Connecticut conveyance tax, town by town

The total

In the latest year each town reported, Connecticut town clerks recorded 33,400 single-family and condominium sales at a market price. For most towns that year is October 2024 to September 2025; the 20 towns that were in a revaluation year reported no sales for it, so their year before stands in. The median sold for $405,000. Running each one through the state and municipal conveyance tax at today’s rates gives an estimated $245.2 million: $187.1 million to the state and $58.1 million to the towns. In most Connecticut residential sales the seller pays both (who pays the conveyance tax).

That is an estimate of the tax on home sales, not the state’s collections. It leaves out commercial property, land, multi-family buildings and every sale an assessor flagged as not at market, and it does not apply exemptions. The method section lists what is in and what is out.

Where it is paid

The tax follows price, so it concentrates where prices are highest. The map shades each town by the conveyance tax on its own median home sale.

Counted in total dollars rather than per sale, volume matters as much as price. Greenwich leads with an estimated $33.2 million across 572 sales. Every town has its own page with these figures; start from the town index.

The top bracket

The state tax on a home is marginal: 0.75% of the first $800,000, 1.25% of the portion up to $2,500,000, and 2.25% of anything above that (how the brackets work). The top rate reaches only 787 sales, 2.4% of the total. Those sales produced an estimated $53.7 million of state tax, 28.7% of the state’s share.

The higher municipal rate falls on cheaper homes

Every town charges a base municipal conveyance tax of 0.25%. A short list of municipalities is eligible to add another 0.25%, and sixteen have (which towns charge more). They are mostly the state’s cities, and their homes sell for less: the typical median sale across the sixteen is $303,750, against $427,000 across the 151 base-rate towns with enough sales to state one.

So a seller in one of these towns pays twice the municipal rate, and in fifteen of the sixteen the town’s median sale is below the typical base-rate town’s. The surcharge on each town’s median sale:

Stamford’s step: does it move prices?

Stamford is the one town whose municipal rate is not flat. It charges 0.35% on a home sold for up to $1,000,000 and 0.50% on a home sold for more, on the whole price (the Stamford step). A sale one dollar over the line owes about $1,500 more in municipal tax than a sale at it. If sellers notice, sales should pile up just under $1,000,000.

They pile up there everywhere, because $1,000,000 is a round number and asking prices cluster under round numbers. So the comparison is relative. For each town, sales in the $50,000 below a price line are divided by sales in the $50,000 above it, at $1,000,000 and at two lines that carry no tax step, over list years 2015 to 2024.

Stamford’s ratio at $1,000,000 is 1.69: 182 sales just under against 108 just over. The six comparison towns range from 1.04 to 1.34 at the same line, and Stamford’s own ratios at the two placebo lines are 1.18 and 0.79.

That is consistent with the step nudging some Stamford sales under the line. It is not proof of it. The counts are in the low hundreds, Stamford's prices sit lower than most of the comparison towns', and a cheaper market has more sales below any given line to begin with. Nor does the step stop sales above the line: 108 Stamford homes sold in the $50,000 just over $1,000,000 in those years.

Method and limits

• Source. The Office of Policy and Management’s record of every real estate sale of $2,000 or more, as reported by town assessors (1,188,997 rows, updated by the state on 2026-08-12).
• Period. Assessment list year 2024, which covers sales recorded between October 2024 to September 2025. A town in a revaluation year reports no sales for it (or only a handful), so for those 20 towns — Branford, Brooklyn, Coventry, Mansfield, Monroe, New Fairfield, Norfolk, North Branford, Old Lyme, Oxford, Pomfret, Prospect, Putnam, Seymour, Thompson, Tolland, Voluntown, Wallingford, West Haven, Willington — list year 2023 stands in.
• Sales counted. Single-family homes and condominiums with no assessor non-use code. Non-use codes mark sales that are not at a market price — transfers between relatives, foreclosures, and the like. Two- to four-family houses are left out.
• Tax. Each sale is run through the same function as this site’s calculator, at today’s rates, with no exemptions applied. Real collections differ: exempt transfers pay nothing, and commercial and land sales, which are excluded here, pay more.
• Medians. A town needs 10 sales in the year for a median. Below that, its last 3 years are pooled; below that again, no median is shown.

The data

Every town’s figures are on its own page, and all of them are in one file: conveyance-tax-by-town.csv. Use them freely, with a link back to this page.