States With No Property Tax

Lowest property tax rates: the 10 cheapest states by effective rate

Effective rate is the median annual property tax divided by the median home value. It is the comparison that survives crossing state lines, because it asks what share of the home's worth the tax takes rather than how many dollars it is.

Smallest property tax bills: the 10 cheapest states in dollars

This list is not the same as the one above. Hawaii has the country's lowest rate but a median bill of $2,239, because homes there are worth $839,100 at the median. Alabama pays the smallest bill in the country at $788 on a $209,900 median home. Which state is "cheapest" depends entirely on which of the two you meant.

The closest thing to none: owning free and clear

Both rankings above compare states to each other. This one compares owners to each other inside the same state, and the spread it finds is wider than most of the state-to-state spread: the Census reports the median bill separately for owners who still carry a mortgage and owners who own outright. In Louisiana the median mortgaged owner pays $1,455 a year while the median free-and-clear owner pays $750, a gap of 94%. In Utah the two groups pay effectively the same amount.

The lowest figure anywhere in this dataset is $612 a year, paid by the median owner in Alabama who owns outright. That is the honest floor of the question: not a state without property tax, but the cheapest combination of state and ownership status the data contains.

What the gap does not tell you is why it exists. Owners without a mortgage are older and bought earlier on average, and many states aim senior, veteran or homestead relief at exactly that group, so tenure and policy are mixed together in one number and the ACS cannot separate them. Treat the gap as a measured outcome, not as evidence of any particular exemption.

What this page does not tell you

These figures are statewide medians from the Census Bureau. Apart from the mortgage split above, which only shows relief's combined trace rather than naming it, they do not account for homestead exemptions, senior or veteran relief, assessment caps, or the wide variation between counties inside a single state, differences large enough that a county profile is the better read once you know which state you are asking about. This page does not rank states by total tax burden either: several of the states above fund their budgets through higher sales or income taxes instead.