A buyer comparing Fairfield County towns almost always runs into the same reassuring line: New Canaan's mill rate is one of the lowest in Connecticut. It shows up in spreadsheets, in relocation checklists, in the kind of casual math people do before they've even toured a house. The number feels like a fixed advantage, something the town has locked in.
It isn't. New Canaan's mill rate has moved three times in three budget cycles, and the direction has flipped. The number that made the town look like a tax bargain wasn't a policy choice. It was a mechanical reset triggered by a one-time revaluation, and the two years since have shown the rate climbing back the other way.
The Reset That Made the Rate Look Good
In 2023, New Canaan completed the kind of townwide property revaluation Connecticut requires periodically, the physical, decade-cycle version rather than the lighter statistical updates that happen more often. The results were dramatic. The town's Grand List, the total assessed value of every taxable property, jumped from $8.01 billion to $9.90 billion, a 23.53 percent increase that town officials called unprecedented.
That single number did almost all the work on the mill rate. When the fiscal year 2025 budget was finalized, the Board of Finance set a mill rate of 16.144, a 14.76 percent decrease from the prior year's 18.940. On paper, that reads like a windfall for taxpayers. In practice, it was arithmetic. The amount the town needed to raise through taxation still grew 5.27 percent that year, to $158.10 million from $150.18 million. The rate fell because the assessed base underneath it had grown even faster.
Board of Finance Chairman Todd Lavieri walked residents through what that actually meant property by property. He noted that roughly 1,900 properties in town would see their tax bills go down under the new rate, while homes whose assessed values had jumped more than 20 percent would see an increase regardless of the lower headline number. In one of his published examples, a property assessed at $1,000,000 paying $18,940 under the old rate would see its bill drop to $17,380, an 8 percent decrease, even after its assessed value rose 10 percent. In a second example, a property whose assessed value jumped 40 percent still only saw its tax bill rise 17 percent, not 40. The mill rate absorbed most of the increase. It didn't eliminate it.
Two Years of Creeping Back Up
The revaluation effect was always going to be temporary, and the town's own numbers show exactly how temporary. The 2024 Grand List, the one that fed into the fiscal year 2026 budget, grew just 0.38 percent, to $9.94 billion from $9.90 billion. That's essentially flat compared to the prior year's 23 percent surge.
With the assessed base no longer expanding and the town's operating costs still rising, the mill rate had nowhere to go but up. The Board of Finance approved a mill rate of 16.691 for fiscal year 2026 in June 2025, a 3.39 percent increase over the post-revaluation low. The amount raised by taxation climbed to $164.0 million.
The pattern held again this year. The 2025 Grand List grew 0.81 percent, to $10.02 billion. In June 2026, the Board of Finance, again under Lavieri's chairmanship and with First Selectman Dionna Carlson's budget behind it, set the fiscal year 2027 mill rate at 16.967, a 1.65 percent increase, raising the total tax levy to $168.1 million.
Line the three numbers up and the trend is plain: 16.144, then 16.691, then 16.967. Two consecutive years of increases, immediately following the one year that made headlines for a cut. The rate isn't drifting back toward its pre-revaluation level of 18.940, at least not yet, but it is moving in a direction the "lowest mill rate in the state" framing doesn't capture.
What the Comparison to Other Towns Actually Measures
New Canaan's mill rate looks favorable next to towns like Hartford, where rates run well above 40, but that comparison is measuring town wealth as much as town governance. A mill rate is simply the levy a town needs divided by its total assessed value. Towns with enormous per-property values, Greenwich chief among them, can fund the same services with a much lower rate applied against a much larger base. Greenwich's mill rate sits near the bottom of the state, and it gets there the same way New Canaan does: a large Grand List relative to the budget, not necessarily tighter spending.
This matters for anyone using the mill rate as a shorthand for "which town costs less to live in." Two towns with identical mill rates can produce very different tax bills once you multiply by the assessed value of the specific home you're buying. The rate tells you the multiplier. It doesn't tell you the number you're multiplying.
Why the Timing of a Renovation Matters More Than the Rate
Connecticut assesses real estate at 70 percent of its presumed fair market value, reset at each revaluation. That single rule is the reason a home's physical condition and the timing of updates can matter as much as the mill rate itself.
A property that has gone through a real renovation, meaning the kind that shows up in comparable sales, carries a market value that reflects that work. At the next revaluation, that value gets captured and the assessed figure moves with it. A home that hasn't been touched in decades tends to be assessed more conservatively, right up until the year it sells and resets the comp set around it.
For a seller preparing an older New Canaan colonial or antique for market, this isn't an argument for or against renovating before a sale. It's a reason to think about the assessment calendar alongside the sale calendar. A buyer inheriting a freshly renovated home is also inheriting the assessed value that renovation will eventually produce at the next revaluation cycle. Understanding where a specific property sits relative to the town's last reassessment, and how much of its current assessment reflects work already captured versus work still pending, is a more useful data point than the mill rate printed on a town website.
What This Means If You're Comparing Towns Right Now
For a buyer weighing New Canaan against nearby Fairfield County towns, the mill rate alone answers the wrong question. A few things worth checking instead:
- Ask when the town last completed a full revaluation, and how much the Grand List moved as a result. A rate that looks low right after a revaluation may already be correcting.
- Get the property's current assessed value, not just the mill rate, and run your own math: assessed value times the mill rate, divided by 1,000, gives you the annual tax bill in dollars.
- Look at the trend, not the snapshot. A rate that fell once and has risen twice since tells a different story than a rate that has simply stayed low for a decade.
- If you're evaluating an older home with renovation potential, ask what portion of comparable recent sales in the area reflect updated interiors versus original condition, since that gap is exactly what the next revaluation will try to close.
New Canaan's finances have been managed conservatively by most measures available, and the town's own materials point to surplus years and reserve contributions alongside the tax decisions. That's a separate claim from the mill rate itself being a fixed discount. The rate is a ratio, and ratios move when either side of the equation does. Right now, the denominator has stopped growing quickly and the numerator hasn't, which is the entire explanation for two straight years of increases after one very good one.
If you're weighing a move to New Canaan, or preparing a longtime home for its next chapter, the numbers behind the number are worth understanding before you sign anything. April Kaynor has spent sixteen years reading New Canaan's market from the inside, including how assessment timing and renovation decisions actually play out at the closing table. Let's Connect.
