Property Tax on a $350k Home by State (2026 Data)

A $350,000 home generates a property tax bill of roughly $6,580 a year in New Jersey and about $1,015 a year in Hawaii. Same house, same price, a $5,565 annual gap — and over a 30-year hold, a difference north of $166,000 before compounding or reassessment enters the picture.

That spread is the entire story of property tax in the United States: the structure is local, the variation is enormous, and the figure that actually governs your bill — the effective property tax rate by county — rarely matches the headline state average. This analysis applies the Tax Foundation’s 2026 effective tax rate data (built on 2024 American Community Survey housing and tax figures) to a fixed $350,000 home so the only variable is geography.

The $350,000 home, ranked by annual bill

Start with the numbers most readers came for. Applying each state’s effective tax rate to a $350,000 home produces the following annual bills at the extremes and across the commonly cited high- and low-tax markets.

Source: Tax Foundation, Property Taxes by State and County, 2026 (2024 ACS data); IRS / One Big Beautiful Bill Act SALT provisions, 2026. Bills = effective rate × $350,000.

The national-median reference point matters here. The Tax Foundation and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy peg the US median effective tax rate near 1.08%, which puts the median $350,000 bill at $3,780. New Jersey runs that figure up by 74%; Hawaii cuts it by nearly three-quarters.

Full state comparison and the Finluxy Property Tax Burden Index

Ranking by dollar bill alone obscures how far each market sits from the national norm. The Finluxy Property Tax Burden Index handles that: it divides a state’s effective tax rate by the 1.08% national median, so 1.0 means a market sits exactly at the median, anything above 1.5 is a genuinely high-tax market, and anything below 0.5 is a low-tax market. The table below pairs each featured state’s $350,000 bill with its Index value.

Source: Tax Foundation, Property Taxes by State and County, 2026 (2024 ACS owner-occupied housing data). Annual bill = effective rate × $350,000. Finluxy Property Tax Burden Index = state effective rate ÷ 1.08% national median (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy / Tax Foundation). Index rounded to two decimals.

No state in the 2026 Tax Foundation data clears the 2.0× threshold at the state level — even New Jersey and Illinois, the two highest, land at 1.74×. That is a function of the denominator: the Burden Index measures distance from the national median, and the median itself sits at a meaningful 1.08%. The 2.0×-and-above readings show up at the county level, which is where the real outliers live.

Why the county number breaks the state average

State averages are a planning convenience, not a bill. Drop into the county data behind the same Tax Foundation release and the dispersion is severe. In Illinois, the statewide 1.88% masks Lake County at 2.26%, Kendall County at 2.28%, and Winnebago County at 2.28% — each of which pushes a $350,000 home’s Burden Index past 2.0×. McHenry and Kane counties sit at 2.26% and 2.18% respectively.

Texas tells the same story from a different structure. The state carries no income tax and leans on property tax instead, producing a 1.40% statewide effective rate — but Texas runs property tax appeals under the legal term “protest,” and county-level rates swing widely around that average. A homeowner comparing two addresses 30 miles apart can face a four-figure annual difference on an identical home. The mechanics of contesting an over-assessment are covered in the property tax assessment appeal process.

California illustrates the reverse distortion. Its 0.70% statewide effective rate looks low, and for long-tenured owners under Proposition 13 it often is — assessed value is frozen near the purchase price and capped at 2% annual growth. A 2024 buyer, though, pays the full market-value rate, and special districts can stack on top. The gap between what a 1995 buyer and a 2024 buyer pay on identical houses is the central wrinkle in California Prop 13 for luxury buyers, and the supplemental levies that fund new developments are detailed in Mello-Roos special district taxes.

The distinction the data forces is between assessed value and market value. The effective tax rate normalizes against market value, but your bill is calculated on assessed value — the figure the county assigns, which can lag or lead the market depending on reassessment cadence. When assessed value exceeds market value, the overage multiplied by the local rate is recoverable through appeal. How counties set that number is the substance of market versus assessed value.

The SALT cap rewrites the math for high earners

Here is what most state-by-state coverage still gets wrong in 2026: it models the property tax deduction as if the $10,000 SALT cap from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act were still binding. It is not. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, enacted in July 2025, raised the SALT deduction (state and local tax deduction) cap to $40,000 for 2025 and $40,400 for 2026, with 1% annual increases scheduled through 2029 before a reversion to $10,000 in 2030.

For a $150k+ household, this changes the after-tax cost of a high property tax bill substantially — but only within an income band. The expanded cap phases down at 30 cents per dollar of modified adjusted gross income above $505,000 in 2026, and never falls below the $10,000 floor. A household earning $450,000 in New Jersey, paying $6,580 in property tax plus state income tax, can now deduct a far larger share of that combined burden than it could in 2024. A household earning $700,000 is back to the $10,000 floor and sees the marginal federal value of an extra property tax dollar fall to zero once that floor is consumed by state income tax alone.

The interaction effect deserves its own attention because the property tax deduction and state income tax deduction share the same cap. In a high-income-tax state, state income tax can exhaust the SALT cap before property tax is even counted — which is precisely when the marginal property tax deduction is worth nothing federally. The full mechanics, including which income bands benefit and which hit the floor, are worked through in the SALT cap property tax deduction value analysis.

What the data shows that most coverage misses

The overlooked finding is not that New Jersey is expensive. It is that the dollar gap between high- and low-tax states on a $350,000 home — $5,565 a year — is now smaller in after-tax terms for a specific slice of $150k+ households than it has been since 2018, and larger for another slice, with the dividing line sitting at roughly $505,000 of MAGI rather than at any property-value threshold.

Below the phasedown, the restored SALT deduction softens the New Jersey bill; above it, the household eats the full $6,580 with no federal offset. Two families buying the identical $350,000 New Jersey home, one earning $400,000 and one earning $700,000, face materially different true carrying costs — not because of the house, the county, or the assessment, but because of where their income lands against a federal phase-out enacted in 2025. State-ranking tables that stop at the gross bill miss this entirely. The pattern intensifies at higher price points, which is why property tax on $2M+ homes behaves differently again.

What this means for a $150k+ household

For a household in the $150,000–$505,000 income band, 2026 is a genuinely different planning environment than 2024 was, and the property tax line is where it shows up most. The restored SALT deduction means a high-tax state’s bill is partially federally subsidized again, which narrows the real cost gap between, say, a $350,000 home in New Jersey and one in Florida. The decision of where to buy should run on after-tax carrying cost, not the gross bill on a ranking table — and that calculation now turns on your MAGI relative to the $505,000 phasedown as much as on the county rate.

Two thresholds deserve to sit on the same page before a purchase. The first is the $505,000 MAGI line, above which the SALT benefit erodes toward the $10,000 floor and a high-tax-state bill reverts to something close to its full sticker cost. The second is the 2030 reversion: every figure in the expanded-cap analysis assumes the $40,400 cap holds, and it is legislated to snap back to $10,000 at decade’s end, which materially changes the 30-year hold math on a high-tax-state home bought today. A household weighing a New Jersey or Illinois purchase against a Florida or Colorado one should model both the current-cap and post-2030 scenarios rather than treating the 2026 deduction as permanent. For the systemic picture of how this line item compounds over a mortgage term, the property tax guide for high earners works through the full carrying-cost framework, and the structural drivers behind the worst markets are mapped in the highest property tax states comparison.