Scarborough Property Tax: The $11.33 Rate Explained

One Town, One Rate — No Village-District or Neighborhood Layer

Scarborough is a genuinely large town by New England standards, at roughly 47.6 to 47.75 square miles of land (sources vary slightly), and it is home to several distinct named villages: Higgins Beach, Pine Point, Prouts Neck, Dunstan, Oak Hill, North Scarborough, West Scarborough, Blue Point, Eight Corners, and Pleasant Hill. Despite that variety, all of it is taxed as one municipality under one assessing office. A buyer weighing a cottage a few blocks from the Higgins Beach Association's summer concert series against a home near the Scarborough Downs redevelopment inland is looking at the same mil rate either way. That is a structural fact about how Maine towns are organized, not a data gap — there simply is no Higgins Beach-specific or Prouts Neck-specific rate to look up.

The FY2025-26 Rate: $11.33 per $1,000 — One of the Lowest on the Maine Coast

Scarborough's FY2025-26 mil rate is $11.33 per $1,000 of assessed valuation, effective August 20, 2025, per SEDCO's Scarborough tax page (sourced from the town). That figure is genuinely notable in context: Scarborough's rate runs among the lowest of any coastal or greater-Portland-area town. A separate comparison table available during this research — labeled to an apparently earlier fiscal year, likely FY2025, and showing Scarborough at $10.93 rather than $11.33 — puts Scarborough in a similar range to Cape Elizabeth ($11.00) and Waterboro ($11.05), and meaningfully below South Portland ($13.20), Freeport ($13.35), Saco ($14.05), Gorham ($14.70), Westbrook ($14.75), Portland ($15.01), Bath ($16.50), and Bangor ($18.55).

Those two Scarborough figures — $11.33 and $10.93 — most likely represent two different fiscal years rather than a contradiction, but this research was not able to fully reconcile them: the town's own tax-rate notice page returned a proxy error when fetched directly this session. Before treating either number as gospel, a buyer should verify the current rate directly against scarboroughmaine.org/departments/assessing. What both figures agree on, though, is the broader pattern: whichever exact year you compare, Scarborough sits at or near the bottom of the greater-Portland rate table, not the top.

A Plausible, Not Proven, Reason the Rate Runs Low

A comparatively low mil rate in a town this size is worth asking why, and Scarborough has a real, documented answer available, even if the research behind this page cannot draw a hard causal line. Scarborough is a large and genuinely growing town — a 2025 Census Bureau estimate puts the population at 24,547, roughly 11% growth since the 2020 Census count of 22,135, making it one of the faster-growing municipalities in Maine. It also has a diversified economic base that goes well beyond beach tourism: Scarborough is the headquarters town of Hannaford supermarkets, a real, verifiable, non-tourism employer anchor.

On top of that, the Scarborough Downs redevelopment — a 525-acre, roughly $615 million mixed-use project being built on the site of a shuttered 70-year horse-racing track, branded "The Downs" — is projected to add roughly $10 million in annual tax revenue at full buildout, according to reporting on the project. A larger, more diversified, faster-growing tax base with a major new commercial and residential development coming online could plausibly help keep the residential mil rate comparatively contained. That is a reasonable inference to draw from the facts on the record, not a confirmed causal claim the research established directly — no source ties Scarborough's specific rate to The Downs' specific revenue in a stated cause-and-effect way, and this page does not claim otherwise.

What a Low Mil Rate Does Not Tell You: Maine Has a State Income Tax

A low property tax rate is only one line item in a household's total state and local tax picture. Maine levies a real state personal income tax on wage income, retirement income, and other earnings, on top of whatever a specific town's mil rate happens to be. That means Scarborough's comparatively favorable rate, on its own, does not tell the whole tax-burden story for someone moving from a state with no income tax, or comparing Scarborough against a low-income-tax state. This page does not attempt to size that income-tax impact in dollar terms, since it depends entirely on a specific household's income and filing situation — that calculation belongs with a Maine-licensed tax professional, not a town mil rate.

Running the Rate Against Scarborough's Home Values

Applying Scarborough's mil rate to its current home-value benchmarks is illustrative only, not a real tax bill for any specific parcel. Zillow's Home Value Index puts Scarborough's typical home value at $705,594; at $11.33 per $1,000, that would work out to roughly $7,994 per year, if that rate still holds for the parcel in question. Scarborough is genuinely more expensive than other Maine markets this site covers despite its comparatively low tax rate — Zillow's own figures put Wells at $578,907 and Old Orchard Beach at $507,308, meaning Scarborough runs well above both on typical home value even as its mil rate runs below several of its own greater-Portland neighbors. A lower rate applied to a higher home value does not automatically produce a lower dollar tax bill, which is exactly why running the actual math on a specific property, using that property's own assessed value from its current tax card, matters more than comparing rates or values in isolation.

What This Page Could Not Confirm

Several things here should be checked directly rather than assumed. The exact reconciliation between the $11.33 FY2025-26 rate and the $10.93 figure that appeared in a comparison table was not fully resolved this session, because the town's own tax-rate notice page returned a proxy error when fetched directly — verify the current rate at scarboroughmaine.org/departments/assessing before relying on either number. No parcel-level FEMA flood-zone breakdown (VE versus AE designations) for Scarborough's coastal areas, including Higgins Beach and Pine Point, was confirmed for this page, so no claim is made here about how flood-zone status might affect assessed values or insurance costs at specific Scarborough addresses. There is also no neighborhood-specific mil-rate variation to report for Higgins Beach or Prouts Neck versus the rest of town — that is a genuine structural fact about how Maine towns tax property, not an unresolved gap, since Scarborough, like other Maine municipalities, does not divide itself into separate taxing precincts the way some New Hampshire towns do. Finally, the exact dollar impact of Maine's state income tax on any specific household's total tax burden depends on that household's own income and filing situation and was not modeled here. Verify all of the above directly with the Town of Scarborough's assessing office, Maine Revenue Services, and a Maine-licensed tax professional or real estate attorney before making a purchase decision based on tax exposure.