Home prices & property taxes
The two numbers every relocating buyer asks me about first: what homes actually sell for, and what the tax bill looks like once you own one. Here is both, town by town, with real figures.
Typical home value by town
| Town | Typical home value* | 1-year change |
|---|---|---|
| Portsmouth, NH | $810K | up 3.4% |
| Dover, NH | $556K | up 1.5% |
| Exeter, NH | $622K | up 2.9% |
| Hampton, NH | $639K | up 3.9% |
| Rye, NH | $1.32M | up 5.4% |
| Stratham, NH | $793K | up 4.7% |
| Newmarket, NH | $572K | up 4.5% |
| Kittery, ME | $701K | up 3.8% |
| York, ME | $783K | up 1.8% |
*Home value data collected from the Zillow Home Value Index, July 2026
Two honest notes on reading this table. First, a typical value describes the whole housing stock - the middle house in town, whether or not it's for sale. What actually closes in a given quarter can land well under it: in Portsmouth and Hampton, where condos make up a big slice of sales, recent sold prices have run meaningfully below these figures. Second, every one of these nine towns gained value over the past year - the Seacoast didn't get the memo about a housing correction.
What your budget actually buys
$500K
The entry point - and in 2026 it sits below the typical value in all nine towns, so this budget is condo-and-compromise territory. Think a condo in Dover, Portsmouth, or Newmarket, a smaller single-family or townhouse on the inland side of Hampton, or a project house in Dover or Exeter. Anything move-in ready at this number draws a crowd.
$750K
The comfortable middle. This clears the typical value in Dover, Newmarket, Exeter, Hampton, and Kittery - a solid three-to-four-bedroom single-family in any of them - and gets you close to the middle of Stratham and York. In Portsmouth it means a condo or a smaller in-town house rather than the classic four-bedroom. This is where most of my relocating families land.
$1M+
Walkable Portsmouth in earnest - the typical Portsmouth home is now around $810K, and the in-town classics run past $1M - plus newer construction in Stratham and well-located York and Kittery homes. Rye is its own tier: with a typical value around $1.32M, seven figures is the cover charge, not the splurge. Ocean views on the Seacoast start with a 1 and often a 2.
Property tax rates by town
| Town | Total rate per $1,000 assessed | Tax year |
|---|---|---|
| Portsmouth, NH | $11.51 | 2025 |
| Dover, NH | $19.68 | 2025 |
| Exeter, NH | $18.76 | 2025 |
| Hampton, NH | $12.61 | 2025 |
| Rye, NH | $8.37 | 2025 |
| Stratham, NH | $13.52 | 2025 |
| Newmarket, NH | $19.42 | 2025 |
| Kittery, ME | $9.29 | FY 2025/26 |
| York, ME | $8.25 | FY 2025/26 |
Tax rate sources: NH Department of Revenue Administration 2025 final municipal tax rates; Town of Kittery Assessor (FY 2025/26, set after Kittery's 2025 full revaluation); Town of York Assessor (FY 2025/26).
The trade the tables hide: price and tax rate pull in opposite directions here. Run the back-of-envelope math on a typical home in each town and Dover (about $556K at $19.68) and Rye (about $1.32M at $8.37) can land within shouting distance of each other on the annual bill - roughly $11K a year in both cases if assessments matched those values. You choose between a smaller check to the bank in Dover or a smaller check to the tax collector in Rye. And the Maine side is the quiet outlier: Kittery and York pair mid-pack home values with the two lowest tax rates on this page - the catch being Maine's income tax, covered in the buying guide.
Mill rates in plain English
A "mill rate" is just dollars of tax per $1,000 of your home's assessed value. Dover's 2025 rate of $19.68 means a home assessed at $500,000 pays about $9,840 a year. Rye's $8.37 on the same assessment would be about $4,185.
Why do rates differ so much? New Hampshire towns pay for schools and services almost entirely from property taxes, so the rate mostly reflects how much taxable property value a town has to spread the bill across. Portsmouth and Rye have enormous tax bases - commercial property downtown, high home values on the coast - so a low rate still raises plenty. Dover and Newmarket have more households per dollar of property value, so the rate has to be higher to fund the same schools.
The trap to avoid: never compare tax rates without comparing assessments. A $19 rate on a $450K Dover home and a $8 rate on a $1.1M Rye home are both real bills, and the Rye one is bigger. Assessments also lag the market and get reset by town-wide revaluations - Kittery's 2025 revaluation cut its rate from $14.20 to $9.29 while assessed values jumped, leaving typical bills roughly on trend. Always run the actual assessment times the actual rate for any home you're serious about.
Where the market is heading this year
The mid-2026 picture is steady, unglamorous growth: all nine towns added value over the past year, most in the 2-5% range. The fastest climbers are the space-and-privacy towns - Rye (up 5.4%), Stratham (up 4.7%), and Newmarket (up 4.5%) - while Dover (up 1.5%) and York (up 1.8%) brought up the rear. My read: the bidding-war era's double-digit years are over, but with inventory still historically thin, there's no give-back happening either. Values are compounding quietly instead of spiking.
One nuance I make sure buyers hear: headlines about "falling Seacoast prices" usually come from sale medians, which bounce around with what happens to sell - a condo-heavy quarter in Portsmouth can drag the sold median far below what the middle house in town is worth. The value of the housing stock itself, which is what these figures track, kept rising everywhere on this page. For buyers that means waiting for a dip has been a losing strategy here; for sellers it means the market will pay fairly - but only for homes priced to this year's numbers, not to a wish.
Want numbers for your exact situation? She answers herself.
Buying, selling, or just wondering what your town is really like - ask away. No pressure, no drip campaign.
