With nine United States counties averaging more than $10,000 per year for annual property taxes, a new report puts Nassau County on the list of highest cost areas. It’s joined by Rockland and Westchester counties in New York, along with Morris, Union, Essex and Bergen in New Jersey. Other counties included on the list were Fairfield County in Connecticut and Marin County in California. The study comes from Attom Data Solutions and looked at the highest property taxes across all the counties in the United States. This report analyzed taxes for more than 84 million single-family homes all across the United States. Not only did it list the most expensive nine counties, but it also showed a national average of $3,296 per home for annual property taxes in 2016. This puts the effective tax rate at 1.15% and a total of $277.7 billion were levied.
A Closer Look at Nassau & Suffolk County Taxes
Nassau County single-family homes averaged $11,232 for annual property taxes in 2016. This average made the effective tax rate for the county 1.91%. Suffolk County wasn’t on the list of the most expensive nine counties, but was close with an average property tax of $9,333 for single-family homes. The effective tax rate for Suffolk County was higher than Nassau County as 1.99%. New Jersey came in as the sate with the highest effective tax rate at 2.31%, while Illinois, Texas, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut were the only other states with a 2% or higher effective tax rate. New York came in with an effective tax rate of 1.88%. The report also revealed the highest metropolitan statistical areas for effective property tax rates. It looked at 217 metro areas with populations of at least 200,000 residents. The top five were:
- Binghamton, NY at 3.10%
- Rochester, NY at 2.99%
- Rockford, IL at 2.96%
- Atlantic City, NJ at 2.77%
- Syracuse, NY at 2.67%
In addition, the report showed the lowest effective tax rate found in Honolulu at 0.32%.
Investment Property Taxes
Those owning investment properties paid a total of $51.4 billion in 2016 for property taxes. This made up about 19% of the total property taxes levied across the country. Overall, investment properties make up about 26% of the single-family homes in the United States. The report looked at the tax data collected from the county tax assessor offices all across the nation. It also looked at the estimated market value for single-family homes using an automated model for valuation. The statistics found within the report are based on the average estimated market value for the homes within each county.