Property Tax Statistics (2026)

The median US homeowner paid $3,211 in real estate taxes in 2024, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

Owners with a mortgage paid a median of $3,580 and owners without a mortgage $2,663.

That gap is not a difference in tax policy. It reflects who holds a mortgage: outright owners skew older, and they skew toward properties bought longer ago in places where assessments have not caught up.

New Jersey's median bill was $9,358. West Virginia's was $881 and Alabama's $890.

The top of the table is a tight cluster of the Northeast plus Illinois and California: New Hampshire $6,707, Connecticut $6,573, New York $6,542, Massachusetts $6,080, Illinois $5,399, California $5,369.

The bottom is almost entirely the South: West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky all under $1,700.

Ranking by dollars paid conflates the tax rate with local house prices, and separating them changes the picture.

Illinois has the highest effective rate at about 1.92% of median home value, slightly above New Jersey at 1.89%, despite a median bill $4,000 lower, because Illinois homes are worth far less.

Hawaii is the clearest reversal. Its median bill of $2,385 is close to the middle of the table, but against a median home value of $875,900 it works out to about 0.27%, the lowest rate in the country by a wide margin.

State and local governments collected $214.6 billion in property tax in the first quarter of 2026 on a seasonally adjusted basis.

Individual income tax raised $154.8 billion, sales tax $154.8 billion, and corporate income tax $47.1 billion, so property brought in more than any of them and more than four times the last.

Property tax is therefore the single largest source of state and local tax revenue, at about 37.6% of the $571.4 billion total, and it receives a fraction of the national political attention that income and sales taxes do because it is set locally.

Before seasonal adjustment, property tax collections were $333.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025 and $157.9 billion in the third.

No other major tax swings like that. Individual income tax moved from $131.4 billion to $142.3 billion across the same two quarters.

The reason is that most jurisdictions bill once or twice a year rather than withholding continuously, which also means the household experiences it as a lump rather than a deduction.

An income tax of the same size is withheld from every paycheque and never lands in the account. A property tax bill arrives whole.

Homeowners with an escrow account effectively convert it back into a monthly payment, which is why escrowed owners tend to notice increases through the mortgage payment rather than through a bill.

Owners without a mortgage get neither the withholding nor the escrow, which is why the tax is most visible to exactly the group least likely to have a monthly income to absorb it.

Property tax is the one large housing cost that does not end when the mortgage does.

A household planning around a paid-off house at retirement is planning around a property that still costs $2,663 a year at the national median, and $9,222 in New Jersey.

It also rises. Unlike a fixed-rate mortgage payment, the property tax bill tracks assessed value and local budgets, so the housing cost that survives into retirement is the one that is not fixed.

Property tax is deductible on a federal return only within the combined limit on state and local tax deductions, and only for taxpayers who itemise.

That is why the same $9,358 New Jersey bill can cost two neighbours different net amounts depending on their other state and local taxes and on whether the standard deduction is larger than their itemised total.

The practical consequence is that comparing headline property tax bills across states without accounting for state income tax and the SALT limit overstates the difference for high earners and understates it for others.

A property tax bill is an assessed value multiplied by a rate, and either can change independently.

Rising house prices raise assessments, but many jurisdictions offset that by lowering the rate to hold revenue roughly flat, so a large price increase does not automatically produce a proportional tax increase.

The reverse also holds: a bill can rise in a year when local values fall, if the jurisdiction raises the rate to keep revenue steady.

Property tax is a permanent operating cost of the asset, and at a 1.9% effective rate it is a larger annual drag than most people assume when comparing renting to buying.

It is also the most geographically variable line in the whole housing budget, more variable than insurance and far more variable than maintenance.

So the sensible comparison between two candidate homes is the total annual carrying cost including tax, not the purchase price, because a $50,000 price difference can be entirely offset by a rate difference within a decade.

The effective rates on this page are our own arithmetic: the state's median real estate tax divided by the state's median home value, both from the 2024 ACS.

That is not the same as a median effective rate, because the median-taxed home and the median-valued home are not necessarily the same home.

It is close enough to rank states and to compare orders of magnitude, and it is not precise enough to estimate an individual bill. For that, the local assessor's published rate and your own assessed value are the only correct inputs.

Median real estate taxes paid, split by mortgage status, are Census ACS 1-Year 2024 table B25103. Median home values are table B25077 from the same release.

Aggregate collections, growth rates and the comparison across tax types are from the Census Bureau's Quarterly Summary of State and Local Government Tax Revenue for 2026 Q1, table 1.

The Census reports a response rate of 73.78% for the property tax component of that quarterly survey with a coefficient of variation of 2.02, the lowest response rate of the four major taxes it tracks.