Understand Lexington before you commit to an address
Lexington is 35,000 people ten miles northwest of the city where the Revolutionary War began, a town meeting town of large lots and strong schools, with a laboratory corridor along Hartwell Avenue and no railway station of any kind. Figures are the same two indexes measured the same way in all 24 municipalities here, on Massachusetts rules including annual full-value assessment. It has not adopted the residential exemption, so the rate Lexington publishes is the rate you pay on the whole value, exactly as a landlord does.
The cost of living in Lexington, and what a home costs
Two calculators on Massachusetts's own rules: monthly compounding and the month private mortgage insurance stops, and the closing costs this state actually charges.
Rent or buy in Lexington
Whether buying here beats renting, and the year it turns over. With no residential exemption in this municipality, the tax line is the published rate on the whole value from the first bill.
Mortgage calculator
Monthly compounding, the 30-year fixed loan, the private mortgage insurance a low down payment triggers, and a closing where Massachusetts charges the buyer no transfer tax and no tax on the mortgage at all.
Then work out whether Lexington is the right part of the metro
No neighborhood guides for Lexington yet. What is here instead is all 24 municipalities of the inner metro on one comparable footing.
All 24 municipalities inside eleven miles
Every municipality here side by side on home value, the rate the town publishes, the rate an owner-occupier really pays after the residential exemption, and the rate a landlord pays on the same building.
Compare the metroBoston, and the exemption it grants
The municipality at the middle of this table, on its own hub: the second highest published residential rate here, one of the lowest bills a resident owner actually pays, and the filing deadline that decides which of the two you get in your first year.
Read the Boston hubTampa Bay and its twenty-four
The two Zillow indexes in the same month, on Florida's homestead exemption instead of Massachusetts's residential one, in a market repricing storm surge in real time.
Compare the two coastsWhat buying in Lexington actually involves
Lexington publishes $12.31 per $1,000, third highest of these twenty-four, and grants no residential exemption, so an owner pays the whole thing: 1.23% of the purchase price and about $19,700 a year on a typical home value of $1.6 million. Both of those are the highest numbers on this table. Lexington sits at the top of the range that Cambridge sits at the bottom of, and the ratio between the two effective rates is more than three and a half to one, on adjacent municipalities in the same county under identical state law.
It is worth being precise about why, because the obvious explanation is wrong. Lexington is not a town without a commercial base: it shifts at 1.96 to one and has a real laboratory and office corridor along Hartwell Avenue and Route 128. What it does not have is the exemption. Take Cambridge's exemption away and Cambridge's effective rate becomes its published rate; give Lexington one and its bill falls by several thousand dollars. The lever that separates the extremes of this table is the one nobody outside these nine municipalities has heard of.
There is no rail. The Lexington branch of the Boston and Maine closed in 1977 and the roadbed became the Minuteman Bikeway in 1993, which is a genuinely good thing to have and is not a train. Every commute from Lexington is a car or a bus to Alewife, and at ten and a half miles that is a real constraint that the price does not appear to have noticed.
The stock is postwar and later on large lots, with mid-century modern neighborhoods that are locally significant and an eighteenth-century center that is heavily protected. Lexington has also been one of the more active towns in the state on multifamily zoning and has permitted a good deal of it under the MBTA Communities requirements, which for a buyer means the pattern of what gets built near the center over the next decade is genuinely open.
Moving to Lexington: check these before you commit
- That there is no residential exemption, which is the difference between the highest bill on this table and a middling one
- The full tax bill in dollars rather than the rate, since a high rate on a $1.6 million house is a large annual number
- The override history and the capital plan, in a town meeting town with a large school budget
- Whether the property is in a historic district or a neighborhood conservation district
- The commute you would actually drive, because there is no rail and Route 2 and 128 are the options
- What multifamily zoning permits near the address, which the town has changed recently
Lexington publishes a residential rate of $12 per $1,000 for fiscal 2026 and grants no residential exemption, so nothing stands between that rate and your bill. Business pays $24, a classification shift of 1.96 to one. Both figures are what the municipality adopted and the Department of Revenue certified, rather than anything assembled on this site.
Sourced, dated, and separated from the guesswork
Every Lexington figure below is cited, stamped with the period it describes, and editable, because a number for the whole city rarely describes your purchase. Appreciation and investment returns are assumptions rather than facts, and they are labelled that way. Read the methodology for how the line is drawn.
- Prices, rents and tax rates: published statistics and the official schedules.
- Nothing here is a lender quote, a pre-approval or financial advice.
Where the Lexington figures come from
- Tax Rates by Class, fiscal year 2026 · Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Division of Local Services, Municipal Databank · retrieved Supports: The certified fiscal 2026 residential rate for each of the twenty-four municipalities, from Cambridge at $6.67 to Everett at $12.62, The commercial, industrial and personal property rate behind each of them, which gives the classification shift, That Arlington and Belmont charge a single rate to all classes, That fiscal 2026 is the most recent fully certified year: at the retrieval date only two of the state's 352 municipalities had a fiscal 2027 rate on the table
- Residential exemption, fiscal year 2026 · City of Boston Assessing Department · retrieved Supports: $351,108 of assessed value excluded from an owner-occupied parcel, worth $4,353.74 at the city's $12.40 rate, The 1 April filing deadline and the requirement to have owned and occupied on the previous 1 January
- City of Somerville FY2026 Classification Hearing, 25 November 2025, and the FY2026 Property Tax Update · Somerville Board of Assessors · retrieved Supports: A residential exemption of 35% of average assessed value adopted for fiscal 2026, yielding savings of up to $4,578, A minimum residential factor of 82.816, the legal minimum for the city, Form LA-4 parcel counts and assessed values by use code, from which the average Class One value of about $1,191,000 follows, That Somerville carries 7,251 condominium parcels against 2,315 single-family parcels, That life science property in this market depreciated about 20% between fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2026
- City Council meeting minutes, 28 October 2025: adoption of a residential exemption and minimum residential factor for fiscal 2026 · City of Malden · retrieved Supports: A unanimous vote to adopt a residential factor of 0.9054 and a residential exemption of 35%, raised from 30%, The council's own statement on the record that the increase is a tax shift benefiting owner-occupied households and not a tax cut, and that the shift is budget neutral, Average fiscal 2026 values of $449,000 for a condominium, $666,000 for a single family, $861,000 for a two-family and $991,000 for a three-family, That the increase from 30% to 35% is worth about $291 a year, from which the $178,684 exemption value here is derived, A Proposition 2 1/2 override under discussion for fiscal 2027 at $5.4 million and $8.2 million
- Residential exemption information for fiscal year 2026 · City of Chelsea Board of Assessors · retrieved Supports: An exemption of 35% of the average assessed value of all Class One residential parcels, $279,066 of assessed value excluded for fiscal 2026, worth $3,203.68 at the city's $11.48 rate, The 1 April 2026 filing deadline and the 1 January ownership and occupancy test
- Residential exemption information, fiscal year 2026 · City known as the Town of Watertown, Assessing Department · retrieved Supports: The maximum 35% exemption recommended by the assessors and adopted by the council for fiscal 2026, $324,715 of assessed value excluded, worth $3,961.52 at the town's $12.20 rate