Effective Property Tax Rate by County (Top Markets)

Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, taxed the average single-family home at 4.59% of its market value in 2025 — more than five times Hawaii’s statewide rate. That is the widest effective tax rate gap in any large US county, and it produced a $9,244 bill on a home worth roughly $201,000, according to ATTOM Data Solutions’ 2025 Property Tax Analysis. The same dollar bill in a low-rate market would carry a home worth over $2 million.

County rates, not state averages, decide what a homeowner actually pays. A buyer comparing Illinois to Texas using headline state numbers misses the fact that Will County, Illinois, runs an effective tax rate of 2.14% while neighboring counties differ by half a point or more. This analysis ranks the top county markets by effective tax rate, converts each into the highest property tax states comparison, and applies one consistent index so the burden is comparable across markets regardless of home value.

The headline numbers

Source: ATTOM Data Solutions, 2025 Property Tax Analysis (released April 2026); Tax Foundation, Property Taxes by State and County (CY2022 data). State figures vary by methodology — see breakdown below.

Why two credible sources disagree on the same state

New Jersey carries the highest residential property tax burden in the country. Both major sources agree on the ranking and disagree on the number. ATTOM Data Solutions puts New Jersey’s 2025 statewide effective tax rate at 1.58%, while the Tax Foundation’s most recent official figure — calendar year 2022 — reports 2.08%. Neither is wrong.

The gap comes from what sits in the denominator. ATTOM divides the average tax bill by an automated valuation model estimate of current market value, and 2024–2025 home price appreciation inflated those values, compressing the rate. The Tax Foundation uses Census American Community Survey figures from an earlier year, when values were lower. Same tax dollars, different value base, different rate. For a homeowner, the practical takeaway is to read the effective tax rate alongside the publication year and the valuation method — a point most rate-comparison coverage skips entirely. The deeper mechanics of this gap appear in any discussion of market versus assessed value.

State-level effective tax rates, ranked

Source: ATTOM Data Solutions, 2025 Property Tax Analysis (April 2026); Tax Foundation, Property Taxes by State and County, calendar year 2022 (most recent official dataset). Dashes indicate states not in the Tax Foundation top-five tables cited.

ATTOM’s 2025 data reorders the top of the list: Illinois (1.84%) now leads New Jersey (1.58%), with Vermont (1.40%), Connecticut (1.36%), and Ohio (1.32%) following. The reordering is partly a price-appreciation artifact — New Jersey home values rose faster than tax levies, pulling its effective rate down relative to Illinois. The New Jersey versus Texas comparison illustrates how identical bills map to very different effective rates across markets.

County rates are where the real spread lives

State averages hide the variation that matters. ATTOM’s 2025 ranking of large counties — those with at least 10,000 single-family homes and populations above 100,000 — shows the effective tax rate concentrated in Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, and Missouri, not the states that dominate the statewide headlines.

Source: ATTOM Data Solutions, 2025 Property Tax Analysis (released April 2026). Counties limited to those with at least 10,000 single-family homes and populations over 100,000. ATTOM publishes Schuylkill and Kendall above the otherwise descending list; rates shown as reported.

Notice what the dollar columns reveal. Schuylkill County’s 4.59% rate sits on a $201,000 average home, producing a $9,244 bill. Cass County, Missouri, charges roughly half the rate (2.16%) but on a $375,000 home — and the bill lands at $8,093, within $1,200 of Schuylkill. Rate alone tells a household nothing about the check it writes. The product of rate and value does. For a $150k+ buyer shopping a $700,000 home, Will County’s 2.14% means about $14,980 a year before any exemption, while a 0.9% national-average market on the same home runs $6,300 — a $8,680 annual difference that compounds across a hold period the way a second mortgage payment would.

Finluxy Property Tax Burden Index

Comparing a 4.59% rate against a 0.33% rate in isolation tells you one is bigger. The Finluxy Property Tax Burden Index expresses each market’s effective tax rate as a multiple of the US national median of 1.08% (per Lincoln Institute and Tax Foundation data), so a single number captures how far above or below typical each county sits. An index of 1.0 means the market taxes at the national median; above 1.5 is a high-tax market; below 0.5 is low-tax.

Finluxy Property Tax Burden Index = local effective tax rate ÷ 1.08% national median. Effective tax rates from ATTOM Data Solutions, 2025 Property Tax Analysis. National median benchmark per Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Tax Foundation.

Every county in ATTOM’s top 10 scores a Burden Index of 1.96× or higher — each taxes residential property at roughly twice the national median or more. Schuylkill’s 4.25× is an outlier driven by low home values rather than extreme levies; the rate is high precisely because the denominator is small. For the statewide picture, applying the same index to New Jersey’s ATTOM rate of 1.58% yields 1.46×, while Illinois at 1.84% scores 1.70× — both high-tax by the index threshold, with Illinois now the heavier burden on a current-value basis.

What the SALT cap change did to the deduction math

Through 2024, the federal deduction for state and local taxes was capped at $10,000 — which meant a homeowner in a top-10 county had usually exhausted the cap on property tax alone, with state income tax adding nothing deductible. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act changed that. Enacted July 2025, the law raised the SALT deduction cap to $40,000 for tax years 2025 through 2029, with the limit set to revert to $10,000 in 2030.

For the $150k+ household, the catch is the phase-out. The $40,000 cap begins shrinking once modified adjusted gross income passes $500,000 and falls back to $10,000 at $600,000 and above, reduced by 30% of income in the band between. A household earning $250,000 with a $14,980 Will County bill plus state income tax can now deduct well beyond the old $10,000 ceiling; a household earning $620,000 in the same home is back to the $10,000 wall. The marginal federal value of the next property tax dollar is therefore no longer zero for most of this audience — but it remains zero above the phase-out, and it reverts to the old regime in 2030. The full mechanics sit in the SALT cap deduction analysis.

The insight most coverage misses

Rate rankings get republished every spring, and nearly all of them rank by effective tax rate while quietly mixing two incompatible measurements. ATTOM’s effective rate divides current tax by an AVM-estimated current value. The Tax Foundation’s divides an older tax bill by an older Census value. Stack them in one table and a state appears to have “fallen” half a point when nothing about its levies changed — only the source and the year moved.

The dataset shows something sharper at the county level: the highest-rate counties are disproportionately low-value markets, not the wealthy suburbs people associate with high taxes. Schuylkill, Macon, and Saint Lawrence counties all post rates above 2.1% on homes averaging under $230,000. The mechanism is arithmetic — a fixed dollar levy on a cheaper home produces a higher percentage. A $150k+ buyer targeting a $400,000-plus property in one of these counties will likely pay a lower effective rate than the county average, because the average is dragged up by the modest homes that dominate the parcel count. The headline county rate overstates what a higher-value buyer actually faces, and no rate table flags that. Counties that limit annual increases soften this further, as the property tax increase limits guide details.

What this means for a $150k+ household

At this income level, property tax is rarely the line item that breaks a budget, but it is the one that compounds silently. A 2% effective rate on a $750,000 home is $15,000 a year — $150,000 over a decade before any reassessment, and reassessments in appreciating markets push it higher. That figure deserves the same scrutiny as a mortgage rate, because over a typical hold it can exceed total interest paid on a conforming loan.

Three thresholds matter for decisions. First, the $500,000–$600,000 MAGI band: inside it, the SALT deduction phases out and the after-tax cost of property tax climbs sharply, which can tilt a relocation or second-home decision. Second, the gap between county-average rate and your specific property’s rate — if your assessed value exceeds market value, a successful property tax appeal can recover the over-assessment multiplied by the effective rate every year it stands. Third, the 2030 SALT reversion: any buyer modeling a long hold should assume the deduction shrinks back to $10,000, not that the current $40,000 cap is permanent. For owners weighing a high-rate county against a low-rate one on equal home values, the broader property tax guide for high earners frames the full homeownership-cost tradeoff. A move from a 2.1× index market to a 1.0× market on a $750,000 home is worth roughly $8,250 a year — real money, and entirely a function of where the parcel sits, not how the house is built.