The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence released the annual 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study, the most comprehensive annual analysis of property taxes in the United States that offers a detailed, city-by-city analysis of property tax rates for the 2025 tax year. 

This annual study documents the wide range of property tax rates in more than 100 US cities and helps explain why they vary so much. The report identifies four key factors that explain most of the variation in property tax rates: property tax reliance, property values, the level of local government spending, and classification (whether cities tax homesteads at lower rates than they tax other types of property). 

The report shows that assessment limits, which restrict how fast a property’s taxable value can grow from year to year regardless of what is happening in the broader housing market, continue to drive inequities. This happens because when a home is sold, the taxable value typically resets to the current market value. Therefore, new buyers immediately face the full tax burden while neighbors in similar homes may pay taxes on a fraction of the actual market value. The tax inequities created by assessment limits only compound over time. The longer a homeowner stays in their house, and the faster local home values rise, the wider the gap grows. It is especially extreme in cities with hot real estate markets, like Miami, where the owner of a newly purchased, median-valued home would face a tax bill 3.2 times higher than would the owner of an equally valued home purchased in 2012: $10,024 versus $3,166. 

“Assessment limits are often presented as straightforward tax relief but our annual analysis continues to show that assessment limits have a number of negative consequences––they create large disparities in tax bills for similar homes and shift the burden to new homeowners,” said Adam H. Langley, associate director of Tax Policy at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “As more states look to adopt these policies, our data shows clearly what the trade-offs are and who ends up paying the price.”

The study also highlights an increase in property tax classification in recent years, whereby office buildings face higher effective tax rates than do homesteads. An analysis of the largest cities in each state shows that commercial properties experience an effective tax rate that is 82 percent higher than the rate for homesteads, on average. 

“Property taxes are the backbone of local government finance, and this report gives policymakers, residents, and businesses the clearest possible picture of how these taxes actually work in practice,” said Mark Haveman, executive director at the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence. “What stands out year after year is how much the design of the property tax system matters. These choices have real consequences for housing affordability, business competitiveness, and fiscal equity, and understanding each of these factors is the first step toward improving them.”

The analysis of the largest city in each state shows that the average effective tax rate on a median valued homestead was 1.213 percent in 2025 for this group of 53 cities. At that rate, a home worth $200,000 would owe $2,426 in property taxes (1.213 percent multiplied by $200,000). On the high end, three cities have effective tax rates at least two times higher than the average—Detroit, Aurora (IL), and Portland (OR). Conversely, seven cities have tax rates half the study average or less—Honolulu, Billings (MT), Denver, Salt Lake City, Boston, Charleston (SC), and Huntsville (AL).

Taking a closer look at the cities with the lowest property tax rates, Billings had by far the largest drop in property taxes for a median-valued home in this year’s report (37 percent). Montana created a graduated property tax structure in 2025 with three tax brackets, which slashed effective tax rates on homes worth $400,000 or less, with smaller decreases on homes worth up to $1.5 million, and increases on the most valuable homes. 

The study also includes estimates for each city’s effective tax rates and tax bills for commercial, industrial, and apartment properties. It shows how taxes changed in each city from 2024 to 2025, the effect of policies that shift the tax burden from homesteads to commercial properties and apartment buildings, and the level of tax inequities created by assessment limits.

To take a closer look at the property tax system in the United States and understand the implications for cities, read the 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study on the Lincoln Institute’s website.

As state and local governments struggle to make progress on challenges including affordable housing and climate change amid dramatic policy shifts at the federal level, reporters and editors learned more about those efforts—and the solutions to be found in land policy—at the 2025 Lincoln Institute Journalists Forum.

The two-day workshop, the latest installment in a series held for more than twenty years, was put on in December in partnership with the Bloomberg Center for Cities and Arnold Ventures. More than 30 working press attended, representing outlets including Bloomberg, Politico, Slate, Fast Company, Pro Publica, and Governing magazine, as well as the Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Texas Tribune, Baltimore Banner, and Substack. The Journalists Forum is designed to allow reporters and editors to take two days away from their pressing deadlines to gain perspective on the issues they are covering; the last two workshops had a focus on housing, in 2023, and climate, in 2022.

In welcoming remarks, Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. “Mac” McCarthy  said that the organization has been committed to supporting local government through technical assistance and other means since David C. Lincoln, son of founder John C. Lincoln, established it in Cambridge in 1974. “From our first days, our interest has been in … making it possible for local governments to do their job, because for us, we think that the quality of life is delivered by your local government.”

Anaclaudia Rossbach, executive director of UN-Habitat, delivered the opening keynote online from Dakar, Senegal, highlighting the importance of local initiatives around the world to build safe and affordable housing and environmentally resilient metropolitan regions. “Localization has been a key principle for us,” she said, noting how cities and nations worldwide are putting together action plans on what she views as an intertwined crisis of housing and climate change.

In the US, however, as the first panel revealed, state and local governments trying to pursue their own policies have encountered vigorous opposition by the federal government, in the form of halting offshore windfarms, freezing or clawing back funding for clean energy and mitigation initiatives, and initiating lawsuits against setting vehicle emissions standards or holding polluters liable for compensation. That has state and local governments playing a lot of defense and in some cases punching back, said Nestor Davidson, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

But states are also engaging in pre-emption of their own, inherent in the zoning reform mandates that override local control of land use. Those kinds of initiatives aren’t ideological as much as a practical attempt to streamline bureaucracy and prompt more housing to be built amid the constraints of a not-in-my-backyard stance in established neighborhoods, Davidson said. “A lot of what states are trying to do is overcome fragmentation and overcome local parochialism,” he said. Tracy Loh, fellow at the Brookings Institution,  observed that the tumultuous array of pre-emptions, legal challenges, and regulatory reversals are making it harder for metropolitan regions to manage rapidly changing economies. The panel was moderated by Enrique Silva, chief program officer at the Lincoln Institute.

Having heard those perspectives on the current political environment, the journalists then explored challenges and opportunities for state and local governments in three categories—housing, climate, and local public finance—and discovered several interconnected policy elements among those topics.

Housing. As the Trump administration calls for reducing rental assistance and other programs under US Housing and Urban Development, state and local governments have been tackling the urgent issue of housing affordability on their own. In a panel moderated by Solomon Greene, director of Land and Communities at the Lincoln Institute, Charles Gardner, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, reported that 33 states enacted legislation aimed at expanding the supply of housing through zoning and code reform, a big increase since 2023. The measures—such as allowing accessory dwelling units, reducing minimum parking requirements, banning single-family only zoning, increasing density at transit stations, and streamlining permitting so housing projects don’t get bogged down—constitute a “great land use realignment,” he said, and are getting popular support in red and blue states alike.

New housing still faces pushback in established neighborhoods, and some local leaders have decried any diminishing of local control over land use and development. But as more communities understand the outdated land use rules they have in place,  zoning reform becomes more legible as a way to create a range of housing types that are more affordable, said Sara Bronin, law professor at George Washington University and founder of the National Zoning Atlas, a database of zoning conditions in 9,000 jurisdictions. Even as they push to increase housing supply, local leaders need to understand flooding and sea level rise to halt “nonsensical” development in vulnerable areas, she said.

Colin Higgins, executive director of the National Housing Crisis Task Force, a bipartisan coalition promoting innovations in the production and preservation of housing, said that in pursuit of the goal of producing up to 8 million new homes, communities need to include subsidized and mixed-income projects alongside the luxury market-rate housing that upzoning enables. That would help address growing skepticism about filtering—the theory that wealthier homebuyers who move into high-end housing open up apartments, condos, and smaller single-family homes that are lower in price.

In a second panel on housing moderated by George W. “Mac” McCarthy, practitioners talked about alternative pathways to affordability, including pre-assembled and manufactured homes, community land trusts (CLTs), and homes built on government-owned land.

Reina Chano Murray, associate director at the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS), demonstrated recent efforts to help municipalities identify land they own that is suitable for housing. CGS identified 276,000 acres of buildable, government-owned land in transit-accessible urban areas with existing infrastructure, across the US. These public lands present many opportunities for the potential development of affordable housing options, including establishing a community land trust, which allows buyers to purchase homes on leased land and agree to restrictions on resale profit.

Charles Dillard, director of planning for the City of Burlington, said that Vermont city is testing what’s possible in developing city-owned land, and has one of the longest-running community land trusts, the Champlain Housing Trust, as a model. John Smith, executive director of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Association in the Roxbury section of Boston, said the bulwark against gentrification is community control of land.

While new construction is an obvious path to expanding affordable housing options, cities and towns must also strive to preserve existing housing stock, some of which gets snapped up by institutional investors, said McCarthy. A recent report published by the Lincoln Institute revealed that nearly 9 percent of residential parcels across 500 urban counties have corporate owners, who often jack up rents and outmaneuver first-time homebuyers. The Trump administration recently moved to restrict purchases of housing stock by institutional investors.

Nature-Based Solutions. Two panels of experts examined the question of whether local and state climate action can have any impact on what’s happening to the whole planet. The retrenchment at the federal level is breathtaking, said Jody Freeman, professor at the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program, including withdrawal from international emission reduction treaties, the deregulation of fossil fuels and their impacts by the Environmental Protection Agency, the termination of collection of climate data, and the dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act and its promotion of clean energy.

The panelists and moderator Peter Colohan, director of partnerships and program innovation at the Lincoln Institute, described a federal rollback defined by unprecedented maneuvers. Freeman offered, as an example, “the executive orders from the president directing the attorney general to identify state climate policies that the administration disagrees with … as somehow unlawful or unconstitutional, and sue the states in order to block them.”

Bradley Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation, said advocates are spending a lot of time in court defending “a legacy of victories” once thought secure, on fronts including offshore drilling, the Endangered Species Act, or Vermont’s use of the Superfund law to collect money from fossil fuel companies to pay for climate action.

“It’s going to take a lot of resources to just maintain [previous wins],” he said. “Fortunately the advocacy community is very well organized … I think we have a pretty solid front for defending against a lot of those rollbacks.”

The dramatic redirection from Biden administration climate policies has prompted state and local government to fill the gap with dedicated funding for emissions reductions, clean energy like solar and wind power, and what Melissa Hoffer, chief of the Massachusetts Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience, described as a “nature-forward but engineered” approach to building coastline resilience. By establishing statewide codes that promote geothermal heating and a switch from fossil fuels to renewable-powered electricity, she said, states can prove that “clean energy and energy efficiency is really the pathway to affordability.”

“Cities have been leading the charge on climate long before state and federal governments were ever involved,” said Brian Swett, Boston’s chief climate officer. “Gina McCarthy, one of our great EPA administrators and the first and only domestic climate czar, used to say … that’s where innovation happens.” He cited the city’s Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance, which sets requirements for large existing buildings to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions over time. “You pilot at the city level, and we’ve been proud of what we’ve been able to do in Boston. So we’re back in that moment again. We are used to leading the charge.”

State, local, and regional initiatives promoting land conservation, biodiversity, and ecosystem protection preservation are similarly continuing apace despite policy reversals at the federal level, as a second climate panel revealed. Peter Stein, principal at Lyme Timber Company, acknowledged the termination of the Biden administration’s 30×30 initiative and moves to expand resource extraction on public lands, but said land conservation has widespread support among voters.

“A little more than a year ago … Donald Trump got elected, but $18 billion worth of local public finance was passed by voters in the U.S. in red, purple, and blue counties and states to support land conservation,” he said. “There’s a long history of voters voting to tax themselves … to pay for land conservation. Eighty percent of all the public money that’s invested in conservation comes from local and state governments.”

Regional collaboration on land conservation is partly filling the vacuum at the federal level, including a pact between New England governors and eastern Canadian premiers, as well as targeted efforts to protect ecosystems and wildlife corridors, said Deb Davidson, chief strategy officer at the Center for Large Landscape Conservation. In Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey launched a package of initiatives promoting biodiversity and wildlife protection. Efforts are also underway to make agriculture more climate-friendly, said Vincent Gauthier, senior manager at the Environmental Defense Fund. Agricultural communities are working with environmental advocates to “develop solutions that find the right trade-offs for everyone, for the climate, and for farmers and ranchers whose livelihoods are on the line every day.”

The land conservation panel was moderated by Chandni Navalkha, director of conservation and stewardship at the Lincoln Institute.

Public Finance and the Property Tax. In two sessions, panels of experts examined the extraordinary fiscal squeeze being felt by cities and towns nationwide, with pandemic aid winding down and future federal funding in doubt, the cost of providing services soaring, and the bedrock source of local revenue—the property tax—under threat. Moderator Bethany Paquin noted that “lawmakers all over the country are exploring how they can provide meaningful property tax relief without undermining … essential local services,” but proposals making headlines in Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania among other places would scale back the property tax dramatically or eliminate it altogether.

The new wave of property tax revolts is driven in part by booming housing markets and significant increases in assessed home values that have prompted nearly a doubling of property tax bills in some cases, said Jared Walczak, vice president of the Tax Foundation. “It’s not surprising that people have some really strong, robust responses to this. I don’t blame them,” Walczak said, though he added: “I do think that the solutions they’re talking about are irresponsible and will not work.”

Because the property tax is the primary source of revenue for local governments and school systems, it is hard to imagine what would take its place, said Billy Hamilton, deputy chancellor emeritus at Texas A&M University. Big increases in a sales tax, or the income tax, seem politically infeasible.  Targeted property tax relief in the form of circuit breakers can help those who struggle to pay rising bills, the panelists agreed.

Meanwhile, cities and towns struggle each year to keep a balanced budget, said Katie McCue, deputy executive director at the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Property tax revenues in Massachusetts are capped each year by Proposition 2 1/2, but the cost of providing services, including employee health care and retirement funding, continues to rise. Municipalities have had to rely on voter-approved overrides to bolster funding for services or to build a new school, she said.

Experts in the second public finance panel, moderated by Luis Quintanilla, program analyst at the Lincoln Institute, suggested there are precious few other ways for local governments to raise revenue. Andrew Reschovsky, professor emeritus at the LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the practice of charging user fees, partly making up for the post-pandemic drop in commercial property tax revenue in struggling downtowns. Daphne Kenyon, principal at D.A. Kenyon & Associates, said payments-in-lieu of taxes (PILOT) agreements with nonprofit institutions can bolster municipal coffers, but only to a point.

Other tactics include establishing a vacancy tax or a land value tax, said Nathan Seegert, professor of finance at Northeastern University. Municipalities that are responsible for an increasing array of obligations, from filling potholes to educating kids, need to diversify their revenue portfolio to have any hope of functioning in that role, he said. “If we’re going to have this trend of pushing the services further down the chain, we’re going to have to be creative in what kind of revenue sources we look for, that can provide that stability.”

At an evening reception at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Jorrit de Jong, director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities, introduced Harvard professor Michael Sandel, who shared reflections on the current state of American democracy, including the bare-knuckle tactics being deployed as different levels of government fight with each other. Sandel, who wrote The Tyranny of Merit and was recently awarded the  Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, said the public discourse might be less polarized if educated elites would “listen more” and avoid technocratic slogans like “follow the science.” He also said that while more than a century old, the ideas of Henry George, the 19th century political philosopher who inspired Lincoln Institute founder John C. Lincoln, are critical to understanding the high home prices and real estate speculation of today.

The journalists also heard from Brett Smiley, the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, who referred to Sandel’s description of state and local governments as historically laboratories of democracy, but now seen more as “outposts or sanctuaries of democracy. I found that pretty meaningful and certainly motivating for the work that we’re doing in the environment that we’re in right now.” As a classic second city in the orbit of Boston, Providence is daylighting rivers, taking down freeways, and promoting arts and culture to attract those seeking an alternative to larger cities, Smiley said. More affordable housing is a key part of the city’s economic development strategy.

Finally, a panel of journalists and publishers in the closing “Practicing the Craft” roundtable addressed a troubling dilemma: that while the actions of state and local governments are more important than ever, many communities lack the capacity to cover those activities.

Over the last 20 years, about 3,500 newspapers have shut down, most of them weeklies that provided the kind of granular, hyper-local neighborhood coverage that community democracy depends on, said Dan Kennedy, a professor at Northeastern University. Some 50 million Americans are left with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news, according to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Kennedy cited several successful examples of independent digital startups based on a nonprofit model, though he added “they tend to be located in affluent suburban communities, and urban communities of color and rural areas are struggling.” Success stories included Brookline.News,  which co-founder Ellen Clegg reported was gaining in circulation covering local stories in that Boston suburb of 65,000 people. Dale Anglin, representing Press Forward, a national local news network funded by the MacArthur Foundation, reported “strengthening information networks that keep communities engaged and informed” through chapters in 32 states, and suggested that not only formal news outlets but video influencers and others deserve support.

Local reporters and editors can do their jobs better if they have access to training for covering complicated issues like housing, said Jon Greenberg of the Poynter Institute. Charles Sennott, co-founder of Report for America and publisher of the Martha’s Vineyard Times, suggested that local outlets—just like cash-strapped local governments—need to work smarter and more efficiently, and could make judicious use of artificial intelligence.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines. Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Catherine Benedict is the digital communications manager at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: 2025 Journalists Forum panelists shared their work with reporters from media outlets across the country. Credit: Catherine Benedict