A Vermont data story · 2026
Property taxes, health premiums, and housing costs are all climbing at once. They're not three separate problems — they share one engine.
Draft for review. Every figure here is sourced, but the numbers and analysis are still being audited and checked before wider release.
Before you scroll past this —
That's how much the average Vermont property tax bill has climbed in the last five years. Not because your town overspent. One formula is doing this in all 251 towns at once — keep scrolling and we'll show you exactly how it works.
01 — Not like the neighbors
Same mountains. Same winters. Very different bills.
Share of income spent on an individual health plan
Individual-market plans only — the kind bought by the self-employed and small businesses without group coverage. A five-times gap between two adjacent New England states.
Public school spending per student, 2023–24
Third-highest per-pupil spending in the nation.
Median age
The third-oldest state in the country.
Three different budget lines, one demographic root cause: Vermont is aging faster than it's growing. Fewer kids to educate. More health care to pay for. A shrinking base of taxpayers covering both.
02 — Why your tax bill keeps climbing
Vermont funds schools with a formula, not a market: your town's tax rate equals spending per student, divided by property value. Shrink the student count, grow the spending, and the rate climbs — even when nobody overspent a dime.
Vermont K-12 enrollment
Total Education Fund spending
Statewide average property tax rate increase, over the last five years.
Tax rate = spending per student ÷ statewide property yield
Shrink the bottom of that fraction, grow the top, and the rate rises on its own — the mechanism behind almost every town's bill, not a story about any one town's choices.
03 — Vermont already tried the obvious fix
In 2015, Act 46 pushed Vermont's 273 school districts down to about 119. Districts did trim administrative costs — then largely spent the savings on something else.
Administrative costs saved after merging — a real, measured number.
Net change in total district spending. The savings were reinvested, not banked.
School districts today — down from 273 before Act 46.
"Little to no evidence" that consolidation itself saves money.— Vermont's own 2025 school-district redistricting task force
A second, voluntary round is now underway: study committees start this fall, any mergers go to town votes on Town Meeting Day 2028, and the new funding formula that would actually change the tax math doesn't arrive until July 2029.
04 — The bill nobody can vote away
Statewide, Vermont's own facilities assessment counts $6.35 billion in repair and rebuild need over the next 21 years — overwhelmingly boring, unavoidable systems, not upgrades.
Where the $6.35 billion statewide need is concentrated
Vermont paused state aid for school construction in 2007, during the recession. Nearly two decades later, it still hasn't come back — leaving small local tax bases to cover the entire bill alone.
Borrow to fix a failing roof, and your official "cost per student" rises — which can trigger the state's own excess-spending penalty. Two unrelated Vermont districts have separately asked the legislature to fix this.
Harwood Unified Union School District — six towns, seven aging schools, one shared budget — is living out this exact math right now. It's one of Vermont's 119 districts; the shape of its problem repeats across most of the others.
If the district settles around two buildings, five of today's schools would send students to whichever is closer — Crossett Brook or Harwood Union, both in Duxbury. Real routed drive times, one town at a time:
Moretown → Harwood Union: 3.2 min · Waitsfield → Harwood Union: 15.0 min · Fayston → Harwood Union: 20.8 min · Warren → Harwood Union: 28.6 min · Waterbury (Brookside) → Crossett Brook: 17.1 min
Real routed drive times (OSRM road-network routing, not straight-line estimates), one-way. Map positions are illustrative — a schematic layout, not a precise GIS trace. Duxbury has no separate elementary school in this dataset; both surviving hub buildings sit there.
05 — Closing a school doesn't make the bill disappear
A district's bonds aren't attached to one building — the whole district keeps paying, whether that school is open or not. And an empty building still needs a roof. Four real Vermont buildings, four different outcomes:
Sold to a newly formed nonprofit for $1 in 2004. Today it's a community center — a gym, a bakery, a fitness business, childcare.
A volunteer committee spent three years finding it a future. The town bought it for $1 in a 2023 vote.
Sat empty more than 40 years before a private developer began converting it into apartments.
Remains abandoned today. Contamination in the original building made remediation too costly to move forward.
No option here is free. Some options take decades.
06 — Vermont's other live fight
It's the leading idea in the 2026 governor's race. Some of the numbers behind it don't hold up.
Share of Vermont homes that are second homes
Potential annual revenue from a second-home tax
The vacancy paradox: two true numbers that seem to contradict each other
A 2025 bill would have let second-home owners pay a lower rate if they leased long-term instead of leaving a home empty. The Senate stripped it out. Montana and New York City both use a version of that idea today.
Harwood's six towns share a single school budget — but a statewide second-home tax would land completely differently across them.
Share of parcels not filed as a primary residence, by town. Warren carries more than double Waterbury's rate — inside the very same school budget.
07 — The real choice
Fewer kids. More retirees. A shrinking base of taxpayers asked to cover costs set well above the local level. Closing schools alone doesn't fix that. A second-home tax alone doesn't either. Four real levers are actually on the table in Montpelier right now:
Act 46, 2015. Administrative costs fell — total spending didn't.
A sliding 2–9% cap tied to a district's spending level. Projected statewide savings: roughly $67 million.
Carve debt service and health insurance out of the "excess spending" calculation — costs no local board actually controls.
More year-round homes, not more empty ones. The second-home rental exemption Vermont wrote, then deleted, would help.
None of these are secret. All four are being debated in Montpelier right now. The question is which Vermonters show up.
Explore — the six Harwood towns
Waterbury shares its school district — and its tax rate — with five neighboring towns. Explore how they compare below.
Share of parcels not filed as a primary residence
About 1 in 3 Waterbury parcels isn't a primary residence — an estimated 259–345 second homes, close to the district-wide norm.
Parcel and second-home-estimate figures: VCGI statewide parcel layer joined to the Grand List (HSDECL field), 2026. Population: 2020 Census. Vacancy: Census ACS 2020–2024 5-year estimates — small-town estimates carry wider margins of error.
| Town | Population | Non-homestead share | Vacancy rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waterbury | 5,331 | 34.3% | 12.8% |
| Duxbury | 1,413 | 35.9% | 12.8% |
| Moretown | 1,753 | 36.2% | 17.7% |
| Waitsfield | 1,844 | 53.9% | 21.7% |
| Fayston | 1,364 | 60.1% | 47.9% |
| Warren | 1,977 | 78.4% | 71.8% |
Explore — every town, every district
This piece focuses on Harwood because it's Waterbury's own district — but Vermont publishes statewide tools that cover all 119 districts and all 251 towns. No login, no cost.
None of this is ours. It's already public — the gap was never the data. It's someone connecting it to your town's bill.