Scituate, MA Property Tax Rate: FY2025 Is $9.99

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

Every Massachusetts town's property tax rate, including Scituate'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. When assessed values climb faster than the levy is permitted to grow, the rate has to ease downward to keep total revenue inside the cap, and vice versa. That's the mechanism behind every rate figure on this page, and it's the same mechanism documented at greater length on this site's Duxbury and Marshfield property-tax pages.

Scituate's Confirmed Rate: FY2025 at $9.99

Scituate's FY2025 property tax rate is $9.99 per $1,000 of assessed value, and this figure is cross-confirmed by two independent sources that agree exactly. The first is massachusettsalmanac.com's own Massachusetts Communities Tax Rate table for Fiscal Year 2025, which lists Scituate at 9.99 alongside its South Shore neighbors. The second is steve-novak.com's own Scituate-specific cost-of-living guide, which separately states the property tax rate for FY2025 as $9.99 per $1,000 of assessed value. Two differently sourced, independently produced figures landing on the identical number is about as solid as an unofficial confirmation gets, and it makes FY2025 the single best-confirmed data point on this page.

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

This page will not guess at Scituate's FY2023, FY2024, or FY2026 rates. The research behind this page turned up the Massachusetts Department of Revenue's own FY2023 and FY2025 tax-levy pages, a tax-rates.org assessor listing, and an assessedvalues2.com portal, but none of them yielded a directly confirmed, Scituate-specific dollar figure for those three fiscal years. Interpolating between a known FY2025 number and a guessed FY2026 number might feel tempting, but neighboring Duxbury's own confirmed rate history (FY2023 $10.69, FY2024 $10.06, FY2025 $10.14) shows a Massachusetts town's rate can swing sharply from one year to the next rather than move in a straight line, and Marshfield's FY2026 rate ($9.61) dropped meaningfully from its FY2025 figure ($9.90) for the same reason. A number invented for Scituate's FY2023, FY2024, or FY2026 rate would be a guess dressed up as a fact, so this page doesn't publish one.

Anyone who needs Scituate's FY2023, FY2024, or FY2026 rate should go directly to a primary source. The Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Division of Local Services maintains a "Tax Rates by Class" database covering every city and town in the state, year by year. The Town of Scituate's own Assessor's Office can also confirm the current figure directly: 600 Chief Justice Cushing Way, Scituate Town Hall, Scituate, MA 02066, phone 781-545-8712.

How Scituate Compares: The South Shore Cluster

Massachusettsalmanac.com's FY2025 Massachusetts Communities Tax Rate table lines up four South Shore towns side by side, all per $1,000 of assessed value: Scituate at $9.99, Marshfield at $9.90, Duxbury at $10.14, and Cohasset at $11.58. Scituate sits squarely in the middle of that cluster — higher than Marshfield, but lower than both Duxbury and Cohasset. It isn't the bargain of the group, and it isn't the outlier at the top either; it's the town whose rate a buyer comparing across this stretch of the South Shore would reasonably call "typical for the area."

That middle position is worth noting because it doesn't track any single obvious variable — Scituate isn't simply the biggest or smallest town in the cluster, and its rate doesn't move in lockstep with home values either. Prop 2½ produces a rate for each town independently, driven by that town's own levy history, assessed-value growth, and any local override votes, which is exactly why four adjacent South Shore towns can post four genuinely different rates in the same fiscal year.

What an Actual Tax Bill Looks Like: Two Different Estimates

Two sources give genuinely different average-bill estimates for Scituate, and this page presents both separately rather than blending them into one invented number. Steve-novak.com's guide estimates a median home price of roughly $1.42 million and an estimated monthly property-tax bill of about $1,186 at the FY2025 $9.99 rate. That home-value figure runs well above other measures of Scituate's typical home value found in this same research (Census ACS puts it at $847,600, Ownwell at $842,500), so it should be treated as a likely outlier — possibly reflecting current active-listing or list-price data rather than a broader median-sale or assessed-value figure — rather than a representative "typical Scituate home."

Ownwell's own Scituate trends page tells a different, lower-value story: a median home value of $842,500, a median annual tax bill of $8,417, and a median effective property-tax rate of 1.00%, compared to a Massachusetts state median effective rate of 1.15%. Ownwell's effective rate running below the state median is consistent with Scituate's nominal $9.99 rate sitting in the middle, rather than the top, of its South Shore cluster. A reader trying to estimate their own future bill should treat these as two separate reference points sourced from two different methodologies, not average them together, and should run the actual numbers against Scituate's confirmed FY2025 rate and their specific property's assessed value.

Before You Rely on These Numbers, Verify Them Directly

This page's one fully confirmed figure is Scituate's FY2025 rate of $9.99 per $1,000, cross-confirmed by massachusettsalmanac.com and steve-novak.com. The FY2023, FY2024, and FY2026 rates are explicitly not confirmed here, and this page has deliberately avoided guessing at them. The two average-bill estimates — about $1,186 a month on a roughly $1.42 million home per steve-novak.com, and $8,417 a year on an $842,500 home at a 1.00% effective rate per Ownwell — are presented as separately sourced figures, not merged into a single number, because they rest on genuinely different home-value assumptions.

Massachusetts tax rates and assessed values move on an annual cycle, and Scituate's own classification-hearing process each fall can shift the following fiscal year's rate in either direction. Anyone budgeting for a Scituate purchase should confirm the current rate directly with the Town of Scituate Assessor's Office (600 Chief Justice Cushing Way, Scituate Town Hall, Scituate, MA 02066, phone 781-545-8712) or the Massachusetts DLS Tax Rates by Class database, and should consult a Massachusetts-licensed tax professional or real estate attorney before making a purchase decision based on property tax exposure.