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Hello Townie helps you compare Massachusetts towns on school quality, home prices, taxes and commute, for those deciding where to settle down.
One way to use it
- Shortlist towns by combined school score (the map shades them green or purple by default). Tap the star on a town's details, or on an address you've searched, to save it, then compare or download your list in the Saved tab.
- Check the commute: tap the train button on the map to show commuter rail and T lines, or use the ruler for driving time.
- Check home prices and taxes in the town's details, then search listings on Redfin.
The map shades by combined school score by default. To shade by MCAS, AP or SAT alone, or set your own cutoffs, use the legend on the map.
School score
The average of three percentile ranks for the town's public school district. Each one ranks
the district against every Massachusetts town from 0 to 100, where 100 is the highest:
- MCAS: grade 10 average scaled score across subjects
- AP: share of AP exams scored 3 or higher
- SAT: average reading/writing + math score
Scores are relative, not absolute: the 70th percentile means better than about 70% of towns. Towns in a
regional district share its score. If a district reports no SAT data, its score averages the other two
rankings. A town needs at least two of the three to get a score; otherwise it shows N/A.
Provincetown, Nahant and Oak Bluffs have no high school of their own, so their score uses
the high school their students attend (Nauset, Swampscott and Martha's Vineyard).
Other numbers
- Typical 3-bed home
- Zillow Home Value Index for 3-bedroom homes (middle third of the market), latest month. The change compares it with the same month a year earlier. Zillow doesn't publish a few small towns; those show an est. tag and use the median of the neighboring towns (or the county, if none).
- Property tax rate
- Residential tax rate for the latest fiscal year each town has set, shown as a percent of assessed value.
- College-bound
- Share of the district's high school graduates enrolled in college the fall after graduating.
- High school size
- An estimate: the district's grade 10 MCAS test-takers × 4.
- Density
- Population ÷ town area. Rural under 200 people/sq mi, sparse suburban 200–499, mid-dense 500–999, dense suburb 1,000–3,000, urban city over 3,000.
Sources
Each source is pulled at its latest available release whenever the data is rebuilt.
© 2026 David Jan. All rights reserved.