Cohasset, MA Property Tax Rate: FY2025 Is $11.58

Proposition 2½: A Cap on Revenue Growth, Not a Fixed Rate

Every Massachusetts town's property tax rate, including Cohasset's, is governed by Proposition 2½, a 1980 ballot law. This site's Duxbury property-tax page already explains the mechanism in full detail, so the short version here: Prop 2½ does not set a statewide or town-specific rate directly. It caps the total dollar amount of property-tax revenue — the levy — that a town can raise. A town's levy can never exceed 2.5% of its total assessed value, and from year to year the levy itself can grow by at most 2.5% plus revenue from new growth (newly built homes, additions, subdivisions), unless voters approve an override.

Under that system, the per-$1,000 rate isn't the input, it's the output. Assessors take that year's allowed levy and divide it by the town's total assessed value to arrive at the rate. A town with a high rate, like Cohasset, isn't necessarily taxing more aggressively than its neighbors — it can simply mean the town's allowed levy is being spread across a smaller total assessed base relative to its budget needs, or that home values have grown more slowly than the levy cap over time. This is the same mechanism documented at greater length on this site's Duxbury, Marshfield, and Scituate property-tax pages, and it applies to Cohasset without modification.

Cohasset's Confirmed Rate: FY2025 at $11.58 — the Highest in the Cluster

Cohasset's FY2025 property tax rate is $11.58 per $1,000 of assessed value, per massachusettsalmanac.com's Massachusetts Communities Tax Rate table for Fiscal Year 2025. That table lines up four South Shore towns side by side: Cohasset at $11.58, Duxbury at $10.14, Scituate at $9.99, and Marshfield at $9.90. Cohasset's rate is not close to the next-highest figure — it sits more than a full dollar above Duxbury, the runner-up — and it's consistent with Cohasset's position as the most affluent, highest-home-value town so far documented in this cluster.

This $11.58 figure carries a specific research provenance worth stating plainly. It was already surfaced and cited in both Marshfield's and Scituate's own independently produced research files for this site, both drawing on the same massachusettsalmanac.com table. The research behind this page attempted a fresh, direct fetch of massachusettsalmanac.com to independently re-verify the figure, but that fetch returned only summary and structural page text, not the underlying detailed rate table itself. So this page treats $11.58 as a figure carried forward and cross-confirmed by two independently produced prior research files in this cluster, rather than one freshly re-verified in this specific research pass. Anyone who wants a fully independent, primary-source reconfirmation should check the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Division of Local Services (DLS) "Tax Rates by Class" database, or contact the Town of Cohasset's own Assessors' Office directly.

What FY2023, FY2024, and FY2026 Looked Like: Honestly, Not Confirmed

This page will not guess at Cohasset's FY2023, FY2024, or FY2026 rates. A direct fetch of the town's own "Real Estate Tax" page returned only billing and due-date procedural information — bills are mailed semi-annually in June and December, with payments due August 1, November 1, February 1, and May 1 — but no rate figures for any fiscal year. A separate attempt to fetch the town's Assessors' Office page directly did not succeed either.

Interpolating between a known FY2025 figure and a guessed FY2026 figure might feel tempting, but neighboring towns' own confirmed rate histories show that isn't a safe assumption: Duxbury's rate moved from $10.69 (FY2023) to $10.06 (FY2024) to $10.14 (FY2025), and Marshfield's FY2026 rate ($9.61) dropped from its FY2025 figure ($9.90). A Massachusetts town's rate can swing in either direction from one year to the next, so a number invented for Cohasset's FY2023, FY2024, or FY2026 rate would be a guess dressed up as a fact. This page doesn't publish one.

Anyone who needs Cohasset's FY2023, FY2024, or FY2026 rate should go directly to a primary source: the Massachusetts DLS "Tax Rates by Class" database, which covers every city and town in the state year by year, or the Town of Cohasset's own Assessors' Office. Town Hall is located at 41 Highland Avenue, Cohasset, MA 02025 — worth noting that this address was surfaced as Town Hall's general contact address, and this page has not independently confirmed whether the Assessors' Office is housed at that same address, since some Massachusetts towns keep the Assessor in a separate building from Town Hall.

How Cohasset Compares: The South Shore Cluster

Massachusettsalmanac.com's FY2025 Massachusetts Communities Tax Rate table puts all four South Shore towns in this site's cluster side by side, per $1,000 of assessed value: Cohasset at $11.58, Duxbury at $10.14, Scituate at $9.99, and Marshfield at $9.90. Cohasset isn't just the highest of the four, it's clearly the highest — a gap of more than a dollar separates it from Duxbury, while Duxbury, Scituate, and Marshfield are bunched within about 24 cents of each other.

That gap tracks with everything else this site's research has found about Cohasset relative to its neighbors: it's the smallest town in the cluster by population, the only one located in Norfolk County rather than Plymouth County, and — per Zillow — has by far the highest average home value in the cluster. A high nominal rate on a smaller, more valuable housing stock is a consistent, not contradictory, combination under Prop 2½'s levy-cap mechanism.

What an Actual Tax Bill Looks Like

Ownwell's Cohasset trends page estimates a median home value of $1,098,300, a median annual property tax bill of $12,718, and a median effective property-tax rate of 1.16% — above both the Massachusetts state median effective rate of 1.15% and the U.S. median of 1.02%. That $12,718 median annual bill is, by a wide margin, the highest of any town in this cluster: compare Scituate's $8,417 and Marshfield's $6,676, both per those towns' own Ownwell-sourced figures.

A separate source, the Census Bureau's own QuickFacts page, gives a meaningfully higher median home value for Cohasset: $1,318,900, drawn from 2020–2024 American Community Survey estimates, versus Ownwell's $1,098,300. Both figures are well above $1 million and point in the same direction, but they aren't identical, likely reflecting different methodologies — a multi-year survey estimate versus an assessment-based estimate. A reader estimating their own future bill should treat these as two separate reference points rather than blend them into one number, and should run the actual math against Cohasset's confirmed FY2025 rate and their specific property's assessed value.

Before You Rely on These Numbers, Verify Them Directly

This page's one confirmed figure is Cohasset's FY2025 rate of $11.58 per $1,000, carried forward from massachusettsalmanac.com's Fiscal Year 2025 comparison table and cross-confirmed by two independently produced prior research files covering this South Shore cluster. A fresh attempt to re-verify that figure directly against massachusettsalmanac.com in this research pass did not return the underlying rate table itself, so treat it as well-corroborated rather than freshly re-verified. The FY2023, FY2024, and FY2026 rates are explicitly not confirmed here, and this page has deliberately avoided guessing at them.

Massachusetts tax rates and assessed values move on an annual cycle, and Cohasset's own classification-hearing process each fall can shift the following fiscal year's rate in either direction. Anyone budgeting for a Cohasset purchase should confirm the current rate directly with the Massachusetts DLS "Tax Rates by Class" database or the Town of Cohasset's own Assessors' Office (Town Hall, 41 Highland Avenue, Cohasset, MA 02025 — confirm this is the Assessors' Office's own address before relying on it), and should consult a Massachusetts-licensed tax professional or real estate attorney before making a purchase decision based on property tax exposure.