The town collects property taxes each year. How you pay your tax bill is discussed HERE. The rest of this page discusses the property tax process.
The total amount collected is the sum of four entities.
- The town itself, police, fire, roads, etc.
- The school system, which itself has two entities
- The Statewide Education Property Tax (SWEPT)
- Grafton County operations, sheriff, register of deeds, etc.
Each of those entities creates a budget and is approved by the taxpayers. The total of those individual budgets is what the town collects in property taxes. This image is from the Town Report for the year 2023. What that says is that the tax rate set in the fall of 2023 was intended to generate $9,739,394 of revenue and it would be distributed to those four entities.
it’s confusing because the town report for the previous year is issued in February of the year but has proposed budgets for the following year. So, for example, the report issued in February 2024 was labeled “2023 Town Report” but contained proposed budgets for the 2025 year.
Notice the column labeled “Valuation”. That is the total of all the assessed property in the town. (The reason there is a different valuation used for the State Education is that the total includes the value of utilities in the town and the tax rate for the state education does not include utilities. No one has explained why.)
By law, every town must reassess all real property every five years, that happened last year. That’s why you saw a huge increase in your assessment.
So, to get the property tax rate, you simply divide the total dollars the town needs by the total assessed value of all property taxes in town.
Doing the arithmetic yields:
The increase in your property taxes is the combination of the increase in the tax rate and the increase in your assessment. It is not uniform across town. I selected a few properties and here is how it varies.
