Why Effective Tax Rates Vary So Much by County
A county’s effective property tax rate is not one number nationally, it is a patchwork built from thousands of separate local budgets. School funding formulas, municipal services, and local bond measures all draw on the same property tax base, which is why a homeowner in Illinois can pay more than five times the effective rate of a homeowner in Hawaii on a similarly valued home.
This page collects the sourced 2025 numbers behind that spread: the national average rate, the states at each extreme, and the counties carrying the highest dollar bills. Every figure below links to where it came from.
Reading a Rising Tax Bill as a Seller Signal
A property tax bill that climbs faster than a homeowner’s income does not sit in isolation. It lands on top of whatever else is already pressuring that owner: an underwater refinance, a fixed retirement income, a vacant inherited property nobody is paying down. Cross-referencing county-level tax data against a list already built from other distress signals turns a generic mailing list into a sharper one; the legal side of working that list once you have it is covered on the state-by-state wholesaling laws reference.
The foreclosure figures below are not a property tax metric on their own, they sit here because rising carrying costs, taxes included, are part of the same distress picture. Foreclosure filings rose 21% year over year in the first half of 2026, a leading indicator worth tracking alongside the tax data itself.
The Numbers
The average effective property tax rate on US single-family homes was 0.9% in 2025, up from 0.86% in 2024, the highest rate since 2020.
That 0.9% average rate generated an average annual property tax bill of $4,427 on a home valued around $494,231 in 2025.
Illinois carried the highest effective property tax rate in the country in 2025 at 1.84%, followed by New Jersey at 1.58% and Vermont at 1.4%.
Hawaii carried the lowest effective property tax rate in 2025 at 0.33%, followed by Idaho at 0.39% and Wyoming at 0.4%.
Westchester County, New York averaged the highest county property tax bill in the nation in 2025 at $18,386, followed by Marin County, California at $16,745 and Bergen County, New Jersey at $14,443.
West Virginia carried the lowest statewide average property tax bill in 2025 at just $1,081.
US foreclosure filings reached 227,548 properties in the first half of 2026, up 21% year over year and up 28% from the first half of 2024.
Foreclosure starts reached 164,566 properties in the first half of 2026, up 18% year over year, the stage where a rising tax bill can tip an already stretched owner toward default.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.