Residents of the Mid-Hudson village of Liberty had the highest effective property tax rate in New York (outside New York City and Nassau) during fiscal year 2019, according to the newest edition of Benchmarking NY, the Empire Center’s annual examination of local property taxes.
Liberty, a small village in Sullivan County with a population of less than 5,000, had an effective rate of $60.81 per $1,000 of estimated market value—or $9,121 on a $150,000 house. The lowest effective tax rate in the state was $3.93 per $1,000, levied on homes and businesses in the Sagaponack school district portion of the Suffolk County town of Southampton. That low rate reflected the town’s high property values, where the latest Census Bureau data put the median home price at $626,400.
One Suffolk County village – Lloyd Harbor – had combined annual taxes of $38,341 on a median-value home. The lowest tax bill on a median-value home was $1,128 in the Hamilton County town of Arietta in the Raquette Lake school district, which sends its small handful of students to neighboring districts.
Benchmarking NY uses data from the state comptroller’s office to calculate effective tax rates–combined county, municipal and school taxes as a percent of market value–for thousands of localities across the state during 2019, excluding only New York City and Nassau County. The complete report lists the top and bottom 20 tax rates and tax bills on a locality’s median-value home in each of nine regions. The highest effective rate and highest tax bill on a median-value home in each region were found in the following communities:
Taxpayers can see the components of their local property taxes and compare taxes across the state using the Empire Center’s Property Tax Calculator on SeeThroughNY.net, the Center’s transparency website.
The Empire Center, based in Albany, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan think tank dedicated to promoting policies to make New York a better place to live, work and raise a family.