Real Cost of Living in Marshfield, MA: Taxes and Prices

How Massachusetts Property Tax Actually Works: Proposition 2½

Massachusetts towns do not simply pick a tax rate each year. Under Proposition 2½, a 1980 ballot law, the total property-tax revenue a town may collect — its “levy” — is capped, and that levy can grow year over year by only 2.5% plus whatever new revenue comes from newly built or improved property (“new growth”), unless voters approve an override at town meeting or the ballot.

Only after that levy ceiling is set does a town divide it by the town's total assessed value to produce a rate expressed per $1,000 of assessed value. Marshfield uses a single rate applied to both residential and commercial property, consistent with a Marshfield-specific property-tax guide's framing of “Marshfield's FY2025 residential property tax rate.” The number that comes out the other end is the output of a statutory revenue cap working backward through the town's rising assessed values — not a figure the Select Board sets directly the way it might set a budget line.

Marshfield’s Confirmed Tax Rate: FY2025 and FY2026

Two rate years are solidly confirmed for Marshfield. For FY2025, the rate was $9.90 per $1,000 of assessed value — cross-confirmed by two independent sources: a Marshfield-specific property-tax guide at steve-novak.com (updated June 2026) and massachusettsalmanac.com's own “Massachusetts Communities Tax Rate Fiscal Year 2025” comparison table, which lists Marshfield at 9.90 alongside neighboring Duxbury at 10.14, Scituate at 9.99, and Cohasset at 11.58 in the same South Shore cluster.

For FY2026, the rate is $9.61 per $1,000 of assessed value — confirmed directly from the Town of Marshfield's own Assessors' Office web page, which states plainly: “FISCAL YEAR 2026 - TAX RATE $9.61,” and repeats the same figure in its FAQ. That is the single strongest, most authoritative tax-rate figure available for this page, and it shows the rate moving down slightly year over year even as assessed values rose — the same Proposition 2½ mechanics described above, working in a homeowner's favor.

FY2023 and FY2024 rates could not be confirmed for this page. Multiple attempts to pull them turned up only current-year figures rather than a clean multi-year table. If you need those specific years, go directly to the Massachusetts Department of Revenue's Division of Local Services “Tax Rates by Class” database, or call Marshfield's own Assessors' Office at 870 Moraine Street (781-834-5585), rather than assuming a number.

What Marshfield Homes Actually Cost: Four Numbers, Four Sources

Ask what a home is worth in Marshfield and you'll get a different answer depending on who you ask. Zillow's own home-values page, reflecting an April 30, 2026 data date, shows an average home value (ZHVI) of $803,822, up 3.8% year over year, with a median list price of $827,633, 49 homes for sale, and homes typically going pending within 9 days — a tight, fast-moving market by that measure.

Census QuickFacts, using 2020-2024 American Community Survey data for owner-occupied units, gives a materially lower median home value of $680,300. Ownwell's trends page (last updated April 13, 2026) lands close to that Census figure, at $674,200. Those two sources — one federal, one a tax-focused analytics firm — agree with each other far more closely than either agrees with a third figure: a Marshfield-specific tax guide at steve-novak.com estimates a median home value around $980,000.

That $980,000 figure should be treated as a likely outlier, or as reflecting a different methodology entirely (assessed value rather than market value, or a different geographic cut), rather than blended in with the others. The two most defensible figures for a straightforward “what's a typical Marshfield home worth” question are Zillow's live $803,822 ZHVI and the Census's $680,300 ACS-vintage figure — pick whichever matches what you're actually trying to measure, and never let anyone hand you a single number as “the” Marshfield home value without naming its source.

Household Income: Trust the Census Number, Not the Older One

Census QuickFacts, drawing on 2020-2024 American Community Survey data in 2024 dollars, puts Marshfield's median household income at $125,986. An older figure still circulating on Wikipedia's town-article infobox — $142,610 median household income — is a 2000-Census-vintage number, not a current one; treat it as stale and prefer the Census QuickFacts figure.

A third figure, $97,105, appears on a DataUSA.io profile for Marshfield. That figure deserves real caution: the same DataUSA profile also reported a 2024 population of 5,161 for Marshfield — a town the Census Bureau's own QuickFacts page puts at 26,826 as of its July 1, 2025 estimate. A population error that far off points to a mismatched geography or Census tract somewhere in DataUSA's pipeline, and its accompanying income figure for Marshfield should not be relied on without independent verification directly against Census or ACS tables.

The Actual Tax Bill: Two Estimates That Don’t Agree

Two sources put real numbers on what a Marshfield homeowner might actually pay each year, and they don't fully agree with each other — largely because they start from different home-value assumptions. The steve-novak.com guide, working from its own roughly $980,000 median-value estimate, arrives at an average annual tax bill of about $9,700, or roughly $808 a month.

Ownwell's trends page, working from its lower $674,200 median value, gives a median annual tax bill of $6,676 and a median effective property-tax rate of 0.99% — compared with a Massachusetts state median of 1.15% and a U.S. median of 1.02%. Read both figures as internally consistent with their own home-value assumptions rather than as competing claims about the same house; the honest takeaway is that a Marshfield tax bill could plausibly run anywhere from roughly $6,700 to $9,700 a year depending on what the underlying property is actually worth.

Either way, Marshfield's rate itself is a genuine selling point relative to the state as a whole. The steve-novak.com guide frames Marshfield's tax rate as roughly 20% below Massachusetts' approximately $12.40-per-$1,000 statewide average — meaningfully cheaper, rate-for-rate, than a typical Massachusetts town, even before accounting for Marshfield's comparatively moderate home values next to a neighbor like Duxbury.

A Practical Checklist Before You Rely on Any Number Here

First, treat $9.61 per $1,000 as Marshfield's confirmed FY2026 tax rate — the strongest figure on this page, sourced directly from the town's own Assessors' Office. Don't reach further back than FY2025's confirmed $9.90; FY2023 and FY2024 were not confirmed in the research behind this page, and guessing at them would be worse than leaving the gap open.

Second, don't anchor to a single home-value number. Zillow's $803,822 ZHVI and the Census's $680,300 figure are the two most defensible, general-purpose estimates; treat the roughly $980,000 tax-guide figure as a likely outlier requiring its own verification before using it for anything financial.

Third, prefer the Census QuickFacts household-income figure of $125,986 over the older, stale $142,610 number still circulating in some places, and be skeptical of DataUSA's $97,105 figure given that source's confirmed, unrelated population error for this exact town.

Finally, this page does not attempt to estimate Marshfield-specific grocery, utility, or homeowners-insurance costs — those figures were not part of the confirmed research behind this page, and inventing them would be worse than leaving them out. Confirm every number here — and get current estimates for costs not covered on this page — directly with the Town of Marshfield Assessors' Office, the U.S. Census Bureau, and a Massachusetts-licensed real estate agent or tax professional before relying on any of it financially. Nothing here is tax, legal, or financial advice.