Understand Lynn before you commit to an address
Lynn is 103,000 people on the ocean north of Revere, historically a shoe manufacturing city and still a General Electric works, with a three-mile beach, a wooded 2,200-acre park in the middle of it, and the lowest prices in this layer after Chelsea. 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 Lynn publishes is the rate you pay on the whole value, exactly as a landlord does. It fronts the ocean or Boston Harbor, which is what the insurance figure here is banded on, and flood is a separate policy that covers what homeowners insurance does not.
The cost of living in Lynn, 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 Lynn
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 Lynn is the right part of the metro
No neighborhood guides for Lynn 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 Lynn actually involves
Lynn publishes $10.30 per $1,000 with a commercial rate of $19.64 and grants no residential exemption. An owner pays 1.03% of the purchase price, about $6,100 a year on a typical value of $589,000. Lynn is the largest municipality in this layer without an exemption, and it is the one where the absence costs the most in relative terms. A flat slab of the kind Chelsea grants would be worth a far larger share of a Lynn bill than of a Newton one, because the exemption is a fixed dollar amount and Lynn's houses are the cheapest of the municipalities that grant none.
That is not a criticism of the city and the arithmetic runs both ways. The exemption is budget neutral: adopting it would move money from Lynn's landlords and its more valuable houses to its owner-occupiers, and in a city with a very large rental population that is a genuine trade rather than a free gain. But a buyer choosing between Lynn and Chelsea should know that two comparable cities twelve minutes apart have made opposite decisions about it.
Lynn has the assets a coastal city gets and the costs that come with them. Lynn Beach and Nahant Beach run the length of the shore, the ferry to Boston runs in season, two commuter rail stops connect to North Station, and Lynn Woods is one of the largest municipal parks in the country. The shore is also low, the flats behind it flood, and homeowners insurance covers none of it.
The stock is two- and three-family wood frame in the flats and along the Lynnway, Victorians and larger singles up the hills toward Lynnfield and Swampscott, and a downtown of nineteenth-century mill and shoe factory buildings, some converted to housing and many not. The conversions are worth diligence: a former factory is a different building from a converted three-decker and a different one again from new construction.
Moving to Lynn: check these before you commit
- That there is no residential exemption here, unlike Chelsea twelve minutes away
- Flood zone and elevation anywhere in the flats or near the shore, and a real flood quote
- For a mill or factory conversion: the reserve, the envelope, and what the developer left undone
- For a two- or three-family: leases, rent roll and deleading certification
- Which part of Lynn, since the flats, the hills and the downtown are three different markets
- The commuter rail schedule rather than the map, and whether the ferry runs when you need it
Lynn publishes a residential rate of $10 per $1,000 for fiscal 2026 and grants no residential exemption, so nothing stands between that rate and your bill. Business pays $20, a classification shift of 1.91 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 Lynn 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 Lynn 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