Where New York Property Taxes Rose Fastest (and Slowest), 2013–2025

In the town of Dryden, in Tompkins County, the property tax rate more than doubled between 2013 and 2025. It rose from $3.17 to $6.49 per $1,000 of home value, a 104.7% increase, the largest of any town in New York State. Dryden is home to about 13,700 people, making it a real, sizable place, not some tiny outlier.

Dryden is not alone. A handful of other towns saw similarly steep increases. Others, even nearby ones, barely changed at all. We looked at 12 years of New York State tax data to find out where, and why a number like "104.7% increase" can be misleading if you don't look closely at how it was calculated.

What we looked at

We used data published by the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, which tracks property tax rates for towns, counties, and school districts across the state. For this analysis, we focused on one specific piece: the municipal tax rate, the part of your property tax bill that goes to your town or city government, for areas outside an incorporated village.

We compared 2013 to 2025 for a specific reason. Before 2013, the state calculated these rates using assessed value. From 2013 onward, it switched to full value. Comparing a number from before that switch to a number from after it would not be a fair comparison, it would be comparing two different kinds of measurements. 2013 and 2025 both use the full value method, so the comparison holds up.

We left New York City out of this analysis. The city's property tax system works differently from the rest of the state, and including it would not be a fair comparison either.

Data Source: This analysis utilizes the Real Property Tax Rates Levy Data By Municipality dataset published by data.ny.gov and maintained by the State of New York.

Why raw percentages can mislead

Here's a problem we ran into early on. A town that starts with a very low tax rate can show a huge percentage increase, even if the real dollar change was small. A rate moving from $0.10 to $0.40 looks like a 300% jump, but in dollar terms, it's barely noticeable.

To avoid that, we set two rules before ranking any town. First, we only included towns whose 2013 tax rate was already above the 25th percentile for the state, meaning at least $3.05 per $1,000. Second, we required a real, meaningful dollar increase of at least $0.50 per $1,000 between 2013 and 2025. Towns that didn't meet both conditions were left out of the rankings below.

We also checked the top results by hand. The five largest percentage increases all came with dollar increases of $2.59 or more per $1,000, real, substantial moves, not just a side effect of a small starting number.

Where tax rates rose fastest

Dryden's increase stands well above the rest. Ellenburg and Salem follow, both more than doubling their distance from where they started in 2013, even though neither quite matches Dryden's pace.

Where tax rates barely moved

A small percentage increase does not always mean a town kept taxes low. Look at Portage and Elmira: both already had high tax rates back in 2013, well above most of the state. Their rates kept rising, just slowly compared to where they started. A town with a high starting rate needs a much bigger dollar increase to show the same percentage growth as a town that started low. So this list is better read as towns where the rate grew slowly relative to where it already was, not towns that kept taxes low.

The reality check: dollar increases

Percentages tell part of the story. Dollar amounts tell another. Here are the ten towns with the largest actual increase in their municipal tax rate, measured in dollars per $1,000, rather than as a percentage.

Most of the same names show up on both lists, which is a good sign. But look at Dunkirk. It does not appear anywhere near the top of the percentage rankings, its 19.2% increase looks modest next to Dryden's 104.7%. Yet in real dollar terms, Dunkirk's tax rate rose by more than most of the state. That's because Dunkirk already had a high starting rate, so the same dollar increase produces a smaller percentage. This is exactly why we built this third table. A percentage ranking alone would have missed Dunkirk's increase entirely.

Does the size of the town matter?

We checked the population of every town on both lists. Most of them are small. Newcomb has about 400 residents. Roseboom has about 700. On the other side, Portage has about 750 and Grove about 500. Both the fastest-rising and slowest-rising lists are made up mostly of small towns, which mostly just reflects that most of New York's 959 municipalities are small to begin with. There is no clear pattern showing that small towns rise faster, or slower, than larger ones.

Dryden is the one real exception. At roughly 13,700 people, it is far larger than every other town on either list, and it still posted the single largest increase, in both percentage and, as the table above shows, near the top in dollar terms too. That combination, a real increase in a town large enough for it to affect a meaningful number of households, is part of why Dryden is the clearest example in this whole analysis.

What this means for you

The goal of this analysis was not to find the highest-tax towns in New York. It was to find the towns where the municipal tax rate changed the most over time. A town can rank high on this list without having high taxes overall, and a town with very high taxes can rank low here if its rate simply held steady.

If you're comparing towns, whether you're moving, buying a home, or just curious about your own town, a single percentage number rarely tells the whole story. Where a town started matters as much as how much it changed.