Arlington’s tax base
About three quarters of Arlington’s revenue comes from property tax on land and what’s built on it. Property tax follows value, and value follows what’s built, so more homes or shops on a lot generally means more tax revenue from it. Arlington has almost no undeveloped land, so if we want to increase revenue, we need to allow building more on land already in use, served by the same streets, pipes and plows.
The map shades every parcel by its value per acre. Pick a band to see where the highest and lowest value land sits, tap a parcel for its numbers or search for an address.
Value per acre is the parcel’s taxable assessed value divided by its lot size. Each band holds the stated share of Arlington’s taxable parcels, ranked from lowest to highest value per acre. Condominium buildings are one parcel, with every unit’s value added together.
Sources and limits
- Parcels and values come from the town’s Parcels with Assessor Info layer, fiscal year 2026 assessments. Taxable value here matches the town’s FY2026 filing with the Department of Revenue to within 0.4%.
- The tax rate is $10.67 per $1,000, the single rate Arlington applies to every class of property in FY2026. Source: the Board of Assessors’ classification hearing, November 10, 2025. Estimated tax is value times rate; actual bills also reflect exemptions and the CPA surcharge.
- Tax-exempt parcels (town, state, school, religious and housing authority land) are shown with gray hatching and left out of the tax base. They hold about $1.1 billion in assessed value.
- New condominiums created after the January 1, 2025 assessment date have no FY2026 value yet. They’re shown in white with a dashed outline and left out of the tax base until the assessor values them.
- Business personal property (equipment, utility lines and poles) is taxed but isn’t tied to a parcel, so it isn’t on this map. It was about $230 million of the FY2026 tax base. Counting it, commercial, industrial and personal property made up 5.2% of all taxable value in FY2026.
- Land means parcel land. Streets, sidewalks and water bodies aren’t parcels, so they aren’t counted.
- Zoning districts come from each parcel’s assessor record. The filter groups them: one- and two-family (R0, R1, R2), multifamily (R3 three-family, R4 town house, R5 to R7 apartments), business (B2 to B5 and B2A), industrial (I) and other (open space, multi-use, planned unit development, hospital and transportation). District names come from the town’s Zoning and Overlay Districts layer.
- Recent zoning changes aren’t shown yet. The attorney general approved two 2026 Town Meeting map changes on September 16, effective October 1: 0 Lot Concord Turnpike from R1 to R6 (Article 50), and parcels near North Union and Norcross Streets from R1 to R2 (Article 52). Parcel districts on this page are as they stood before those changes, and will be updated once the town’s data includes them.
- Last rebuilt from the town’s data: loading…