The Property-Tax Gap 2026

Which states have the widest county-to-county gap?

For every state with at least five counties in the data, the table shows its cheapest and priciest county by effective rate, the resulting ratio, and what that gap is worth per year on a $300,000 home.

Not ranked (fewer than five counties): Delaware (3), Hawaii (4). Alaska's 39× ratio is amplified by very small census areas such as Hoonah-Angoon Census Area; the lower-48 leaders are a fairer picture of what most homeowners can encounter.

Why does the same state bill some homeowners 8× more?

Statutory rates are only the surface. The effective rate a homeowner actually pays combines local millage, assessment ratios, homestead exemptions and assessment caps — all set at county or municipal level. In Texas, Borden County homeowners pay a median 0.22% while El Paso County pays 1.80%: on a $300,000 home, that is a $4,740-per-year difference without leaving the state. School funding formulas and the share of revenue raised from sales or income taxes explain most of the rest.

The New York paradox makes the mechanism visible: New York City applies assessment limits to residential class 1 property, so Kings County's effective rate (0.56%) lands below many upstate counties, where full-value assessment pushes Monroe County to 2.41% — on far cheaper homes.

Explore any county in the interactive tables of our property tax by state comparator, or drill into flagship counties like Cook County, IL, Harris County, TX and Santa Clara County, CA.

Methodology & data

1. Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS) 2024 5-year estimates — median real-estate taxes paid and median owner-occupied home value, for 3,125 counties and county-equivalents.
2. Effective rate = median tax paid ÷ median home value. It reflects what a typical owner actually pays, not the statutory millage.
3. Top-coding disclosure: ACS caps median tax paid at $10,000. In the 17 counties at the cap, true medians are at least $10,000 and effective rates are conservative (understated).
4. Counties with suppressed or zero values are excluded from ratio rankings.
5. Full dataset (state, county, effective rate, median value, median tax): CSV download — CC BY 4.0. Citable mirrors: DOI 10.7910/DVN/JDRIUL (Harvard Dataverse) and 10.5281/zenodo.21244037 (Zenodo).

Cite this study

Journalists and researchers are welcome to reuse any figure or the full dataset with attribution: “StateTakeHome, The Property-Tax Gap 2026 — statetakehome.com/data”. For questions about the data or custom county cuts, write to contact@statetakehome.com — we answer fast and can provide state-specific breakdowns on request. See also our general methodology and the open-data catalog.