% | $11.48 | $279,066 | 0.55% | $2,906 | $6,110 | $2,760 |
| Somerville | Middlesex | 3 | $942,964 | +0.4% | $10.98 | $416,939 | 0.61% | $5,776 | $10,354 | $1,860 |
| Everett · coastal | Middlesex | 3 | $641,064 | +1.4% | $12.62 | $204,651 | 0.86% | $5,508 | $8,090 | $2,760 |
| Brookline | Norfolk | 4 | $1,193,341 | -4.9% | $10.24 | $354,974 | 0.72% | $8,585 | $12,220 | $1,860 |
| Revere · coastal | Suffolk | 4 | $623,186 | +0.4% | $8.94 | None | 0.89% | $5,571 | $5,571 | $2,760 |
| Medford | Middlesex | 5 | $844,337 | +0.5% | $8.63 | None | 0.86% | $7,287 | $7,287 | $1,860 |
| Malden | Middlesex | 5 | $688,110 | +1.5% | $11.40 | $178,684 | 0.84% | $5,807 | $7,844 | $1,860 |
| Arlington | Middlesex | 6 | $1,086,584 | +2.1% | $10.67 | None | 1.07% | $11,594 | $11,594 | $1,860 |
| Belmont | Middlesex | 7 | $1,463,936 | +0.9% | $11.51 | None | 1.15% | $16,850 | $16,850 | $1,860 |
| Watertown | Middlesex | 7 | $839,029 | +1.2% | $12.20 | $324,715 | 0.75% | $6,275 | $10,236 | $1,860 |
| Melrose | Middlesex | 7 | $928,760 | +3.4% | $11.47 | None | 1.15% | $10,653 | $10,653 | $1,860 |
| Milton | Norfolk | 7 | $1,093,192 | +2.3% | $11.81 | None | 1.18% | $12,911 | $12,911 | $1,860 |
| Saugus · coastal | Essex | 8 | $697,860 | +0.8% | $10.42 | None | 1.04% | $7,272 | $7,272 | $2,760 |
| Newton | Middlesex | 8 | $1,538,927 | +2.0% | $9.69 | None | 0.97% | $14,912 | $14,912 | $1,860 |
| Quincy · coastal | Norfolk | 8 | $686,803 | +0.9% | $11.78 | None | 1.18% | $8,091 | $8,091 | $2,760 |
| Lynn · coastal | Essex | 9 | $588,977 | +0.5% | $10.30 | None | 1.03% | $6,066 | $6,066 | $2,760 |
| Waltham | Middlesex | 9 | $832,401 | +1.0% | $10.32 | $317,643 | 0.64% | $5,312 | $8,590 | $1,860 |
| Woburn | Middlesex | 10 | $769,822 | +1.9% | $9.15 | None | 0.92% | $7,044 | $7,044 | $1,860 |
| Wakefield | Middlesex | 10 | $827,833 | +2.0% | $11.74 | None | 1.17% | $9,719 | $9,719 | $1,860 |
| Lexington | Middlesex | 10 | $1,597,777 | +2.3% | $12.31 | None | 1.23% | $19,669 | $19,669 | $1,860 |
| Needham | Norfolk | 11 | $1,567,155 | +5.2% | $10.83 | None | 1.08% | $16,972 | $16,972 | $1,860 |
| Braintree · coastal | Norfolk | 11 | $743,095 | +2.0% | $10.06 | None | 1.01% | $7,476 | $7,476 | $2,760 |
Read the last three columns together. Owner's rate is what somebody who lives in the house pays; tax a year is that rate in dollars; not lived in is the published rate on the whole value, which is what a landlord pays on the identical building. The insurance column is the only estimate in the table and it is banded two ways: $1,860 a year inland and $2,760 for the eight municipalities that front the Atlantic or Boston Harbor. It is homeowners insurance only, and flood is a separate policy. The Community Preservation Act surcharge is on the bill in the municipalities that adopted it and is in none of these figures.
A flat slab, voted every autumn, that nobody outside nine city halls talks about
Massachusetts General Laws chapter 59, section 5C lets a municipality exempt up to 35% of the average assessed value of all Class One residential parcels from the tax bill of anyone whose principal residence is on one. The important word is average. It is a flat dollar amount, not a percentage of your house. Every qualifying owner in Boston gets the same $351,108 off, whether the house is worth four hundred thousand dollars or four million, which means it is worth several times more as a share of the bill at the bottom of the market than at the top. That is the intended effect and it is why the statute exists.
Nine municipalities here grant one: Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Somerville, Everett, Brookline, Malden, Watertown and Waltham. The other 15 do not. And it reaches only an owner who lives in the building, so the person who owns the identical house next door and rents it out pays the published rate on the whole value. In Boston that is $9,819 a year against $5,465.
The cleanest way to see it is Somerville against Medford. They are adjacent, 2.2 miles apart hall to hall, built from the same three-decker stock in the same decades, and both now have Green Line service. Medford publishes $8.63 per $1,000 and Somerville publishes $10.98, more than two dollars higher. A Medford owner pays $7,287 a year and a Somerville owner pays $5,776, on a house worth $98,627 more. The published rates run one way and the bills run the other, and the entire difference is one vote each December.
The residential exemption is a local option and it is voted again every autumn at the classification hearing, so a town that grants it this year is not obliged to grant it next year and several have changed the percentage recently. It applies only to the home you are domiciled in on 1 January, it is not automatic on purchase, and you have to file for it: the deadline is three months after the third-quarter bill, which in most of these municipalities means 1 April. It does not travel with you across a town line. And it is the owner-occupier's alone, so on a two-family where you live upstairs and rent the ground floor you get the whole exemption on the whole parcel, while the absentee owner of the identical building next door gets none of it.
Proposition 2 1/2 caps the levy, and classification sets the rate
Two things have to be true at once for this table to make sense. The first is that Proposition 2 1/2, MGL c.59 s.21C, caps the total amount a municipality may raise: a ceiling of 2.5% of the town's full and fair cash value and a limit that may grow 2.5% a year plus certified new growth. It does not cap the rate. The rate is the permitted levy divided by the taxable value, so a rate can fall while every bill in town rises, and a buyer who thinks 2 1/2 caps their taxes will be wrong every year. Overrides and debt exclusions are the escape valves and both are ordinary.
The second is classification. MGL c.40 s.56 lets a municipality shift part of the levy onto commercial, industrial and personal property, up to 1.75 times that class's share. So the residential rate a town publishes is an output of a local vote about its commercial tax base, not a measure of what it spends. Woburn shifts hardest, at 2.34 to one, which is why it publishes $9.15 while charging business $21.43. Arlington and Belmont charge one rate to everybody, and the reason is not virtue: they have almost nothing commercial to shift onto.
Put the two levers together and the published-rate column becomes actively misleading. Everett publishes the highest residential rate on this table at $12.62, and an owner-occupier there pays 0.86%, which is less than several municipalities publishing lower rates. Cambridge publishes the lowest at $6.67 and an owner there pays 0.35%, the lowest of any American municipality on this site. Both of those towns grant the exemption. The spread between the cheapest and dearest owner-occupier rate here is Cambridge at 0.35% against Lexington at 1.23%, a factor of 3.56, and it is the widest on this site inside a single metro.
In dollars the ordering changes again, because value dominates rate: $2,906 a year in Chelsea against $19,669 in Lexington. Home values run from $532,202 in Chelsea to $1,597,777 in Lexington, and three of these 24 fell in value over the year to June 2026.
The whole of this metro sits below the whole of Florida
This site now carries six American metros measured identically: the same two Zillow indexes in the same month, and each state's own arithmetic applied to them. The median rate an owner-occupier pays is 0.97% here against 0.88% around Charlotte, 1.51% around Orlando, 1.60% in Tampa Bay, 1.77% in Miami-Dade and 1.76% on the Palm Beach coast. Charlotte's median is the lower of the two, so this is not the cheapest American metro on the site by that measure. What is true, and more useful, is that the ranges do not overlap: the dearest municipality in Greater Boston, Lexington at 1.23%, pays a lower rate than the cheapest municipality in any of the four Florida metros, where the floor is 1.31%. Twenty-four municipalities against ninety-six, and the two sets do not meet.
The insurance inversion extends north as well. A mainland house is modelled here at $2,760 a year on the coast and $1,860 inland, against $2,160 around Charlotte, $3,720 inland at Orlando, $4,680 on the Tampa Bay coast, $6,060 in Miami-Dade and $6,600 on the Palm Beach coast. Massachusetts has no hurricane landfall record to speak of, no hail season and no wildfire exposure, and it is the cheapest of the six American metros here to insure a house in. Not the cheapest on this site: Greater Montreal is modelled at $1,320 a year, and the Canadian layers sit below the American ones generally.
And then the sentence that matters more than either of those. The bill in dollars runs the other way. 0.97% of $1,597,777 is a great deal more money than 1.60% of $380,283, and a low rate on an expensive house is not a cheap house. If you are choosing between the two halves of this country, compare the annual dollars in the tax column and not the percentages, and then compare the price you would be paying to get them.
Five groupings, and none of them official
Massachusetts does not divide a metro into parts and neither does the MBTA, so this grouping is editorial: built from the water, the river and the radial roads. The twenty-four are the largest municipalities by 2024 population whose town or city hall lies within eleven straight miles of Boston City Hall.
Boston and the inner core
Boston The second highest published residential rate in this layer, and one of the lowest bills a resident owner actually pays. · Cambridge The lowest published rate in Massachusetts and the largest residential exemption, both at once. · Chelsea The lowest annual tax bill of these twenty-four, on the lowest home values. · Somerville The largest residential exemption the statute allows, in a city with almost nothing commercial to shift onto. · Everett The highest published residential rate of these twenty-four, and a middling bill once the exemption comes off. · Brookline The only town in this layer that grants a residential exemption, and the only one whose values fell more than four percent.
North of the Charles
Medford A lower published rate than Somerville and a bill fifteen hundred dollars higher, on a cheaper house. · Malden Raised its residential exemption to the statutory maximum in October 2025, and put an override on the next ballot. · Arlington One of only two municipalities here with a single tax rate, and no exemption to go with it. · Belmont The other single-rate municipality, and the highest bill of any town in this layer that is not Lexington or Needham. · Watertown A city by charter called a town by name, with the maximum residential exemption and a laboratory tax base to pay for it. · Melrose The second-largest one-year price rise of these twenty-four, in a city with essentially no commercial base. · Woburn The largest classification shift of these twenty-four, and no residential exemption at all. · Wakefield On Route 128 itself, taxed like a residential town rather than a commercial one.
The North Shore
Revere Three Blue Line stops and an ocean beach, and no residential exemption to go with either. · Saugus A commercial tax base made entirely of Route 1, and marshland along the river. · Lynn The second cheapest housing of these twenty-four, and the largest city here without an exemption to protect it.
West to 128
Newton Thirteen villages, one municipality, and no residential exemption on any of them. · Waltham The original 128 office corridor, still paying for a maximum residential exemption with it. · Lexington The highest effective tax rate and the highest annual bill of these twenty-four. · Needham The largest one-year price rise in this layer, and the second highest bill.
South of the city
Milton The state's test case on multifamily zoning, and no residential exemption on a seven-mile commute. · Quincy The second-largest municipality in this layer without a residential exemption. · Braintree The farthest of these twenty-four, at eleven miles, and the end of the Red Line.
The rule's most conspicuous casualty is Weymouth, 11.3 miles out with 60,159 people, which would rank eleventh on this table and misses the eleven-mile cutoff by three tenths of a mile. Wellesley at 12.7 miles, Peabody at 13.2 and Salem at 13.9 are outside for the same reason. Inside the radius, Dedham, Stoneham, Winchester, Winthrop and Swampscott are excluded by population rather than by distance. A rule that produces an awkward result and is applied anyway is worth more than one adjusted until nobody notices.
Sources
The Department of Revenue certifies a residential and a commercial rate for every Massachusetts municipality each fiscal year, and this layer carries the fiscal 2026 figures directly. Fiscal 2026 ran from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026 and its values are as of 1 January 2025; it is the most recent fully certified year. The exemption amounts are each municipality's own published figure, except in Somerville and Malden, which publish what the exemption is worth in tax rather than the value it removes, so the value there is that saving divided by the rate. These are the figures on this page that are estimates:
- Home insurance: $155 a month inland and $230 on a municipality that fronts the ocean or Boston Harbor. It is the least certain figure here and the one to replace with a real quote; it also excludes flood, which is a separate policy
- The residential exemption in Somerville and Malden. Both cities publish what the exemption is worth in tax rather than the assessed value it removes, so the value here is that published saving divided by the published rate: $416,939 in Somerville from a saving of up to $4,578 at $10.98, and $178,684 in Malden from the $291 the council's own 30% to 35% increase is worth at $11.40. The other seven are the amount the municipality itself publishes
- The condominium fee at $625 a month, which in this metro spans a converted three-decker with three units and no funded reserve at one end and a professionally managed tower at the other. The range matters more than the midpoint
- The split of rent by bedroom count, on HUD's fiscal 2026 Fair Market Rents for this metro. The level is Zillow's and measured, the shape is HUD's and measured, and applying one to the other is the assumption
- The utilities an owner pays over a renter, at $210 a month, which is the highest figure on this site because here the owner picks up the heat
- Maintenance at 1% of the home's value a year, which on housing stock largely built between 1890 and 1940 is optimistic rather than conservative
- Every forward-looking rate: appreciation, rent growth, cost inflation and the return on the invested difference
- And nothing at all for the Community Preservation Act surcharge, for flood insurance, or for a Proposition 2 1/2 override or debt exclusion, any of which can be voted in a single town meeting and none of which is in a published rate
- Tax Rates by Class, fiscal year 2026 · Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Division of Local Services, Municipal Databank, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Residential exemption, fiscal year 2026 · City of Boston Assessing Department, retrieved 2026-09-01
- City of Somerville FY2026 Classification Hearing, 25 November 2025, and the FY2026 Property Tax Update · Somerville Board of Assessors, retrieved 2026-09-01
- City Council meeting minutes, 28 October 2025: adoption of a residential exemption and minimum residential factor for fiscal 2026 · City of Malden, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Residential exemption information for fiscal year 2026 · City of Chelsea Board of Assessors, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Residential exemption information, fiscal year 2026 · City known as the Town of Watertown, Assessing Department, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Residential exemptions · Town of Brookline Assessors, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Assessor's Department: the residential exemption · City of Waltham, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Assessor's office: owner-occupant residential exemption, fiscal year 2026 · City of Everett, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Residential exemption and fiscal 2026 tax rates · City of Cambridge Assessing Department, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), mid-tier, smoothed and seasonally adjusted: city files for all homes, single family and condominium, June 2026 · Zillow Research, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), all homes, smoothed: city file, June 2026 · Zillow Research, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Fiscal Year 2026 Fair Market Rents: Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH HUD Metro FMR Area · United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Annual estimates of the resident population for minor civil divisions, 2020 to 2024 · United States Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Primary Mortgage Market Survey, 27 August 2026 · Freddie Mac, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Average home insurance cost in Massachusetts, 2026 · MoneyGeek and Insurance.com, on carrier rate filings, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Chapter 59, Section 5C: residential exemption · Massachusetts General Laws, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Chapter 59, Section 21C: Proposition 2 1/2 · Massachusetts General Laws, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Chapter 59, Section 38: valuation at full and fair cash value · Massachusetts General Laws, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Chapter 40, Section 56: classification and the minimum residential factor · Massachusetts General Laws, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Chapter 64D, Section 1: excise upon deeds, instruments and writings · Massachusetts General Laws, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Chapter 40P: the Massachusetts Rent Control Prohibition Act · Massachusetts General Laws, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Chapter 188: the declaration of homestead · Massachusetts General Laws, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Real Estate Bar Association for Massachusetts v. National Real Estate Information Services, 459 Mass. 512 · Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, retrieved 2026-09-01
- Homebuyer programs and down payment assistance · MassHousing, retrieved 2026-09-01
- ONE Mortgage · Massachusetts Housing Partnership, retrieved 2026-09-01
None of this includes the Community Preservation Act surcharge. The CPA is a local option under MGL c.44B, adopted by ballot, that adds a surcharge of 1% to 3% to the property tax bill to fund open space, historic preservation and affordable housing, usually with the first $100,000 of value exempted. It is levied on the bill rather than on the value, so it is in no published rate and in no figure on this page, and it is adopted in a good many of these municipalities. Check whether the town has it and at what percentage before you treat the tax line here as the whole tax line. Massachusetts has a homestead and it is not a tax exemption. A declaration of homestead under MGL c.188 protects up to $500,000 of the equity in your principal residence from most creditors, with $125,000 protected automatically whether you file or not. It does nothing at all to your tax bill. The residential exemption is the thing that lowers the bill, it is a different filing with a different office, and it does nothing at all for your creditors. If you are arriving from a state where homestead means the tax break, this is the sentence to remember. Homeowners insurance does not cover flood, and along this coast that distinction is the one that costs money. Boston Harbor, Revere Beach, the Lynn shore, the Saugus marshes, the Quincy necks and the Fore River are all tidal, and the flood policy is separate, is priced off an elevation certificate, and is not in any figure on this page. Nothing here is a barrier island, so the exposure is a smaller version of what the Florida layers describe, but a low-lying lot in Revere or on Houghs Neck is a flood question before it is a tax question. Nothing here is a listing, a lender quote or financial advice. Rates are set at a classification hearing each autumn, the exemption is voted at the same hearing and applied for by 1 April, and an override can be put to a ballot at any time. Confirm anything you plan to act on, and read the research and sourcing methodology for how the line between a fact and an assumption is drawn on this site.