Wells, ME Property Tax Rate: What Owners Pay

One Town, One Rate — No Village-District Layer to Track Down

Every parcel in Wells, whether it sits on Mile Road near Wells Beach, on Ocean Avenue at Moody Beach, on the barrier beach at Drakes Island, or well inland toward Sanford, is taxed under the same single Town of Wells rate. There is no second precinct budget or separate district tax bill layered on top the way there is at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, which is both part of the Town of Hampton and its own Village District with its own separately voted budget. Wells Beach, Drakes Island, Crescent Beach, and Moody Beach are neighborhoods and villages within the single Town of Wells — none of them has its own government, assessing office, or tax rate. For a buyer, that means one town's records tell the whole story for any address in Wells; there is no second taxing entity to research separately.

A Town Old Enough and Large Enough to Explain the Numbers

Wells's tax roll covers a genuinely large, genuinely old town. At 73.61 square miles total — 57.55 square miles of land and 16.06 square miles of water — Wells is a big town by New England standards, and it has been an incorporated town since July 4-5, 1653, making it one of Maine's three oldest incorporated towns, after York and Kittery, named for the cathedral city of Wells, England. None of that changes the $6.46-per-$1,000 rate itself, but it is useful context for why one town-wide assessing office covers such a wide range of property types and neighborhoods, from Route 1 commercial parcels to beachfront cottages at Wells Beach, Drakes Island, Crescent Beach, and Moody Beach.

One zoning nuance worth flagging alongside the tax picture, separate from what a buyer would owe the town each year: some condominium and "contel" developments east of Route 1 near the beach, including Barefoot Cottage and Wellington Manor, carry a town zoning rule limiting occupancy to no more than 28 consecutive days at a time. That is a zoning restriction on how a unit can be used, not a tax rule, and it matters more to a rental-income calculation than to the tax bill itself — this cluster's vacation-rental-investment page covers it in full; a buyer should confirm current specifics with Wells's Code Enforcement Office before relying on it.

Wells's FY2025-2026 Rate: $6.46 per $1,000, and What It Actually Costs

Wells's official tax-information page, wellstown.org/874/General-Tax-Information, states the current rate as $6.46 per $1,000 of valuation for fiscal year 2025-2026 (July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026). Property is assessed at 100% of value, with an assessment date of April 1, 2025, and a commitment date — the date the tax roll is finalized and bills go out — of September 15, 2025. Unpaid balances accrue interest at 7.5% annually, per the same page.

Running that rate against Wells's two available home-value benchmarks gives a range rather than a single, false-precision number. Zillow's Home Value Index puts Wells's typical home value at $578,907; at $6.46 per $1,000, that works out to roughly $3,740 per year in town tax. The U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey figure for Wells's median home value, a separate and generally more conservative measure, is $485,300, which works out to roughly $3,135 per year at the same rate. Neither figure is a real tax bill for a specific parcel — Wells's own assessed value for an individual property, taken from that parcel's current tax card, multiplied by the confirmed current-year rate, is the only number that matters for an actual purchase decision.

Why the Zillow and Census Numbers Diverge

The gap between Zillow's $578,907 typical-home-value figure and the Census Bureau's $485,300 median is worth naming rather than glossing over — it is nearly a $94,000 spread on the same town. Zillow's Home Value Index is a current market-index estimate weighted toward active listings and recent sales; the Census figure is a survey-based median drawn from the 2020-2024 American Community Survey, which lags current market conditions and captures the full owner-occupied housing stock, including homes that have not turned over recently. Neither number is Wells's own assessed valuation for tax purposes, and a town's assessed values do not automatically track either market index in real time — Maine towns periodically revalue their assessment rolls, and an individual parcel's assessed value can sit above or below what either of these town-wide figures would suggest.

The Part an NH Buyer Will Miss: Maine Has a State Income Tax

This is the single most important structural difference for anyone cross-shopping Wells against this site's New Hampshire Seacoast towns — Rye, Hampton Beach, Seabrook, Portsmouth. New Hampshire has no state income tax on wages and salaries and no general state sales tax; property tax there effectively is the entire state-and-local tax picture for a homeowner, which is exactly why a comparatively low NH town rate reads as a genuine, complete advantage. Maine does not work that way. Maine levies a real state personal income tax, on top of property tax, and that income tax applies to wage income, retirement income, and other earnings a Wells resident receives regardless of what the town's own mill rate happens to be.

That means Wells's $6.46-per-$1,000 rate should not be read the same way an NH town's rate would be read. A $6.46 nominal rate next to New Hampshire towns charging $8, $12, or $17 per $1,000 is not evidence that Wells is "cheaper to own in" overall — it is evidence only that Wells's property tax, specifically, is a smaller line item than it would be in a comparably valued NH town. The income tax sitting alongside it is a real, ongoing cost that an NH-only mental model simply does not account for. Anyone moving from New Hampshire and budgeting off property tax alone is missing a piece of Maine's total tax burden that this page's research was not able to size in exact dollar terms for a specific income level — that calculation depends on the buyer's own income sources and should be run with a Maine-licensed tax professional, not estimated from a town's mill rate.

Household Income Context

Wells's median household income, per the Census Bureau's 2020-2024 American Community Survey estimate, is $88,024. That figure matters for the income-tax point above in a specific way: it is Maine's state income tax applying against whatever income a household actually earns, not against the town's property values, so a lower- or middle-income household and a high-income household living in the same $6.46-per-$1,000 town face very different total state tax exposure even on identical property tax bills. This page does not attempt to translate that median income figure into a specific Maine income-tax dollar amount, since actual liability depends on filing status, deductions, and income sources that vary by household — a Maine-licensed tax professional can run that calculation for a specific buyer's situation.

A Home-Value Comparison to Kennebunkport — Not a Tax-Rate Comparison

It is worth being precise about what can and cannot be compared here. This page's research did not turn up a confirmed current tax rate for either Kennebunkport or Ogunquit, Wells's two immediate coastal neighbors, so no tax-rate comparison across the three towns appears on this page — inventing one would be worse than leaving the gap. What is confirmed is a home-value comparison: Kennebunkport's own Zillow Home Value Index figure is $1,122,864, against Wells's $578,907 — Kennebunkport's typical home value runs at roughly double Wells's. That is a real, sourced difference in what a buyer would be paying for the underlying property in each town, and it is one reason a lower Wells assessed-value base could produce a smaller dollar tax bill even before comparing rates directly. It says nothing about either town's mill rate, and it should not be read as one.

What This Page Could Not Confirm

A few things should be checked directly rather than assumed from this page. No confirmed current property tax rate for Kennebunkport or Ogunquit was available for this page, so no direct rate-to-rate comparison across Wells and its two coastal neighbors is presented here; treat any such comparison found elsewhere as needing its own primary-source check against each town's own assessing office. A parcel-level breakdown of FEMA flood-zone designations (VE versus AE) for Wells was not obtained for this page, so no claim is made here about how flood-zone status might affect assessed values or insurance costs at specific Wells addresses. No confirmed oceanfront-versus-inland assessed-value premium specific to Wells was found, and no clean, current Redfin median sale price or days-on-market figure for Wells was independently pulled for this page. 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 Wells's Assessing office (wellstown.org), Maine Revenue Services, and a Maine-licensed tax professional or real estate attorney before making a purchase decision based on tax exposure.