Every Paramus listing sheet leads with the same line: lower property taxes than almost anywhere else in Bergen County. It's true, and it's been true for years. What most of those listing sheets leave out is that the advantage has been shrinking every year the borough's home values climb, and the mechanism that makes the rate low is not the same mechanism that decides what you actually pay.
The Subsidy Is Real
Paramus's tax rate is low because its tax base is not mostly residential. Garden State Plaza, Paramus Park, Bergen Town Center and the retail corridor along Route 17 and Route 4 generate an enormous share of the borough's assessed value. As of the borough's most recent reporting, Paramus carries more than $13 billion in total assessed property value, and 42 percent of that comes from commercial properties. That is an unusually high commercial share for a town this size, and it is the entire reason the residential rate stays low. Homeowners are not paying less because Paramus spends less. They are paying less because the mall parking lots and big-box anchors are covering a disproportionate share of the municipal, county and school levy.
The borough has also been running a rolling reassessment, a multi-year process that keeps property values current so both commercial and residential assessments reflect true market value rather than a decade-old number. Mayor Christopher DiPiazza confirmed that last year's tax rate came in at 1.499 percent, the lowest in ten years, and this year's rate is estimated at 1.415 percent. According to the borough, the reassessment is expected to shift even more of the tax burden onto commercial properties going forward.
"Half of the homes in Paramus are projected to see an estimated tax decrease, even with updated assessments."
That is the mayor's framing, and for half the homes in town, it will likely hold. But a decreasing rate and a decreasing bill are two different promises, and the second one depends on something the rate has no control over.
The Denominator Moved Faster Than the Rate
A tax rate is a percentage applied to your home's assessed value. If the rate drops but your assessed value rises faster, your bill goes up anyway. That is exactly the position most Paramus homeowners are in right now.
Over the three months ending May 2026, the median sale price in Paramus ran around $1.2 million, up 7.5 percent from the same period a year earlier. Price per square foot climbed a similar 6.6 percent. A separate single-month read for June 2026 put the median even higher, close to $1.33 million, up nearly 19 percent year over year. The gap between those two figures is less a contradiction than a reminder that Paramus sells roughly 50 to 60 homes a month, a small enough sample that one cluster of high-end closings can swing the median by six figures in either direction.
What both readings agree on is direction. Between April 2025 and March 2026, homes over $1 million accounted for more than half of all Paramus sales, with the $900,000 to $1 million range standing out as the busiest segment in town and the $700,000 to $1 million range moving fastest off the market. Days on market have stretched from about 60 days a year ago to closer to 79 days this spring, which tells you demand hasn't cooled so much as buyers are taking a bit more time to close at these higher price points.
Run the math and the tension is obvious. A 0.084 percentage point drop in the rate, from 1.499 to 1.415 percent, saves a homeowner roughly 5.6 percent on the rate itself. But if that same home's assessed value rose 7.5 percent or more over the same period, because Paramus prices did exactly that, the rate cut doesn't offset the appreciation. The bill still climbs. The commercial subsidy is doing its job. It is just being outpaced by a housing market that is doing its job too.
Why Comparing Rates Across Towns Doesn't Work Either
The instinct when shopping between towns is to line up the tax rates and pick the smaller number. That instinct fails in Paramus's case for the same reason it fails almost everywhere: the rate only tells you the percentage, not the bill.
A comparison of Paramus against a neighboring Passaic County town, using 2024 rate figures, found the two towns almost four times apart, with Paramus at roughly 1.5 percent against the other town's rate above 5.9 percent. The borough's rate has moved a bit lower since, but the gap between the two towns hasn't closed. On paper, that looks like a landslide in Paramus's favor. But because Paramus home values run so much higher, the actual median annual tax bills in that comparison landed within a few hundred dollars of each other, with Paramus homeowners paying slightly more in raw dollars despite the dramatically lower rate. The same analysis noted that Garden State Plaza alone is estimated to account for roughly 10 percent of all property taxes collected in the borough, and that Paramus generates more annual retail sales per ZIP code than almost anywhere else in the country. The subsidy is large. It's just not large enough to overcome what buyers are willing to pay to live there.
The lesson for anyone comparing Paramus to another Bergen County or North Jersey town isn't that rates are meaningless. It's that a rate only means something once you multiply it against the actual home price you're looking at, not the town average and not the rate itself.
What This Means If You're Actually Comparing Towns
If you're deciding between Paramus and another suburb, skip the rate comparison entirely and do this instead. Pull the current assessed value and most recent tax bill on a specific home you're considering, not a borough-wide average. Multiply the asking or recent-sale price by the current rate to estimate what you'd actually owe in year one, since assessments often lag a few months behind a sale. Then check whether the town you're comparing it to has a large commercial base of its own, because that's the only structural reason two towns end up with meaningfully different rates in the first place.
For sellers, the reassessment news cuts a different way. If the rolling reassessment is shifting more of the tax burden toward commercial parcels as the borough expects, that's a genuine selling point for a listing, but it's worth pairing with the honest caveat that appreciation has been erasing much of that benefit for the last two years running. Buyers doing their own math will find that quickly, and a listing that gets there first reads as more credible than one that leans only on the headline rate.
One more thing worth watching if you already own here. Assessment notices in Bergen County typically go out in the spring, and if your home's assessed value has been climbing in line with the borough average, this is the year to actually read that notice rather than file it. The appeal window is administered through the Bergen County Board of Taxation, and if your assessment jumped well past what comparable recent sales support, that's worth a conversation with the assessor's office before you accept the new number as final.
A Few Quick Answers
Is Paramus's tax rate actually falling every year? It has fallen for at least the last two cycles, from 1.499 percent to an estimated 1.415 percent this year, and the borough attributes the trend to its ongoing rolling reassessment shifting more value onto commercial properties.
Does a falling rate mean a falling tax bill? Not automatically. If your home's assessed value rises faster than the rate falls, which has been the pattern in Paramus given recent price appreciation, your dollar bill can still increase even as the rate drops.
Is Paramus still cheaper than nearby towns on taxes? On rate, almost always yes, because of the borough's unusually large commercial tax base. On actual annual dollars owed, it depends entirely on the home price you're comparing, and in at least one direct comparison, Paramus's dollar bill came out close to or even slightly above a neighboring town with a far higher rate.
If you're weighing a move into or out of Paramus and want the actual numbers run against a specific property rather than a borough average, that's the kind of due diligence Joseph Aziz Real Estate builds into every conversation. Get a free home valuation and we'll walk through what your assessment, your rate and your real market position actually add up to.
