Plymouth, MA Property Tax: One Rate, Huge Town

The FY2026 Rate: $12.55 Per $1,000, and Why It's Unified Rather Than Split

Per SouthShore.news reporting on Plymouth's Select Board classification hearing, Plymouth's FY2026 tax rate is $12.55 per $1,000 of assessed valuation — a single, unified rate covering both residential and commercial property, rather than the split residential/commercial system a number of larger Massachusetts cities use. That's a deliberate, recurring policy choice on Plymouth's part: each fall, at the town's classification hearing, the Select Board has the option to shift more of the tax burden onto commercial and industrial property by adopting a split rate, and has instead chosen to keep a single rate applied evenly across all property classes.

The unified-rate choice matters most in comparison to a neighbor like Quincy, which sets two separate rates each year — a lower residential figure and a commercial rate running roughly double it. Plymouth's Select Board maintained its single rate even as total residential property valuation townwide rose about 6%, or roughly $1 billion, to approximately $16.5 billion — meaning rising home values were absorbed into the existing unified-rate structure rather than triggering a shift toward taxing commercial property more heavily to ease the residential load.

As with every Massachusetts city or town, that $12.55 figure is an output, not an input the town simply picks. It's arrived at by taking the total property tax revenue Plymouth is legally allowed to raise for the year and dividing it by the town's total assessed value — which is where Proposition 2½ comes in.

Proposition 2½: The Levy Cap Behind Every Massachusetts Tax Rate

Proposition 2½ is a 1980 Massachusetts ballot law, and it applies identically to Plymouth, Quincy, Duxbury, and every other city and town in the state — it isn't a Plymouth-specific rule. What it does is cap the total dollar amount of property tax revenue, called the levy, that a municipality can raise. Under the law, a town's total levy can never exceed 2.5% of the town's total assessed value, and from one year to the next the levy itself can grow by at most 2.5% plus whatever additional revenue comes from new growth — newly built homes, additions, subdivided lots, and other newly taxable construction — unless voters approve an override.

That framing flips the usual assumption about how a tax rate gets set. In a system where officials simply pick a rate, the rate is the fixed input and the bill is the output. Under Prop 2½, the allowed total levy is the fixed input — set by formula from the prior year's levy plus the capped growth allowance — and the per-$1,000 rate is what's left over once that levy is divided by the town's total assessed value. When property values rise faster than the levy is allowed to grow, as happened with Plymouth's roughly 6% residential valuation jump in FY2026, the rate has to come down (or, as here, hold steady rather than rise) to keep total collections within the statutory cap.

Why the Same Rate Means Different Bills Across a 96-Square-Mile Town

A unified $12.55 rate sounds simple, but Plymouth's sheer size means it gets applied against an unusually wide range of underlying property values and property types within one town's borders. Plymouth's total area runs 134.0 square miles, of which 96.4 square miles is land — a land area several times larger than Duxbury's roughly 24 square miles or Hull's 2.8 square miles, the other OCEAN-type towns in this site's South Shore cluster. That land encompasses the historic Plymouth Center harbor district, the residential neighborhoods of North, West, and South Plymouth, the coastal villages of Manomet and Cedarville further south along Cape Cod Bay, and a substantial inland interior with lake and pond country, including Great Herring Pond, that most Pilgrim-history-focused visitor content never touches.

A single rate applied across that range of property doesn't produce a single typical bill — it produces a wide spread of actual bills, because the rate is multiplied against each property's own assessed value, and assessed values vary enormously across Plymouth's neighborhoods. A modest inland home well back from the water carries a very different assessed value, and therefore a very different bill at the same $12.55 rate, than a waterfront property in Plymouth Center or along the Manomet coastline exposed to the erosion pressures documented elsewhere on this site's Plymouth coverage. This page won't invent a specific bill for a specific address or neighborhood — the honest version is that Plymouth's own size and geographic diversity mean the rate alone tells a buyer very little without also knowing a specific property's assessed value.

What Ownwell's Market Data Suggests About a Typical Bill

Absent a single representative property, the closest available substitute for a typical Plymouth bill comes from Ownwell's market-data tracking, which measures actual tax paid as a percentage of home value. Ownwell puts Plymouth's median home value at $530,300, with a median annual property tax bill of $6,728 and an effective tax rate of 1.27% — a figure Ownwell itself describes as running higher than both the Massachusetts state median of 1.15% and the national median of 1.02%.

Read alongside the confirmed FY2026 nominal rate, that effective-rate figure is a genuinely useful but separate data point, not a substitute for it. An effective rate blends the nominal per-$1,000 rate together with how closely a town's assessed values track actual market sale prices, so Plymouth's 1.27% effective rate running above the state median doesn't necessarily mean its nominal $12.55 rate is unusually high — Zillow's own separately tracked average home value for Plymouth, $665,167 as of a recent snapshot, runs meaningfully higher than Ownwell's $530,300 median, a reminder that an aggregate index and a median-value estimate are two different measurements from two different methodologies, not a contradiction to resolve. Either way, Plymouth's home values, and by extension its typical tax bills, run well below Duxbury's own roughly $1.1 million ZHVI figure — a real, defensible reason Plymouth reads as a relatively more affordable South Shore option, consistent with its much larger and more economically diverse population base.

County Seat, Twice Over: Plymouth's Own Civic Wrinkle

One more structural fact worth knowing alongside the tax rate itself: Plymouth is one of two county seats, or shire towns, of Plymouth County — the other being Brockton. Most Massachusetts counties have a single shire town, so sharing that status is a genuine, if easy-to-overlook, civic distinction. It doesn't change how the tax rate itself is calculated, since Massachusetts property taxation is set at the municipal, not county, level, but it's a useful marker of Plymouth's actual scale and civic weight relative to the smaller, more purely residential towns elsewhere in this site's South Shore cluster — Plymouth is, by recent estimates, one of Massachusetts's roughly twenty largest towns or cities by population, not merely the site of the 1620 landing.

Before You Rely on Any of This, Verify It Directly

Every figure on this page is a snapshot: Plymouth's FY2026 rate, its recent assessed-value totals, and Ownwell's median-value and effective-rate figures are all specific to the time they were reported, and Massachusetts tax rates move on an annual cycle set at each fall's classification hearing. A rate that held steady in FY2026 is not a guarantee of what FY2027 will bring, particularly if residential valuations keep climbing at anything like the roughly 6% pace reported this cycle.

Anyone budgeting for a Plymouth purchase, in any of its neighborhoods, should confirm the current rate and a specific property's own assessed value directly with the Town of Plymouth Assessors' Office, or check the Massachusetts Department of Revenue's Division of Local Services "Tax Rates by Class" database, which tracks every city and town's confirmed rate year by year. This page is independent research, not tax or legal advice — consult a Massachusetts-licensed tax professional or real estate attorney before making a purchase decision based on property tax exposure.