Rye, NH Property Tax Rate: What Owners Pay

A Single-Layer Tax Town, Not a Village-District Town

It is worth stating plainly because it trips people up when they cross-shop the NH Seacoast: Rye is not structured like Hampton Beach. Hampton Beach sits inside the Town of Hampton but is also its own Village District, a precinct created in 1907 under state law that votes its own separate budget and bills its own separate tax on top of Hampton's town-wide rate. Rye has no equivalent structure. Rye Beach and Rye Harbor are villages and neighborhoods within the Town of Rye, not separate taxing entities, and every parcel in town, whether it sits on Ocean Boulevard, at Straws Point, or well inland, is taxed under the same single Town of Rye rate. One bill, one rate, no second precinct layer to track down.

That simplicity is a genuine practical advantage when budgeting for ownership here. A buyer does not need to separately investigate a village district's own budget documents the way a Hampton Beach buyer does; the Town of Rye's own tax collector and assessing records tell the whole story for any parcel in town.

Rye's 2025 Rate: $8.66 per $1,000, and Why It Reads So Low

The figure most recently reported for Rye is $8.66 per $1,000 of assessed value for 2025, sourced from the Madden Group's 2025 Seacoast homeowner tax guide, which itself cites the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration's municipal tax rate list dated June 8, 2025. That is a genuinely low number as New Hampshire town rates go, and it is not an accident or a sign that Rye's town government is unusually thrifty. New Hampshire's town-based tax system means a town's nominal rate and its per-parcel property values move in opposite directions: a town where the average home is worth well over a million dollars can raise the same tax revenue with a much smaller rate per $1,000 than a town with more modestly valued homes, simply because the underlying assessed base is so much larger per parcel. Rye's high property values, discussed below, are the direct reason its rate reads low rather than a sign of lower spending.

This figure should still be treated as a reported number rather than a locked-in current fact. It was pulled from a secondary aggregator rather than fetched directly from the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration's own official published rate report at revenue.nh.gov, and DRA rates are finalized annually, typically in the fall, after each town sets its budget. Anyone using this number for an actual purchase or budgeting decision should confirm the current-year figure directly against the DRA's own report or the Town of Rye's own Tax Collector and Assessing pages before relying on it.

What $8.66 per $1,000 Actually Costs, in Dollars

Two different home-value figures exist for Rye, and running the $8.66 rate against each gives a useful range rather than a single false-precision number. Zillow's Home Value Index puts Rye's typical home value at $1,294,369 as of a May 31, 2026 snapshot; at $8.66 per $1,000, that works out to roughly $11,209 per year in town tax. The U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey figure for Rye's median home value, a different and generally more conservative measure, is $1,028,100, which works out to roughly $8,903 per year at the same rate.

Both of those are illustrative multiplications, not real tax bills. A town's own assessed value for a specific parcel is not the same thing as a Zillow estimate or a Census-wide median, and New Hampshire towns periodically revalue their assessment rolls against an equalization ratio set by the state, which can push an individual parcel's assessed value above or below what a market index like Zillow would suggest for the same property. The only reliable number for a specific address is the actual assessed value on that parcel's current tax card from the Town of Rye's own Assessing office, multiplied by the confirmed current-year rate.

How Rye Compares to Its Seacoast Neighbors

Set against other Rockingham County Seacoast towns, per the same Madden Group 2025 figures, all per $1,000 of assessed value: New Castle $5.39, the lowest in the region, Rye $8.66, Portsmouth $11.18, Hampton $12.32, North Hampton $12.80, Exeter $17.79, and Brentwood $25.17, the highest cited. Rye sits second-lowest in that lineup, closer to ultra-wealthy New Castle than to Hampton or Portsmouth, which lines up with the broader wealth picture: Rye's median household income is reported between roughly $137,969 and $140,655 depending on source and vintage, meaningfully above Hampton's roughly $92,605 and Portsmouth's roughly $100,169, and its home values run at something like double Hampton's on both the Zillow and Census measures. A low nominal tax rate paired with a high assessed-value base is the through-line connecting all of these figures.

No State Income Tax, No State Sales Tax: The Rest of the Picture

New Hampshire has no state income tax on wages and salaries and no general state sales tax. There is no offsetting state levy to weigh against the property tax rate the way a buyer moving from Massachusetts or another income-tax state might expect. In New Hampshire, the property tax is essentially the entire state and local tax picture for a homeowner, which is part of why nominal town rates in this state read high relative to states that spread the load across multiple tax types, and why a rate as comparatively low as Rye's $8.66 stands out as a real, meaningful advantage rather than just a smaller number on paper.

What This Page Could Not Confirm

A few things should be checked directly rather than assumed from this page. First and most important, the $8.66 per $1,000 figure came from a secondary source citing the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration's June 2025 rate list; it has not been independently pulled from the DRA's own official published report, and DRA rates are set annually, so a current-year figure should be confirmed directly against revenue.nh.gov or the Town of Rye's own Assessing and Tax Collector pages before being used for a purchase decision. Second, no specific, sourced oceanfront-versus-inland assessed-value premium was found for Rye specifically; it is reasonable to expect Route 1A and Rye Harbor-adjacent parcels carry higher assessed values than inland Rye, consistent with the pattern at every other ocean market this site covers, but no confirmed dollar or percentage figure exists for Rye. Third, a clean, current Redfin median sale price and days-on-market figure for Rye's ZIP code, 03870, was not independently pulled for this page. None of these gaps should be filled with an assumed number. Verify each directly with the Town of Rye's Assessing office, the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration, or Redfin, and consult a New Hampshire-licensed tax professional or real estate attorney before making a purchase decision based on property tax exposure.