By Adam Swift
As was largely expected last week, the town council voted to maintain a uniform tax rate for residential and commercial/industrial properties for Fiscal Year 2026 at its meeting last week.
As has been the case in past years, town officials cited the predominance of residential property in Winthrop as the main reason to keep the single tax rate.
Winthrop’s property tax base is made up of 94 percent residential properties and only 6 percent commercial and industrial properties, according to Town Council President Jim Letterie.
Some communities with a larger commercial base opt for a split tax rate, where there is a shift to a higher rate for the commercial properties. But Letterie said that in Winthrop, a split rate would put a large burden on commercial properties while only saving residential homeowners a few dollars a year on their property tax bills.
Homeowners will see a jump in their tax bills this year, in part due to the recently passed debt exclusion for the new fire station and the Proposition 2-½ override to help fund the schools, according to Nate Cramer, who assisted the Winthrop board of assessors with the tax classification.
The expected tax rate for the town is expected to come in at $11.14 compared to $10.32 for FY25. The average annual single-family tax bill will go up from about $7,100 in FY25 to $8,293 in FY26, according to Cramer.
“Part of the reason the bills are going up so much is because … there are a few overrides in there,” said Cramer.
Cramer did note that for FY25, the average single-family residential tax bill was still below the state average of approximately $7,700.
“The fact that we stick to one tax rate, similar to Nahant, is the fact that we have such a small commercial base,” said Letterie. “We have done exercises in the past where if we went to a split tax rate – depending on what the variable might be – it is going to save the average taxpayer somewhere in the $25 to $35 range, and it is going to cost the average commercial business potentially $300 to $400 to $500, and there wasn’t really enough of a savings there to really put that burden back on the commercial.”