US Property Tax Rates by State (2026)

All 50 States + DC Ranked by Effective Property Tax Rate

New Jersey and Illinois sit alone at the top of the ranking, tied at 1.88%, a full 34 basis points above third-place Connecticut. Hawaii anchors the bottom at 0.29%, less than a sixth of the top rate, with Alabama the only other state under 0.40%.

The gap exists because New Jersey and Illinois both fund an unusually large share of local government, especially K-12 schools, through the property tax rather than state income or sales tax transfers. Hawaii sits at the opposite extreme partly because the state levies property tax almost exclusively at the county level with narrow rate bands, and partly because high median home values push the effective rate down even when dollar collections are not small.

A state’s rank in this table is the right tool for relocation screening and first-pass budgeting. It is the wrong tool for underwriting a specific purchase: every state calculator linked above breaks the statewide figure down by county and layers in homestead exemptions, which is where the real number for a specific address comes from.

Why Property Tax Rates Vary So Much by State

Statutory millage rates are not comparable across states because assessment ratios differ so widely. A 30-mill levy in a state that assesses at 100% of market value produces a far larger bill than the same 30 mills in a state assessing at 4%, which is exactly why the Tax Foundation and this page report effective rates, actual tax paid divided by market value, rather than raw millage.

States that lean hardest on the property tax tend to be states that either have no income tax (Texas, New Hampshire) or that fund an outsized share of K-12 education locally rather than through state transfers (New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut). Property taxes made up 28.9% of total state and local tax collections nationally in fiscal year 2023 and 70.0% of local tax collections specifically, which is why states that push more fiscal responsibility to the local level show up near the top of this ranking almost by construction.

Expect the funding-model gap between high- and low-property-tax states to persist rather than close. States near the bottom, like Hawaii and Alabama, raise comparable or greater shares of revenue through income and sales taxes instead, so a low property tax rate rarely means an overall low tax burden; it means the burden is collected elsewhere.

Regional Patterns: Northeast, Midwest, South, and West

The Northeast is the only region where every state sits above the 0.50% mark, and five of the ten highest-rate states nationally are Northeastern. The region’s older housing stock and dense network of independent municipalities and school districts, each with its own levy, keeps effective rates structurally high regardless of which party controls a given statehouse.

The South shows the widest internal spread of any region, from Texas at 1.40% down to Alabama at 0.37%, a difference driven mainly by whether the state has an income tax. Texas, Tennessee, and Florida lean on property tax in the absence of one; Alabama and Louisiana keep property tax low in part because they tax other bases, including relatively high sales tax rates, more aggressively.

The West is the lowest-taxed region on this metric, largely because of assessment-limitation laws. California’s Prop 13 and Oregon’s Measure 50 both cap annual assessment growth well below market appreciation, which mechanically suppresses the effective rate even in expensive coastal markets. Expect that gap to persist as long as those caps remain in place, since the caps affect the denominator of the effective-rate calculation directly, not just the tax rate itself.

States With No Income Tax: Does That Mean Higher Property Tax?

Four of the nine states with no wage income tax, New Hampshire, Texas, Alaska, and South Dakota, rank in the top half nationally for property tax rate, while the other five sit in the bottom half. The relationship is real but not universal: New Hampshire and Texas both post property tax rates well above the 0.90% national average precisely because they have no income tax to lean on instead.

Nevada, Wyoming, and Florida break the pattern by keeping property tax moderate to low despite having no income tax, largely because tourism and severance taxes (Wyoming’s mineral extraction levy, Florida and Nevada’s tourist and sales tax bases) do the revenue work that property tax would otherwise have to do.

Anyone relocating for the “no income tax” headline should run the full picture, not just wages: New Hampshire’s 1.50% property tax rate on a $500,000 home is roughly $7,500 a year, which can offset a meaningful share of the income tax savings depending on the home’s value relative to income.

Federal SALT Deduction: The 2026 Cap Increase and Who Benefits

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act capped the federal deduction for combined state and local taxes, including property tax, at $10,000. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, raised that cap to $40,000 for the 2025 tax year and $40,400 for 2026, with 1% annual increases scheduled through 2029 before the cap reverts to $10,000 in 2030.

The higher cap phases down for high earners: taxpayers with modified adjusted gross income above $500,500 in 2026 see the deduction reduced by 30 cents per dollar of income over that threshold, though it never falls below $10,000. A household earning $600,000 or more in 2026 is effectively back at the old $10,000 limit regardless of how much SALT it actually paid.

This change matters most in exactly the states that top this page’s ranking. A New Jersey household paying $12,000 in property tax plus state income tax could deduct only $10,000 of that combined total under the old rule; under the 2026 rule, assuming income stays under the phase-down threshold, the full amount becomes deductible, which is a meaningfully different after-tax cost of ownership than the same household faced as recently as the 2024 tax year.

Expect continued state-level pressure on property tax even with federal relief in place. The SALT cap increase changes what homeowners can deduct on their federal return; it does not change what states and counties levy, and Bhatt’s point is that the underlying rate pressure households feel locally has not gone away just because Washington moved the deduction ceiling.

How Effective Rates Compare to What You Will Actually Pay

A statewide effective rate is a population-weighted average across every county, city, and school district in the state, not a prediction for any single parcel. A homeowner’s actual bill depends on the county’s specific millage, any city or special-district add-ons, and whichever assessment cap or homestead exemption applies to that property.

Assessment caps are the single biggest reason an individual bill can diverge from the state figure. California’s 0.70% statewide average blends recently purchased homes assessed near market value with decades-held homes still capped near their original purchase price under Prop 13, so the true range within the state runs far wider than the single average number suggests.

Anyone using this page to screen a relocation or a purchase should treat the state rank as a starting filter and the county-level calculator as the actual planning tool. Each state page linked in the table above breaks the statewide average down to the county level and factors in the state’s specific homestead exemption, which is where a genuinely usable estimate comes from.

Using State-Level Data: From Statewide Averages to Your County

Every state name in the ranking table links to that state’s dedicated calculator, which adds a county selector, the state’s specific homestead exemption rules, and a top-counties breakdown that this page does not attempt to replicate at national scale. That is a deliberate division of labor: this page answers “which states are expensive,” the state pages answer “what will I actually pay.”

Two structural questions are worth checking before treating any number on this page as a bill: whether the state or county reassesses at sale (Texas and most of the Northeast do; California and Florida cap the reset), and whether a homestead exemption applies to the property in question, since exemptions can shave 10% to 30% off the taxable value in states that offer them.

For buyers weighing states against each other on affordability broader than property tax alone, this data connects most directly to Home Affordability in America: Income, Prices, and the Gap and Housing Market by State: Prices, Growth, and Key Statistics, which put the property tax figures on this page alongside median price and income data for full-picture comparisons.