Research

Top 10 US Counties by Median Annual Property Tax Bill

PlainPropertyTax ranks US counties by median annual property tax paid by owner-occupied households using US Census Bureau American Community Survey 5-year estimates. Updates automatically as our source data refreshes.

Compiled byPlainPropertyTax Editorial, Property Tax Editorial Team · June 9, 2026

Research period: 2026-05-17

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.

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
1	Bergen County	New Jersey	$10,001	$623,000	1.61%
2	Morris County	New Jersey	$10,001	$582,500	1.72%
3	Union County	New Jersey	$10,001	$529,200	1.89%
4	Essex County	New Jersey	$10,001	$524,100	1.91%
5	Hunterdon County	New Jersey	$10,001	$517,200	1.93%
6	Monmouth County	New Jersey	$10,001	$606,100	1.65%
7	Passaic County	New Jersey	$10,001	$459,500	2.18%
8	Somerset County	New Jersey	$10,001	$552,100	1.81%
9	New York County	New York	$10,001	$1.1M	0.92%
10	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. 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

The top-ranked record in this dataset is Bergen County, with a value of $10,001 on the Median property tax column. 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

The gap between the top-ranked record ($10,001) and the 10th-ranked record ($10,001) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. 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.

Sources

US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates - https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs