Westport, CT Property Tax: The 18.86 Mill Rate and the 2025 Revaluation That Will Reshape Bills

The FY2025-26 Rate: 18.86 Mills, Up From 18.62

Westport's Board of Finance approved a mill rate of 18.86 mills for the FY2025-26 fiscal year, an increase of 1.29% over the prior year's 18.62 mills. That rate funds a $252 million town and school budget. A mill rate is Connecticut's standard property-tax unit: one mill equals $1 of tax for every $1,000 of assessed value, so the rate is applied directly to a property's assessed value, not its market value, to produce the annual tax bill.

That distinction between assessed value and market value matters more in Connecticut than in states that tax at full market value, because Connecticut towns - Westport included - assess property at a fraction of what it would sell for, under a formula covered in the next section. A rate moving from 18.62 to 18.86 mills is a modest year-over-year increase on its own, but it is only half of what determines a given property's actual bill; the other half is the assessed value the rate gets multiplied against, and that side of the equation is what the 2025 revaluation is actively rewriting.

How Assessment Works Here: 70% of Market Value

Under Connecticut's standard assessment methodology, which Westport follows, properties are assessed at 70% of their appraised market value, not at 100% of it. That 70% figure is a statewide assessment ratio set by state law, not a Westport-specific discount, so it applies uniformly across the town's Grand List.

Reporting on Westport's rate has used that 70% ratio to illustrate what a tax bill actually looks like at the 18.86 mill rate: a property with a $500,000 assessed value works out to roughly $9,423 a year in tax, and a property with a $1 million assessed value works out to roughly $18,856 a year. Those two figures are illustrative math from that reporting, built by multiplying an assessed value by the 18.86 rate - they are not a guarantee of what any specific property will actually owe, and they say nothing about what market value corresponds to a given assessed value on any individual parcel. A specific property's actual assessed value, and therefore its actual bill, has to come from Westport's own Assessor's office, not from working backward off these examples.

The 2025 Revaluation: What Changes, and When It Hits Bills

Westport completed a town-wide revaluation in 2025, conducted by Vision Government Solutions Inc., a Massachusetts-based firm with more than 35 years of experience and over 100 completed Connecticut revaluations. The revaluation is tied to the Grand List of October 1, 2025 - the town's official master list of all taxable property as of that date, which becomes the base the new assessments feed into.

Property owners received new assessment notices in late November 2025, with informal hearings held in November and December 2025, and formal appeals available after that informal-hearing window closed. The new assessments produced by this revaluation will first appear on tax bills due beginning July 2026 - meaning any property owner who has not yet seen a bill reflecting the new numbers should expect one starting with that billing cycle.

The town describes the revaluation as "a revenue neutral process." In practice, that means the town's total tax collections are designed to track the approved budget rather than balloon simply because assessed values changed - but revenue-neutral at the town-wide level does not mean unchanged at the individual-property level. Because a revaluation resets each property's assessed value to reflect current market conditions rather than the prior assessment cycle's conditions, individual bills can shift up or down relative to what an owner paid before, even while the town-wide total stays tied to the same budget. Anyone who owned property in Westport before this cycle should expect their own bill to move, in either direction, independent of any change in the mill rate itself.

Who Sets the Budget and the Rate

Westport's mill rate does not get set in isolation - it is the output of the town's budget process, which runs through a specific governance structure. An executive Board of Selectmen, headed by a First Selectman, handles town administration, while a 36-member Representative Town Meeting (RTM) - nine districts, four representatives each, a body that has existed in this form since 1949 - adopts the town and education budgets and approves any appropriation over $20,000. A separate Board of Finance, the body that approved the 18.86 mill rate described above, sits alongside these two.

That layered structure means Westport's rate each year reflects decisions made across three distinct bodies rather than a single office, and it is worth understanding as context for why the rate moves the way it does year to year - and for where to direct questions about a future budget cycle, since the RTM and Board of Finance, not the Assessor's office, are where budget and rate decisions actually get made.

What This Means If You Own or Are Buying in Westport

The two facts that matter most right now are the 18.86 mill rate itself and the fact that the 2025 revaluation's new assessed values are only just beginning to show up on bills, starting with the cycle due in July 2026. Anyone budgeting a purchase or evaluating an existing property in Westport should get the current assessed value - post-revaluation, not a pre-2025 figure - directly from the Assessor's office, rather than relying on a prior year's assessment or on the $500,000/$1,000,000 illustrative examples above, which are only meant to show how the rate math works, not to estimate any specific property's bill.

This page does not have, and does not invent, a current median home sale price, an assessed-value distribution across Westport's Grand List, a price-per-square-foot figure, or any Connecticut elderly or veteran property-tax exemption dollar thresholds specific to Westport. Connecticut law does provide for exemption programs of that kind generally, but this page does not state Westport-specific thresholds because none were confirmed - anyone who may qualify should ask the Assessor's office directly what current, town-specific programs and amounts apply.