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Top 10 US Counties by Median Annual Property Tax Bill

US counties ranked by median annual property tax paid by owner-occupied households, from Census Bureau ACS 5-year estimates.

Research period:

Compiled by Plainpropertytax on 2026-08-26

Research question

Across the 3,000-plus US counties tracked in the property-tax dataset, which counties carry the highest absolute median property tax bills, and how do the leading counties cluster within high-cost metropolitan suburbs versus geographically dispersed high-value markets?

Methodology

This ranking is generated automatically from the U.S. Census Bureau's published dataset and reflects the most recently reported figures for each entity. The page updates whenever we refresh our copy of the source data, so the numbers always match the latest release we have ingested.

Coverage and exclusions: entities with no reported value for this metric are left out of the ranking rather than shown as zero, since a missing figure is not the same as an actual zero. U.S. Census Bureau occasionally withholds a value for confidentiality, small-sample, or quality-control reasons, and those withheld entries are excluded the same way.

Data provenance: U.S. Census Bureau publishes this dataset on its own release schedule, and we pull each new release as it becomes publicly available. If a later release revises a prior figure, the revised number will appear here automatically the next time we refresh our copy, no part of this page is hand-edited.

Editorial governance: PlainPropertyTax maintains an editorial standards process covering how rankings are built, how outliers are handled, and how corrections are processed if an entity disputes a figure attributed to it. A named editor reviews this page before publication, shown in the byline above. Corrections and clarifications can be requested through the contact channels linked in the site footer.

Transparency: every number on this page traces back to a specific U.S. Census Bureau source record, linked from the entity pages reachable from this ranking. See our methodology page for the full source list, update cadence, and how each figure is derived.

See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.

These counties are tied, not ranked. The American Community Survey top-codes median real-estate taxes, so every county at or above the ceiling is published at the same capped figure of $10,001. 17 counties nationally reach it, 10 of them shown here, and their order below is produced by the query's secondary sort rather than by any difference in tax. The effective-rate column is not top-coded and is the column to read when you need an ordering.

Top 10 US Counties by Median Annual Property Tax Bill

Live data, updated automatically whenever we refresh our copy of the source

value

Median annual property-tax bill by county. The top 10 bars are all $10,001, the ACS top-code (the highest figure the survey publishes, rather than a measured amount), so they are tied rather than ranked and no county among them leads. 17 counties nationally reach it. Read the effective-rate ranking for an ordering that separates them.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 5-Year Estimates

The ranked top 10

Every row below reflects the most recent data we have on file. Refresh the page after we update our copy of the source to see the latest values.

# County State Median property tax Median home value Effective rate
= Bergen County New Jersey $10,001 $623,000 1.61%
= Morris County New Jersey $10,001 $582,500 1.72%
= Union County New Jersey $10,001 $529,200 1.89%
= Essex County New Jersey $10,001 $524,100 1.91%
= Hunterdon County New Jersey $10,001 $517,200 1.93%
= Monmouth County New Jersey $10,001 $606,100 1.65%
= Passaic County New Jersey $10,001 $459,500 2.18%
= Somerset County New Jersey $10,001 $552,100 1.81%
= New York County New York $10,001 $1.1M 0.92%
= Putnam County New York $10,001 $471,300 2.12%

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, County-Level Property Tax. Values reflect our most recent copy of the source data.

Findings

Top entity in the ranking

Every county in this visible set reports the same capped figure of $10,001, so this cut has no single top-ranked record: the 10 counties shown are tied at the ACS ceiling and their order here reflects only the query's secondary sort, not a difference in tax. 17 counties nationally sit at the ceiling. For an ordering that genuinely separates them, read the effective-rate ranking, which is not top-coded. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value comes directly from the current dataset; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the U.S. Census Bureau publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update automatically.

Distribution shape

Top and bottom of this visible set are the same number, $10,001, so no spread can be read from it: the ceiling censors the distribution rather than describing it. The shape of the real distribution is visible only below the cap, or in the effective-rate view. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.

Aggregate context

Across the full population behind this ranking, here are the summary statistics: how many records exist in total, the sum of the ranking metric across all qualifying records, and the mean per-record value. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied (records with null or zero values on the ranking metric are excluded). This aggregate row is computed from the same dataset that powers the ranking above.

Source provenance

The records in this ranking originate from U.S. Census Bureau, specifically the American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, County-Level Property Tax. PlainPropertyTax ingests the source vintage published by the agency and republishes it here in a clear, browsable format. Every page reflects our most recent copy of the data, there is no stale cached export, and an update from the source agency propagates to this page within hours. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and how each figure is derived.

Why this ranking matters

Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.

What this analysis cannot tell us

County-level median property tax is reported by the US Census Bureau ACS for owner-occupied housing units; it does not measure the tax bill on commercial property, agricultural land, or rental housing. The leading counties tend to cluster in the New York metropolitan suburbs (Westchester, Nassau, Rockland), Northern Virginia, and the San Francisco Bay Area, markets where high home values, high public-service expenditure, and traditional property-tax-funded school systems compound to produce six-figure-adjacent median bills. The ACS 5-year aggregate smooths year-to-year variation; mid-cycle changes in millage rates or assessment caps may not yet appear in the published median. Some counties operate under property tax caps (California Proposition 13, Massachusetts Proposition 2½) that limit annual increases regardless of underlying home appreciation; the median figure captures the effective burden on the median household but not the burden a recent home purchaser would face under uncapped assessment.

Secondary cut from the same source

Top 10 US counties by median home value, the underlying valuation against which property tax is assessed

value

Median home value by county, highest first. Teton County leads at $1,633,900, Nantucket County $1,593,800 and San Mateo County $1,559,600; the 10th-placed Alameda County is $1,090,100.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 5-Year Estimates

Related data

Sources