The Paramus Market Report

1. Paramus in 2026: What This Report Tells You

Paramus is a strong housing market, and it is two of them at once. The median single-family home sold for $769,000 in 2021 and $1,150,000 in 2026 through October 2, a rise of 50 percent.¹ But the house that sold in 2021 and the house that sold in 2026 are often not the same kind of house. Across the Borough, 1950s ranches, capes and splits are being bought, taken down and replaced by houses more than twice their size, and that one fact now shapes the price of the old house, the price of the new one and the tax bill on both.

That is good news if you own here, and it is workable news if you want to buy here, provided you know which of the two markets you are in. This report exists to tell you. It contains the things a listing site cannot, and it is free. I live in Paramus, and my neighbors will read this, so where a number is unflattering it is printed anyway, with what to do about it.

The four findings

1. The teardown economy sets the floor. Since January 2020 the deed record shows 206 purchases of an older house that has since been replaced by a new one. In 116 cases both halves are on record: the old house bought at a median $653,500, the new house on the same lot sold at a median $2,025,000, 19 months apart.²

What this means for you
If you own an original house on a standard lot, a builder's price for the lot is a real alternative to listing, and you should know that number before you answer anyone's letter. If you are buying under $1 million, some of your competition does not care about the kitchen. Section 2 has the arithmetic.

2. It is two markets with a middle. Existing homes sold at a median of $993,750 in 2026; new construction at $2,340,000.¹ Under $1 million, homes sell at or above asking in about two and a half weeks, with 1.3 months of supply. At $2 million and up, the median home sold for 97.5 percent of asking after 40 days, there are 5.1 months of supply, and half the listings since 2021 came off the market at least once without selling.³

What this means for you
The town-wide median describes neither market. Decide which one you are in before you read any other number. Sections 3, 4 and 5 are split that way.

3. Paramus has the lowest tax rate of the towns buyers compare it with, and the advantage is narrowing slowly. At 2025 effective rates a $1,150,000 home costs about $16,500 a year in Paramus, against $22,300 to $28,300 in Ridgewood, Washington Township, Fair Lawn, Oradell, Glen Rock and River Edge. The reason is the retail and office base on Routes 4 and 17, which carries about 45 percent of the levy. Because the Borough reassesses every property every year and houses have been gaining value faster than malls, the homeowners' share rose from 52.0 percent in 2022 to 55.0 percent in 2025, and the average homeowner's bill rose 8.0 percent in 2025 while the rate went down.⁴

What this means for you
Budget about 1.45 percent of your price for taxes and grow it 5 to 8 percent a year, not 2. It is still the lowest carrying cost in the comparison. Section 9 shows the bill piece by piece.

4. About 2,100 homes are approved or under construction, almost none of them on a residential street. They are apartments at Garden State Plaza, Bergen Town Center and Paramus Park, by the hospital on Winters Avenue and From Road, senior housing on Pascack Road, and 82 townhomes on Paramus Road. The first 575 apartments at Garden State Plaza broke ground in spring 2026 and are projected to open from mid-2028.⁵

What this means for you
The single-family neighborhoods change one lot at a time; the highways change in blocks. If you are buying within a few streets of Route 4, Route 17, From Road or Paramus Road, Section 13 tells you what is approved nearby.

If you are buying

Know which Paramus you are shopping in. Under $800,000 the median buyer paid 103 percent of asking; from $800,000 to $1 million, 101 percent; at $2 million and up, 97.5 percent. An offer at asking is a real offer under $1 million, and an offer below asking is the normal opening at $2 million. Section 4 gives the full range at each budget so you know what a winning offer looks like and what it does not need to look like.

Look at the calendar on the listing before the price. Under $1 million, a house that goes under contract in its first 14 days sells for a median 108 percent of asking. One still available on day 22 sells at asking. Section 4 explains how to tell which you are looking at.

Work out the tax from the price, not from the listing. Paramus resets your assessment toward what you paid within a year or two. Recent buyers were assessed at about 80 percent of their price at closing and about 91 percent a year later. On new construction the listing's tax line has often been the old house's bill. Section 9 has the rate to use, and Section 8 adds up a $1.15 million purchase line by line.

Read the lot the way a builder does. Paramus has no cap on floor area. On a standard 75 by 125 foot lot the code allows roughly 4,700 gross square feet where a 1,900 square foot house stands, with no variance and no design review. That is why the house next door may be replaced, and it is also what your own lot is worth one day. Section 14 works two typical lots.

Inspect for the decade. Four in ten Paramus homes were built in the 1950s. A tank sweep, a sewer camera and an electrician's look at the panel answer the three questions a general inspection cannot. On a new house, ask for the final certificate of occupancy and the warranty certificate. Section 15 is organized by build era and covers the Borough's own resale certificate, which requires every open permit to be closed.

Plan the commute from the specific house. Paramus has no train station. It has buses on Routes 4 and 17, three highways, and stations in neighboring towns that charge non-residents $125 to $1,500 a year to park, where they sell permits at all. Section 16 has the list.

If you are selling

Get two numbers, not one. What your house is worth to a family, and what your lot is worth to a builder. Builders paid a median $795,000 for a teardown in 2024 and $830,000 in 2025, and more than a third of those purchases cannot be found on the listing service. The houses that did go through the listing service sold at a median 102.7 percent of asking in 14 days. Section 2 explains why the open market is worth testing.

Under $1 million, your risk is not time. More than four listings in five sell, in about two and a half weeks. Coming out between February and April has been worth a few points of asking price. Section 3 shows the calendar.

At $2 million and up, price to the shelf. Eighteen homes were for sale at that level on October 2, 2026 against about three and a half sales a month. A listing that fails and returns has sold, at the median, for about 4 percent less than its first asking price. Section 5 has the record.

Close your permits before you list. The Borough will not schedule the resale inspection until every open construction permit is closed. In a 70-year-old house that is the item most likely to delay a closing. Section 15 lists what the inspector checks.

What a well-informed owner knows about the Borough

How Paramus compares (Section 6) puts the Borough beside Ridgewood, Fair Lawn, Glen Rock, Oradell, River Edge and Washington Township, one source per row, and Paramus loses some rows. What your budget buys (Section 7) describes the typical home at $850,000, $1.2 million and $2.1 million. A worked example (Section 8) adds up what a $1.15 million home costs to own each month.

Taxes (Section 9) shows what a Paramus tax bill is made of, how it compares with six neighboring towns, what annual reassessment does to a recent buyer, where the commercial base is exposed, and the relief programs for owners who qualify.

Schools (Section 10) reports what the New Jersey Department of Education and the Board of Education publish: the eight schools side by side, test results and attendance by school, graduation, staffing and per-pupil cost. No third-party grades.

Crime and safety (Section 11) explains why a single per-resident rate misleads in a town whose daytime population is far larger than its resident count, and reports police, fire and EMS staffing and budgets.

Living here (Section 12) covers the retail corridor, the Sunday closing ordinance and the court case that bears on it, the parks, the pool and golf course, the library, the hospital and the calendar.

Housing pipeline (Section 13) explains the state affordable-housing obligation in plain terms and lists every multifamily, townhouse and senior project tied to a Planning Board record.

Zoning (Section 14) answers what you can build on a typical lot, when a variance is needed, and what a teardown has to go through.

Commute (Section 16), Neighborhoods (Section 17) and Demographics (Section 18) cover the buses and the stations, the Borough by census tract and the Ridge Ranch area, and who owns here and for how long.

Cost of living (Section 19) covers water, sewer, garbage, permits and energy. Your first 90 days (Section 22) is the owner's calendar.

Reasons to buy here (Section 20) is the short answer to why people choose Paramus, led by the lowest tax rate of the seven towns compared. Reasons not to buy here (Section 21) is included on purpose. Every town has trade-offs, and a buyer who has read them and still wants Paramus is the buyer who is glad to be here in five years.

How to use this report

Start with the one-page summary that follows. Sections 2 through 8 are the core: the market, how to bid, how Paramus compares, what your budget buys and what a home costs to own. Read them before you look at a single house, and Section 15 before your first inspection. Bring the rest to the questions as they come up. The report is updated quarterly; the next edition covers data through December 2026. If you are comparing Paramus with Ridgewood, The Ridgewood Market Report is the companion to this one.

What I tell my clients: Paramus is not one market, and most of the mistakes I see come from treating it as one. The family paying over asking for a ranch and the family negotiating on a new six-bedroom are three blocks apart and in different markets. Know which one you are in, know the tax number that goes with your price, and the rest of this report is detail.

Paramus at a Glance

$1.15M

Median sale price, 2026

Up 50% since 2021

$994K and $2.34M

Existing homes and new construction

Two markets; the median is neither

206

Older houses bought and replaced since 2020

Old house $653,500, new house $2,025,000 (116 lots)

100%

What buyers paid vs. asking

103% under $800K; 97.5% at $2M and up

46

Homes for sale on October 2

1.3 months of supply under $1M; 5.1 at $2M and up

1.434%

Effective tax rate, lowest of seven towns

About $16,500 a year on $1.15M; $22,300 to $28,300 in the other six

1950s

When four in ten homes were built

528 houses built since 2015

$23,990

School spending per pupil, highest of the districts compared

$16,400 to $21,600 in the neighboring districts

Three things to know before you look at a house.

Under $1 million you may be bidding against a builder who wants the lot. At $2 million and up you are usually negotiating with one. Find out which market the house is in before you decide how to bid.

Paramus has the lowest property tax rate of the seven towns buyers compare, and its schools spend the most per pupil. The Borough reassesses every home every year, so your tax follows your price within a year or two. On a new house, the tax on the listing has often been the old house's bill. Budget about 1.45 percent of the price.

There is no train station, and almost all stores and offices are closed on Sunday by Borough ordinance. Commuters use the Route 4 and Route 17 buses or pay a neighboring town to park at its station.

Sale and inventory figures from the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service through October 2, 2026; teardown figures from New Jersey Division of Taxation deed records through June 2026 matched to the Borough's 2026 tax list; tax figures from the New Jersey Division of Taxation for 2025 (2026 rates were not yet published); year built from the Borough's 2026 tax list; population and ownership from the U.S. Census Bureau. Each figure is explained in the section that covers it.

2. The Teardown Economy

If you own a 1950s house in Paramus, the most likely buyer for it may not plan to live in it.

Two of every three single-family houses in the Borough were built between 1945 and 1975 (5,101 of 7,636). They are ranches, capes, splits and bi-levels with a median of 1,990 square feet. Since 2015, 528 of the Borough's lots have had a new house built on them, and 292 of those date from 2020 or later.⁶ The State's permit count shows the pace: 25 houses demolished in 2015, 57 in 2023, 52 in 2024.⁷

Paramus is not adding houses. It is replacing them, one lot at a time, and that single fact now sets the price of the old house, the price of the new one, and the tax bill on both.

This matters whether you are selling, buying under $1 million, or buying at $2 million.

What a teardown actually is

The deed record shows the whole sequence. The State publishes every deed transfer in Paramus; the Borough tax list shows what stands on each lot today. Put the two together and you can find every lot where an older house was sold and a house built in 2020 or later now stands.⁸

There have been 206 of those purchases since January 2020.

The house that was bought was built in 1952 and had 1,514 square feet, at the median. The house on the same lot today has 4,013.

A purchase shows up in this count only after the new house is finished and on the tax roll, which takes a year or two. So the 2025 figure will keep rising as those houses are completed, and 2026 purchases are not visible yet. It is not a slowdown.

The price paid for a house that will be taken down rose 52 percent from 2020 to 2024.

What this means for you
If you own one of these houses, the floor under your price is set by what the lot is worth to someone who will rebuild on it, and that floor has been rising faster than the market as a whole: from 2021 to 2024 it rose 27 percent, while the median single-family sale price rose 17 percent ($769,000 to $901,000).⁹

The rule of thumb

In 116 cases the deed record shows both halves: the old house bought, and the new house on the same lot sold.⁸

The new house sold for 3.1 times what the old one cost. Turned around, that is the rule of thumb:

• The old house on a standard lot is worth about a third of what a new house on that lot will sell for
• New houses sold at a median of $2,225,000 in 2025; the old houses they replaced had cost $725,000
• A lot that is narrow, irregular or on a corner is worth less to a builder than its area suggests (Section 14 explains why)

What recent cases actually look like

2021 is left out: only seven lots completed the cycle that year, too few for a median to mean anything.

Gross spread is not profit. It is one sale price minus another. It does not include demolition, construction, architect and engineering fees, permits, interest and taxes during a 19-month hold, or the cost of selling. None of those appear in any public file, and this report does not estimate them. What the table does show is direction: in the first half of 2026 the old house cost $83,000 more than in 2025 and the new house sold for $75,000 less. The margin for whoever builds is getting thinner, which is worth knowing if a builder is the one making you an offer.

The public files also leave the buyer and seller names blank, so this report cannot say how many builders are active or who they are.⁸

If you own a 1950s ranch, cape or split

Of 176 teardown purchases since 2021, 63 (36 percent) cannot be found as a closed sale on the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service.¹⁰ For comparison, the same test on every other sale of an older Paramus house in those years finds 26 percent missing, so some of the gap is ordinary: a sale through another listing service, or an address typed differently. The difference between the two figures is the part that points to private offers.

The houses that did go through the listing service sold at a median of 102.7 percent of asking in 14 days, and 60 percent sold above asking.

A builder prices your lot from the finished house, not from the old one. In each year from 2022 through 2025, the median paid for a teardown was 37 to 38 percent of the median new-construction sale price that year (42 percent in 2021).^8, 10 New construction sold at a median $2,340,000 in 2026 (Section 3). At the same share, that points to about $870,000 to $900,000 for a typical lot today. That is arithmetic from past sales, not an appraisal of any one lot.

Builders pay by the lot, not by the square foot. Divide what was paid by the size of the lot, and the teardown purchases of 2024 and 2025 come to a median of about $74 per square foot of land, up from about $46 in 2020.^8, 6 But the price hardly moves with the size of the lot.

A lot gets one house whatever its size, so the largest lots are a third bigger than the smallest and sold, at the median, for about $65,000 more. But the range inside each group is wide. Lots of 12,500 square feet or more sold for $680,000 to $950,000, and what separates the top from the bottom is the lot itself: its width, its shape and its zone. In the R-100 zone, where lots are 100 feet wide, the median was $840,000, against $805,000 in R-75. A lot that can legally be divided in two is worth more again, and few Paramus lots can be.

What this means for you
A letter or a knock on the door offering to buy your house "as is, no commission" is an offer for your lot. Before you answer it, find out what lots like yours have sold for. The median was $795,000 in 2024 and $830,000 in 2025. The assessor's land value on your tax record, a median of $445,300 for these houses, is not that number.⁶ And judge an offer against what lots like yours sold for, not by multiplying a price per square foot by the size of your lot.

What I tell my sellers: more than a third of the older homes that builders bought in Paramus never went on the market. When one of those owners gets a private offer, there is nothing to compare it with. The homes that were listed sold for a median of almost 3 percent over asking in two weeks, and six in ten sold above asking. So before you say yes to an offer that arrives in the mail, let me show you what lots like yours have actually sold for. You can still take the private offer; you should know what you are giving up first.

If you are buying under $1 million

You are bidding against the people who will take the house down.

From 2021 through 2024, 99 of the 628 single-family sales under $1 million on the listing service (16 percent) were teardown purchases. The share rose each year from 2022: 13 percent, 18 percent, then 20 percent in 2024 (26 of 133).¹⁰ A buyer who will demolish does not need the kitchen to work, does not ask for repairs and is not depending on an appraisal of the house.

That is part of why this is the band that sells over asking. In the twenty months to October 2, 2026, houses listed under $800,000 sold at a median of 103.0 percent of asking and those from $800,000 to $1 million at 101.1 percent, with more than half of each going above the list price.⁹

What this means for you
On a tired house on a 75-foot lot, assume at least one competing offer has no inspection or mortgage condition. Section 4 covers what it takes to win. And look at the lot the way a builder would, because that is who you will be selling to one day.

If you are buying a new house at $2 million or more

This is where the supply is, and where you have room.

Of the 71 homes listed at $2 million or more that closed in the last twenty months and could be matched to the tax list, 67 (94 percent) were built in 2015 or later, and 52 (73 percent) were new construction.¹⁰ The top of the Paramus market is, for practical purposes, the output of the teardown purchases above.

Since 2021, half of all listings at $2 million and up ended without a sale: 114 sold, 37 expired and 75 were withdrawn. Many of those were relisted under a new number, so the true share that never sold is lower, but no other band comes close; under $800,000 the figure is 16 percent.⁹

What this means for you
At $2 million and up you are the scarce party. The median buyer paid 2.5 percent under the list price, one in four paid more than 6 percent under, and there were 18 houses to choose from against roughly three and a half sales a month. Ask how long the house has really been for sale, including any earlier listing.

Why the rules allow it

Many towns cap the size of a house as a fraction of its lot, called a floor area ratio. Paramus does not. Its code says "there shall be no maximum floor area ratio"; a house is limited by its yards, a 25 percent cap on building coverage, a 50 percent cap on all hard surface, and height.¹¹ On the standard 75 by 125 foot lot that works out to roughly 4,700 gross square feet where a 1,900 square foot house stands, as Section 14 shows.

A house that fits those limits is built as of right. There is no variance and no design review. The one public hearing most rebuilds get is before the Planning Board for a soil moving permit, required when more than 400 cubic yards is moved, which a full basement usually exceeds. Demolition itself takes a construction permit and a $3,000 deposit.¹²

What this means for you
If the house next door is sold to someone who will rebuild, you will not be asked. The soil hearing is the place to raise truck routes, retaining walls and where the roof water goes. If you are the one building, it means time and certainty, which is why 19 months from purchase to resale is possible here.

The tax bill, and the number that is wrong on the listing

The land under an old house and the land under a new one are assessed about the same. The building is the difference.^6, 13

Same street, same lot size, about $16,000 a year apart.

Here is the part no listing site shows. When the new house in each of the 116 pairs was sold, the assessment on the books was a median of 37.9 percent of the price paid, and in 70 of the 116 it was under half.⁸ The record still described the old house, or the land alone. The tax on that assessment was about $11,700. The same 116 lots carry a median 2026 assessment of $2,020,450, which is about $30,300 at the 2025 rate. The gap has been closing as the annual reassessment picks new houses up sooner: for new houses sold in 2025 the median was 48.8 percent, and for those sold in the first half of 2026 it was 97.2 percent, with 2 of 15 under half.

Paramus reassesses every property every year, so the gap does not wait for a town-wide revaluation.¹⁴ A house finished during the year is picked up by an added assessment: it is valued from the first of the month after completion, billed for the remaining months, and that bill is due November 1.¹⁵ New houses in the pairs that sold in 2025 are already assessed at a median of 97.4 percent of what the buyer paid.

Practical consequence: the tax line on a new-construction listing has, more often than not, described a house that no longer exists. Ask what assessment it is based on, and budget from the price instead: the State's effective rate for Paramus was 1.434 percent of market value in 2025, which is about $28,700 a year on $2 million (Section 9).¹³

For the neighbor who is not rebuilding: a new house next door does not reassess yours. Your assessment follows sales of houses like yours.

Where it concentrates

Rebuilding is happening across the Borough, on the lots the code makes easiest.

• By zone. The R-75 zone (75-foot lots) holds 68 percent of the single-family houses, 85 percent of the teardown purchases since 2020 (176 of 206) and 94 percent of the pairs (109 of 116). In R-75, 8.6 percent of houses were built in 2015 or later; in R-100, 3.4 percent.⁶
• By area. The blocks residents call Ridge Ranch, bounded by Midland Avenue, Forest Avenue, Century Road and Route 17, hold 24 percent of the Borough's single-family houses, 37.5 percent of those built since 2015 (198 of 528), 39 percent of the teardown purchases (80 of 206) and 47 percent of the pairs (55 of 116). One house in nine there is now less than twelve years old, against one in eighteen elsewhere. Section 17 gives the block list and the figures by census tract.

What this means for you
On a block of 75-foot lots, expect construction within sight at some point during a five-year hold, and expect the new houses to become the comparable sales for the street.

The owner-builders

More than a third of the new houses in Paramus were built by the people who live in them. Of the 528 houses built since 2015, 333 were sold as finished houses. The other 195 (37 percent) were rebuilt and never resold, and on 166 of those the tax bill goes to the house itself, which is what you see when the owner lives there.⁶

These are residents, not builders. Some bought an older house in order to replace it. Others took down the house they already lived in: 34 of the 130 who bought the old house did so four or more years before the new one went up, and another 65 have owned the lot so long that there is no sale on record at all.⁸ A tax-bill address is strong evidence that the owner lives there, though it is not proof, and a few of the most recent ones may be new houses still waiting for a buyer.

What this means for you
Buying the old house and building your own is an established route here, not an exotic one, and the same as-of-right rules apply to you as to a builder. Price it honestly. You will pay what builders pay for the lot, carry it through construction, and receive the full assessment within a year of moving in.

What to do

1. Owners of an older house: look up what teardown lots sold for in the last twelve months before answering any private offer, and get a second number from the open market
2. Buyers under $1 million: check the lot (frontage, shape, corner or interior) as carefully as the house; it is what your competition is pricing
3. Buyers of new construction: ignore the tax figure on the listing and use 1.434 percent of your price; ask for the full listing history
4. Anyone building: read Section 14 before you buy, and count the 50 percent hard-surface limit before you plan a pool
5. Neighbors: watch the Planning Board agenda for soil moving permits on your street

What I tell my buyers: in Paramus you are really choosing between two markets that share the same streets. Under $1 million you are competing with people who value the lot more than the house, so decide your number before the open house and expect to pay over asking. At $2 million and up there are five months of supply and half the listings since 2021 did not sell the first time, so take your time and negotiate. Either way, I work out the tax from the price you are paying, because on a new house the figure on the listing sheet has usually been the old house's, and the median shortfall has been about $15,000 a year.

3. Market Conditions

Two terms come up throughout this report. Percent of asking is what a home sold for divided by what it was listed for; above 100 means it sold for more than the seller asked. Days on market is the time from listing to accepted offer.

One note on method: every "percent of asking" in this report is the sold price divided by the home's final list price, so a house that cut its price before it sold looks a little stronger here than it was. Nothing based on fewer than 10 sales is published.¹⁶

Six years, one direction

Closed single-family sales, Borough of Paramus.¹⁶

The median Paramus house sold for 50 percent more in 2026 than in 2021.

Two things in this table are unusual.

Buyers have paid asking, not more, every single year. The median sale has landed within half a point of the list price in all six years. Between four and five homes in ten sell above asking, and that share has not trended up. Prices rose 50 percent without bidding wars becoming the norm. Sellers raised their asking prices and buyers met them.

The headline number is two different things averaged together. Paramus is no longer selling the same kind of house it sold in 2021. To see that, split the sales by what was sold.

Sales are matched to the 2026 tax list by address; the 87 of 1,278 with no match are left out. "New construction" is a house whose recorded year built is within two years before the sale.¹⁷

An existing Paramus house sold for about 32 percent more in 2026 than in 2021. That is a strong run by any normal standard. It is not 50 percent. The other 18 points came from a change in what is being sold: new houses on teardown lots went from one sale in eleven to one in five, at prices that climbed from $1.5 million to $2.3 million. In 2021 more than half of all Paramus sales (55 percent) closed under $800,000 and almost none closed at $2 million or more. In 2026 it is 12 percent under $800,000 and 18 percent at $2 million and up.

Notice also the last two rows. The existing-home median was $990,000 in 2025 and $993,750 in 2026. The town-wide median rose 9.5 percent over the same period. If you own an older Paramus house, the first figure is yours.

What this means for you
If you are buying or selling a 1950s to 1970s house, ignore the $1,150,000 headline. Your market is the existing-home column.

Why: fewer older homes for sale, and builders buying some of them

Paramus recorded 258 single-family sales in 2021 and 209 in 2025, a drop of about a fifth, while the median rose by more than a third over those years. As in most of Bergen County, fewer owners chose to sell.

The Paramus-specific part is underneath. Sales of existing homes fell from 220 to 157, a drop of 29 percent. Sales of new homes rose from 23 to 36. And of the 744 existing homes that sold through the MLS from 2021 through 2024, 116 (16 percent) now carry a year built later than the sale: the house that was sold is gone and a new one stands on the lot.¹⁷ (This is a listing-service count; it is a different measure from the 116 same-lot deed pairs in Section 2, and the matching number is a coincidence.) Section 2 shows that more than a third of builder purchases never reach the MLS at all, so the true share is higher.

So a buyer looking for a house under $1 million is competing for a smaller pool than six years ago, and competing in part with builders who value the same house for its lot. That is the floor under the lower end of this market. Section 2 covers the teardown economy in full; Section 5 covers what would have to change for it to ease.

There is one sign of loosening. Through October 2, 2026, 171 homes had closed, against 155 by the same date in 2025 and 142 in 2024.

Paramus is two markets with a middle

Split the last twenty months of sales by list price and the Borough separates cleanly.

Closings February 1, 2025 through October 2, 2026.^16, 17

The same sales in finer bands:

The shape is a staircase going down. Every step up in price buys a little more negotiating room and takes a little longer. Under $800,000, the median buyer paid 3 percent over asking and the house was under contract in 16 days. At $2 million and up, the median buyer paid 2.5 percent under asking, nine homes in ten sold at or below the list price, and the house took 40 days.

Under $1 million nothing sold was new. At $2 million and up, at least 52 of 75 sales were new houses. A buyer at $850,000 and a buyer at $2.3 million are shopping for different products from different sellers: one from a homeowner, the other, most of the time, from a builder. Advice built on the town-wide figure is wrong for both.

By bedroom count

Closings February 1, 2025 through October 2, 2026.¹⁶

Six-bedroom houses are 84 of 371 sales, almost one in four. In most Bergen County towns that row would be too small to print. In Paramus it is the new-construction market seen from a second direction, and it shows the same thing the price bands do: longer on the market, sold below asking. The smallest houses are the most contested, which fits Section 2: a two- or three-bedroom house on a standard lot is the one a builder also wants.

The calendar: money under $1 million, time above it

Town-wide, the calendar barely registers.

All single-family closings, 2021 through 2025 (full years).¹⁶

The whole range is 1.7 points, from 99.3 percent in October to 101.0 percent in July. That is a small gap, and anyone who tells you there is a "right month" to buy a $1.8 million house here is not reading the data: homes listed at $1 million and up show no seasonal pattern in price (monthly medians between 96.9 and 100.0 percent). The tables below show what the calendar does change at those prices.

Under $1 million there is a real, modest effect.

Single-family closings with a list price under $1 million, 2021 through 2025.¹⁶

The gap between the July peak and the October-to-January floor is 3.6 points of asking price. On an $850,000 house that is roughly $30,000. The better measure is the odds of a contest: seven in ten of these homes sold above asking in May closings, four in ten in January and October closings.

These are closing months, and a closing reflects an offer written 45 to 60 days earlier. Sorting the same sales by the month the house was first shown says the same thing from the seller's side: sold homes under $1 million that came to market in February went for a median 104.6 percent of asking and in April 103.5 percent; those that came out in July or September went for 100.0 percent. Read it as: offers written from late winter through spring face the most competition; offers written from midsummer on face the least.

What this means for you
A buyer under $1 million with flexible timing gains a few points and better odds by writing offers in late summer and autumn. A seller under $1 million gains the same by coming out between February and April. Above $1 million, the month does not matter; the price and the house do.

The same calendar for the other two markets. Above $1 million the month does not move the price. It moves the time.

Single-family closings with a list price of $1 million to $2 million, 2021 through 2025.¹⁶

From $1 million to $2 million, buyers paid between 97.5 and 100 percent of asking in every month of the year. What changes is how long the house sits: about 20 days for closings from June through October, and about 40 for closings from November through March.

At $2 million and up there are too few sales in most single months to publish, so the calendar is by quarter.

Single-family closings with a list price of $2 million and up, 2021 through 2025.¹⁶

Almost nothing at this price closes in the first three months of the year. Spring closings came closest to asking, and the discount widened as the year went on, from under 2 percent in spring to about 4.5 percent in the last quarter.

What this means for you
Under $1 million, the month changes what you pay. From $1 million to $2 million, it changes how long you wait, so a winter buyer has more time and a winter seller should expect about twice the wait. At $2 million and up, the later in the year you buy, the more room there has been to negotiate.

If you are also looking at Ridgewood. The two towns behave differently. In Ridgewood the median house is under contract in 11 or 12 days, while a Paramus house from $800,000 to $1 million takes about 18. Ridgewood has a strong spring premium, with a gap of 12.7 points between its best and worst month for price; in Paramus the gap is 1.7 points. Ridgewood had 12 homes for sale in late August 2026, against 46 in Paramus on October 2. The Ridgewood Market Report covers that town in the same depth.

For sellers: not every listing sells

Since the start of 2021, 1,774 single-family listings in Paramus have ended one way or another. Of those, 1,278 sold and 496, or 28 percent, expired or were withdrawn. The rate is not even across the market.

Single-family listings that closed, expired or were withdrawn, January 1, 2021 through October 2, 2026.¹⁶

At $2 million and up, a listing has been as likely to come off the market unsold as to close. The median asking price of the listings that did not sell was $1,379,000; of those that did, $875,000. A withdrawn listing is often put back under a new listing number, so this table overstates the number of houses that never sold. Section 5 measures how many came back and sold, and at what price.

What I tell my buyers: the first thing I ask is which Paramus you are shopping in. Under $1 million you are bidding against other families and sometimes a builder, and you should expect to pay asking or a little more. At $2 million and up you are usually negotiating with a builder who has carrying costs, and asking price is where the conversation starts, not where it ends. The town-wide median describes neither of you.

4. What It Takes to Win

The question every buyer asks is some version of "how much over asking do I need to go?" In Paramus the honest answer depends on which side of $1 million you are on, and for half the market the answer is "less than you fear." Here is the range behind it rather than a single number.

The competitive zone

Under $1 million, where almost half of Paramus houses sell, this is how the last twenty months of closings came out:

Single-family closings listed under $1 million, February 1, 2025 through October 2, 2026.¹⁸

An offer at asking price in this range is a real offer. It is the middle of the field, not the back of it. But the field is wide: the house you want may be one of the quarter that goes 10 percent over, and the way to tell which kind it is, before you write, is how long it has been on the market.

Same 177 sales.¹⁸

A Paramus house under $1 million that is going to draw a contest draws it in the first three weeks, and those houses sell for about 8 percent over asking. One that is still available on day 22 sells at asking, and three times in four at or below it. These are close to two separate populations.

Here is the full picture by band:

Single-family closings February 1, 2025 through October 2, 2026.¹⁸

The one-line version

At $900,000 in Paramus, expect to pay asking to 2 percent over, expect other offers a little more than half the time, be ready to go 9 or 10 percent over for a house in its first two weeks, and expect to decide within about 18 days.

Adjust from there:

"Sold above asking" is the share of closings above final list price, used here as the best available measure of how often a house drew competing offers. Sample sizes as in the table above.¹⁸

Price is not the whole offer

These numbers describe price. They do not describe the other terms that decide contests between offers that are close on price: inspection scope, mortgage and appraisal contingencies, attorney review posture, deposit size, closing date, and whether the seller needs to stay a few weeks after closing.

In Paramus there is a specific reason terms matter under $1 million. Some of your competition is a builder buying the lot (Section 2). A builder typically does not need a mortgage contingency or a long inspection, and does not care about the kitchen. A family buying the same house cannot always match those terms and should not try to match all of them. What you can do is know before you write whether the house is a likely builder target, and shape the offer for that. Do not read the percentages above as a bidding instruction. They describe the field. The strategy is the conversation we have about your specific house.

The eighteen-day reality

Paramus gives a buyer some time to decide. It does not give as much as the 18-day figure suggests.

Most houses come out for the weekend. Of the 371 houses that sold in the last twenty months, 70 percent had their first day of showings on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Saturday is the single most common day (22 percent), then Thursday (19 percent) and Sunday (16 percent). Monday and Tuesday together are 16 percent.¹⁹ Launches lean on the open-house weekend itself.

The contested ones are gone by the second weekend. Under $1 million, 44 percent of sold houses had an accepted offer within 14 days, and the two most common single days were day 9 and day 14: one weekend of showings, then a decision early the next week or after the second weekend.

Right now is a little slower than the average. Of the 40 single-family homes under contract or in attorney review on October 2, 2026, the median took 21.5 days from first showing to accepted offer; the middle half took 13 to 48 days. Only 7 of the 40 went in ten days or fewer. For the 18 of those listed under $1 million the median was 16.5 days.¹⁹ Accepted offers in Paramus show up in week two or three.

Mortgage rates are the likeliest reason. The average 30-year rate was 7.28 percent in the first week of October 2026, up from 6.34 percent a year earlier.²⁰ On a $920,000 loan, which is what a buyer at the Paramus median borrows with 20 percent down, that is about $577 more every month for the same house. Buyers who have to qualify at the higher payment take longer to commit, and some drop out. The sales data cannot prove that rates caused the slowdown, but the timing fits, and it fits the price pattern too: the existing-home median was flat from 2025 to 2026 (Section 3).

What this means for you
If you are buying, you have a little more time to decide than a buyer had a year ago, and a seller whose house has passed the three-week mark knows it. If you are selling, price for the buyer who is paying 7 percent, not the one who was paying 6.

What that means in practice: you can usually see a Paramus house twice, and you can usually get an inspector's opinion before the deadline rather than after. You cannot start your pre-approval after you find the house. A listing in its first weekend should be treated as a ten-day decision; a listing in its fourth week is one where you can ask the seller a question and wait for the answer.

What I tell my buyers: look at the days on market before you look at the price. A house under $1 million in its first two weekends will probably cost you 5 to 10 percent over asking and you need your paperwork done before you walk in. The same house on day 25 will most likely sell at asking, and nobody else may be writing that week. It is the same market on both days, so check the calendar before you decide how hard to bid.

The exception worth knowing

At $2 million and up it is a different market, and most of it is new construction sold by builders.

• 72 percent of these homes sold below asking, and only 11 percent above it.
• One in three (32 percent) sold at 95 percent of asking or less. One in ten sold at 91 percent or less. On a $2.4 million house, 95 percent is $120,000 off the list price.
• The 66 sales identified as new construction closed at a median 98.2 percent of asking after a median 40 days. The 19 existing homes sold at $2 million and up closed at 95.7 percent.²¹
• Remember the note in Section 3: these percentages are against the final list price. A house that cut its price before selling gave up more than the table shows.

The $1.5 million to $2 million band is the transition. Three in ten homes there still sell above asking, but the median is 1 percent under and the house takes 35 days.

If you are shopping at $2.3 million, the strategy that wins at $850,000 is not just unnecessary. It is expensive. Offer below asking, ask for what you want finished or upgraded, and take your time. The builder across the table has a construction loan, taxes and a calendar, and Section 5 shows how many competing new houses are for sale at once.

5. Inventory, Pipeline and Liquidity

Forty-six houses

On October 2, 2026, there were 46 single-family homes for sale in the Borough of Paramus.²²

Paramus closed 226 single-family sales in the twelve months before that date, about 19 a month. Forty-six for sale against that pace is 2.4 months of supply. A balanced market is usually described as five to six months.

That is tight, but a Paramus buyer has something to look at every weekend. But the town-wide figure hides the same split that runs through Sections 3 and 4: under $1 million there are 11 homes for sale and 1.3 months of supply; at $2 million and up there are 18 homes and more than five months.

Inventory changes weekly. This count is a snapshot as of the date above.

Where the forty-six houses are

Active single-family listings, October 2, 2026; closings October 1, 2025 through October 2, 2026.²²

Almost half of what Paramus sells is under $1 million. Less than a quarter of what is for sale is. Four homes in ten on the market are priced at $2 million and up, a band that accounts for one sale in five.

Three more things about the 46:

• The $2 million shelf is mostly builders' inventory. At least 8 of the 18 homes at $2 million and up carry a year built of 2023 or later on the tax list, and several of the rest are new houses whose tax record has not caught up.²³ They have been for sale a median 41.5 days, and 5 of the 18 have been on more than 90 days.
• Most of the homes from $1 million to $1.5 million are new to the market. Seven of the 11 were listed in the second half of September, and the typical one had been for sale 9 days on October 2. These are fresh autumn listings, not homes that failed to sell.
• Ten of the 46 have cut their price as their most recent change, nine of them at $1 million and up.

What is under contract, and what it tells you

On the same date, 40 homes had an accepted offer and were waiting to close. Put those next to the homes still for sale and you can see where buyers are moving fastest. If more homes have a buyer than are left for sale, that price range is selling faster than new listings arrive.

NJMLS listings on October 2, 2026. "Have a buyer" counts homes under contract or in attorney review.²²

The point for a buyer: between $800,000 and $1 million, when a house that suits you comes up, it may be one of six. At $2 million and up you can make a shortlist.

One line to watch. The under-$800,000 band shows fewer homes pending than for sale. With counts this small that may mean nothing. It may also mean that what remains under $800,000 is the stock that needs the most work, which is exactly the stock a builder prices as a lot. The next quarterly update will say which.

A note on the next few months of headlines

The 40 pending homes have a median asking price of $1,187,000. Apply each price band's usual percent of asking and they should close at a median of about $1,188,000, against $1,150,000 for 2026 so far.²⁴ So the next two months of closings should print a median at or slightly above this year's figure. That is a projection from 40 contracts, and it assumes they all close.

Two cautions about any Paramus headline.

First, the median here sits in the gap between two markets, so it moves with the mix of what closed, not only with prices:

Single-family closings by quarter.²²

A 13 percent drop from one quarter to the next, followed by a 16 percent rise, is not the value of your house changing. It is a winter quarter with fewer $2 million closings in it. If you see a headline this winter saying Paramus prices fell, check what sold.

Second, the median asking price of what is for sale is $1,724,444. Consumer sites publish that figure as "median list price." It tells you what is left on the shelf, which Section 3 shows is weighted to new construction. It is not what a Paramus house costs.

Townhouses, condos and co-ops: a small, separate market

On October 2 there were 14 of these for sale, 1 in attorney review and 5 under contract, against 34 closings in the prior twelve months (26 townhouses, 6 co-ops, 2 condos).²² That is about five months of supply, but the count is small and it is really two unrelated things:

• Townhouses: 8 for sale. Five are in one new community on Paramus Road that is still selling out, and two are in a 2018 rental community now being sold unit by unit (Section 13 has both). Townhouse closings in the last twelve months had a median of $1,697,500, which is the new product, not the 2000-era townhomes.
• Co-ops: 6 for sale, all in one building, against 6 co-op closings in twelve months. Over 2021 to 2026 the co-op median was $326,250 with a median 51 days on market. It is the least expensive way to own in Paramus and the slowest to resell.

Every figure in this subsection rests on fewer than 35 sales. Treat it as a description, not a trend.

Liquidity, or how fast a house turns back into cash

Appreciation is the number buyers ask about. Liquidity is the number that matters if plans change and you need to sell.

In Paramus the two diverge by price. Four measures point the same way.

Days and percent of asking: closings February 1, 2025 through October 2, 2026. Listings without a sale: all single-family listings closed, expired or withdrawn since January 1, 2021.²²

By bedroom count the pattern repeats: three-bedroom homes went under contract in a median 17 days at 100.8 percent of asking; homes with six or more bedrooms took 40 days and sold at 97.6 percent.

The top of the Paramus market is materially slower than the bottom, and half its listings fail on the first try. That last column needs care, because a listing that fails is not a house that never sells. We traced every address.

• 496 single-family listings expired or were withdrawn since 2021, at 341 different addresses.
• 205 of those addresses (60 percent) later closed through the MLS. Another 27 were back on the market or under contract on October 2, 2026. The remaining 109 (32 percent) have no later sale in the MLS; some sold privately, some were rented, some owners stayed.
• Leave out the most recent year, which has not had time to play out, and 66 percent of the addresses later sold.
• The later-sold rate is about the same in every price band, 57 to 66 percent.
• The price of the second try: those 205 houses eventually sold for a median 96.2 percent of the asking price on the listing that failed, and two-thirds sold below it.²⁵

Put plainly: a failed listing in Paramus usually means a house that was priced about 4 percent above what the market would pay, sat, came off, and came back. At $2 million and up that happens to one listing in two.

What this means if you are buying at the top
A $2.3 million new house in Paramus is a fine house. It is a slower asset than an $850,000 one, and if you might need to sell within three to five years you will be selling a no-longer-new house into a market that has 18 newer ones on the shelf. Price that in. The mirror image is the good news in Section 4: that slowness is why the top of the market negotiates.

What this means if you are selling under $1 million
Your risk is not time. More than four listings in five sell, in about two and a half weeks.

What happened the last time the market turned

Everything above describes a rising market, because that is what the last six years contain. It would be dishonest to present that as evidence of what happens when the market falls. So here is what happened the last time it did.

Closed single-family sales in the Borough of Paramus through NJMLS.²⁶

Three things stand out.

Paramus fell 19.2 percent, and took years to come back. The median went from $630,000 in 2007 to $509,000 in 2012, a decline of 19.2 percent over five years. Most of it came fast: the median was down 18 percent by 2009 and then moved sideways for three years. The average sale price tells the same story, down 23 percent from 2006 to 2010. In 2014, seven years after the peak, the median was $549,950, still 13 percent below it. The sales record used here does not include 2015 through 2020, so the year Paramus regained $630,000 falls somewhere in that gap; by 2021 the median was $769,000. The recovery therefore took somewhere between eight and fourteen years.

It was a slow market, not a collapsed one. Through the whole period buyers paid 95 to 97 percent of asking, roughly one home in ten sold above asking, and homes took seven to ten weeks to go under contract. Sales fell from 202 in 2006 to 141 in 2008, a drop of 30 percent, and were back to 170 a year later. Compare 2026: 100 percent of asking, 46 percent above asking, 24 days.

Recovery showed up in speed and competition before it showed up in price. In 2013 sales jumped to 190, the share sold above asking doubled from 10 to 20 percent, and days on market fell from 45 to 28. The median rose only 6.6 percent that year. That is the order to watch for in reverse: if the share of homes selling above asking falls well below four in ten and stays there while days on market lengthen, price is the last thing to move, not the first. One soft quarter is not that signal. The fourth quarter of 2025 showed 27 percent above asking and 34 days on market, and by the second quarter of 2026 the figures were 56 percent and 20 days.

What this means for a buyer today
The last time Paramus turned, an owner who bought at the 2007 peak and had to sell between 2009 and 2012 took a loss of 16 to 19 percent before costs, and an owner who had to sell in 2014 was still down 13 percent. An owner who could hold a decade or more was made whole and then some. The 2007 market did not include today's $2 million new-construction tier, so there is no record of how that tier behaves in a downturn. The liquidity table above is the best evidence available, and it says that tier would be the slowest to sell.

What could change this

Honest forecasting means naming what would break the pattern.

• Mortgage rates. Freddie Mac's weekly survey put the average 30-year fixed rate at 7.28 percent on October 1, 2026, against 6.34 percent a year earlier.²⁷ Paramus prices rose through that increase. The part of the market most exposed to rates is the part that borrows the most against income: the under-$1 million buyer on the demand side. A sustained fall in rates would add buyers to the band that already has 1.3 months of supply. A further rise would show first in the above-asking share, as it did in 2007, when it fell to 6 percent a year before the median moved.
• New-construction supply at $2 million and up. This is the variable that is specific to Paramus. There are 18 such homes for sale against 42 sales a year, and Section 2 shows builders are still buying roughly 40 older houses a year to replace. If the top tier slows further, two things follow: builders discount finished houses, and they pay less for the next lot. The second matters to every owner of an older house, because builder demand is part of the floor under the sub-$1 million market. Watch months of supply at $2 million and up; it was 5.1 on October 2.
• The pipeline of new units. Section 13 counts about 2,100 homes approved or under construction in Paramus. Roughly 1,500 are rental apartments at the malls and by the hospital, 332 are senior or assisted living, and 82 are for-sale townhomes. The apartments do not compete with a single-family house for a buyer, though they give a household a way to live in Paramus without buying, and the first 575 are not scheduled to open until mid-2028. The townhomes do compete: at $1.7 million to $1.9 million they are an alternative to a house in the $1.5 million to $2 million band, which is already the transition zone between the fast market and the slow one.
• More older homes for sale. Closings through October 2 were 171, up from 155 at the same point in 2025. If long-time owners continue to list at a higher rate, the under-$1 million shortage eases. It is the most benign way for this market to rebalance, and so far it is one year of evidence.

What I tell my buyers: Paramus is easy to get into and, at the top, slower to get out of. If there is any chance you will move within five years, buy the house that the next family and the next builder would both want, which is the one under $1 million on a standard lot. If you are buying the $2.3 million new house, buy it because you intend to stay, and negotiate as if you know that there are seventeen others for sale, because there are.

6. How Paramus Compares

Most Paramus buyers are also looking at Ridgewood, Fair Lawn, Glen Rock, Oradell, River Edge or Washington Township. This table puts the seven towns side by side on the things that can be measured the same way for all of them. Every row uses one source for all seven towns, so the comparison is fair even where the number is unflattering. Paramus wins some rows and loses others, and the ones it loses are marked as plainly as the ones it wins.

The comparison

Sale prices, tax bills and bill growth: New Jersey Division of Taxation, 2024 and 2025 Average Residential Statistics; the sale price is the average of the Division's usable-sale sample for each town (count in parentheses), not a median and not every sale. Effective rates: Division of Taxation, 2025 General Tax Rates. Assessment ratios: Division of Taxation, Certification of Average Ratios for Tax Year 2026. Revaluation list: Bergen County Board of Taxation, January 7, 2026; the Board's list does not separate revaluations from reassessments. Per-pupil spending: each district's 2026-27 User Friendly Budget as filed with the NJ Department of Education (budgetary cost per pupil, 2024-25 actual). Rail, parking and bus: NJ Transit and each borough, as cited in Section 16. Water: Jersey WaterCheck system profile and The Ridgewood Market Report, Sections 16 and 18. Offense counts and rates: FBI Crime Data Explorer, calendar 2025, as reported in Section 11. A dagger (†) marks a figure from a secondary source; confirm it before you rely on it. The Paramus sale price in the first row is an average and the one in the last row is a median, from different sources; they are not expected to match.

On the crime rows: 971 of Paramus's 1,046 property offenses in 2025 (92.8 percent) were larceny-theft, the category that includes shoplifting. Offenses are counted where they happen, including stores, mall parking decks and highways, while the rate divides by residents only, so Paramus's per-resident rate is not comparable with a residential town's (Section 11). Fair Lawn reported 7 of 12 months in 2025 and is not rated.

How to read it

On price, Paramus is the second most expensive of the seven by average sale, behind Ridgewood. Glen Rock averages about 16 percent less, Oradell about 23 percent less, and Fair Lawn about half. A buyer who started in Fair Lawn or River Edge and is looking at Paramus is moving up a price tier, and should know it before the first showing. Part of the Paramus average is new construction: one sale in five here now closes at $2 million or more (Section 3), which most of these towns do not have in that volume.

On taxes, Paramus wins the row that matters to a buyer. At the same $1,150,000 price, Paramus costs $16,491 a year to hold at 2025 effective rates. The next cheapest are Washington Township and Ridgewood at about $22,350. Glen Rock and River Edge are near $28,000. That is $5,850 to $11,800 a year, every year, and it comes from the commercial base on Routes 4 and 17 that the other six towns do not have (Section 9).

Paramus loses the row beside it. Its average residential bill rose 8.0 percent between 2024 and 2025, the fastest of the seven and seven times Ridgewood's 1.1 percent. The rate fell and the bill rose, because Paramus resets every assessment every year and house values have been rising faster than mall and office values.

What this means for you
The Paramus tax advantage is real and large, and it is narrowing a little each year. Budget on the bill growing 5 to 8 percent a year, not 2 (Section 9).

Paramus does not have the lowest average bill, either. Fair Lawn's is $12,418, because Fair Lawn's houses cost half as much. If your question is "which town has the smallest tax bill", the answer is Fair Lawn. If it is "which town taxes a given house least", the answer is Paramus.

The assessment row tells you who has a correction coming. Paramus, River Edge and Oradell carry assessments at 89 to 93 percent of market value. Ridgewood, Fair Lawn, Glen Rock and Washington Township are at 57 to 63 percent, and all four appear on the County Board's revaluation and reassessment lists for 2026 or 2027. In those towns the bill on a listing sheet can change sharply in one year for a recent buyer. In Paramus it moves every year in smaller steps. Neither is free; they are different kinds of risk.

Paramus spends the most per pupil of every district in the table, $23,990 in 2024-25 (audited actual) against $19,713 in Ridgewood; the 2026-27 budgets put the two at $26,695 and $21,796 (Section 10). Per-pupil spending is a cost figure, not a quality figure, and it belongs in a tax conversation more than a schools conversation: it is one reason the total school levy rose 4.9 percent for 2026-27 (5.0 percent for the general fund alone). Section 10 shows where the money goes, which is mostly staffing. Oradell, River Edge and Washington Township do not run their own K-12 systems, so their rows are not like-for-like with the other four: an Oradell or River Edge household pays into an elementary district and a regional one, and Washington Township shares a district with Westwood.

On the commute, Paramus and Washington Township are the only two of the seven without a train station. A Paramus rail commuter drives to another town's station and pays that town's non-resident price where it sells permits at all: $480 a year at New Bridge Landing, $1,200 at Glen Rock, $1,500 at Radburn, and nothing at Oradell, which does not sell to non-residents. A Fair Lawn resident pays $120 a year at Radburn for the same space. What Paramus has in exchange is the largest set of direct buses to Port Authority and the GWB Bus Station of the seven, and three highways (Section 16).

On water, Paramus, Oradell and River Edge share a utility, so the PFAS treatment cost for the Haworth plant that Section 19 describes as still unpriced will fall on all three. Ridgewood and Glen Rock customers are already paying a treatment surcharge to Ridgewood Water. At the same use, the annual bills are close: about $1,030 in Paramus against $1,008 in Ridgewood (Section 19).

Crime figures for all seven towns are in the table above and in Section 11, with the reason Paramus's per-resident rates cannot be compared directly with residential towns.

Where Paramus wins and loses, in one list

• Wins: effective tax rate; tax on a given price; no deferred revaluation; Port Authority bus service.
• Loses: growth in the tax bill; per-pupil cost; no train station and non-resident parking prices; entry price against five of the six peers.
• Even or not directly comparable: water cost at equal use; offense rates. Days on market against peers comes in the next edition.

What the next quarterly edition adds

The peer-town median sale price and days-on-market row, from the same NJMLS closed-sales method used for Paramus in Section 3, so that the seven towns can be compared on how competitive they are and not only on what they cost. And 2026 tax rates, which the Division of Taxation had not published as of October 3, 2026.

What I tell my buyers: decide which row you are buying. If it is the train, Paramus is the wrong town and Glen Rock, Fair Lawn or River Edge is the right one, and you will pay about $8,800 to $11,800 a year more in tax on the same price for it. If it is carrying cost, nothing in this table comes close to Paramus. I live here and I do not pretend the 8 percent line is not on the table; I plan around it.

† Figures marked with a dagger are best-effort research, so verify them with the issuing office (the Borough of Paramus, the school district, the county, the state or the utility) before making judgment calls or decisions on them.

7. What Your Budget Buys

"What does a million dollars get me in Paramus?" is the question behind most first conversations. The honest answer is that a million is between two different Paramus markets, so this section uses three budgets that sit where the sales actually cluster: about $850,000, about $1.2 million and about $2.1 million. Each column describes the typical single-family home that closed within 10 percent of that price between February 1, 2025 and October 2, 2026, from the multiple listing service, matched to the Borough's tax list for living area, year built and lot. The figure is the middle of the range, with the quarter-to-three-quarter spread where it helps.

Closed single-family sales February 1, 2025 through October 2, 2026 within 10 percent of each budget (New Jersey Multiple Listing Service). Bedrooms, baths, style, asking price and days on market are from the listing. Living space, lot and year built are from the Borough's 2026 tax list, matched by address for 83, 41 and 43 of the sales in each column. Living space is the assessor's building area and understates finished basements. In the $850,000 column, 13 of the 83 matched homes now carry a year built of 2024 or later, meaning the house that sold has since been replaced; those 13 are left out of the living space, year built and price-per-foot figures. Tax in year one is the 2025 rate of $1.499 per $100 on the median 2026 assessment of the homes in the column; the settled figure is the 2025 effective rate of 1.434% on the budget. The 2026 rate had not been published as of October 3, 2026.

Reading the three columns

$850,000 buys a three-bedroom ranch or split level from the early 1950s on a quarter acre, and you may be bidding against a builder for it. This is the house Paramus was built from, and it is the most common sale in town. It is also the house the teardown economy runs on. Of the homes that sold in this band and could be matched to the tax list, 13 of 83, about one in six, have already been replaced by a new house. One of them sold for $850,000 in July 2025 and, rebuilt, sold again for $2,215,000 in August 2026.

What this means for you
When you lose a house at this price to a cash offer with no inspection, that is often who you lost it to, and Section 2 explains their arithmetic.

$1.2 million buys the Paramus family house: a four-bedroom colonial, split or bi-level from the 1960s with about 2,600 square feet and a slightly larger lot. It is the best value per square foot of the three columns, about $460 against $515 below it and $545 above it. A buyer here pays for 1,000 more square feet and a fourth bedroom and gets them at a lower price per foot than the starter house, because the land is a smaller share of the price and no builder is bidding. Not one of the 41 matched homes in this column was built after 2019. Section 15's inspection list for 1960s and 1970s houses applies in full.

$2.1 million buys new construction: six bedrooms, five and a half baths, about 3,850 square feet, built around 2023, on the same 10,000-square-foot lot the 1953 ranch stood on. Twenty-nine of the 43 matched homes were built in 2020 or later, and 46 of the 48 are colonials. The lot is not bigger than the $850,000 buyer's; the house is. This is also where the market negotiates. The typical home in this column sold for 96.4 percent of its asking price, seven in ten sold below asking, and there were 5.1 months of supply at $2 million and up on October 2, 2026 (Section 5).

What changes across the three columns is the age of the house, not the land. The lot is nearly constant at about a quarter acre and the money buys a newer and larger building: 1953, then 1966, then 2023. A buyer who wants new construction has a real pool to choose from here, at a price that mostly starts near $1.9 million: of 72 homes built in 2020 or later that sold above $1.5 million in this period, nine in ten sold for $1.86 million or more.

What does not change is the tax rate. Because Paramus reassesses every year, the tax follows the price closely in every column. New homes are assessed at about 96 percent of what they sold for, older ones at about 84 percent with the gap closing the following year (Section 9 separates the older ones by year of purchase: 91 percent for homes bought in 2025, 82 percent for homes bought in 2026). The $2.1 million buyer pays about two and a half times the $850,000 buyer's tax, in line with the price.

What I tell my buyers: know what the next tier up buys before you stretch. Between $850,000 and $1.2 million it buys a bedroom, a bath and 1,000 square feet in a house fifteen years newer, and it takes you out of the builders' price range. Between $1.2 million and $2.1 million it buys a new house on the same size lot, with room to negotiate. If you are at $850,000, decide early whether you are buying a home or a lot, because the seller's other offers may already have decided.

8. A Worked Example: What a $1.15 Million Paramus Home Costs to Own

$1,150,000 is the median price of a single-family home sold in Paramus in 2026 through October 2.⁴² The 40 homes that closed within 10 percent of that price since February 2025 were, typically, a four-bedroom colonial, split or bi-level with three full baths and about 2,600 square feet, built around 1966, on 0.28 acre.⁴³ This page adds up what that house costs to buy and to own, line by line, using the figures from the rest of this report. Where a line depends on the buyer (the mortgage rate, the insurance quote), the assumption is stated so you can substitute your own.

Assumptions: purchase price $1,150,000; 20 percent down ($230,000); a 30-year fixed mortgage of $920,000 at 7.28 percent, the Freddie Mac national average for the week of October 1, 2026 (an illustration, not a quote; substitute the rate you are offered);⁴⁴ family of four; 5/8-inch water meter; water use of 5,000 gallons a month; the house is not in a flood zone; no homestead rebate or senior program applied.

At the closing table

The second and third lines are the ones that changed. Until July 10, 2025 the buyer of a New Jersey home priced above $1 million paid a 1 percent fee at closing; on this house that was $11,500 out of the buyer's pocket. P.L. 2025, c.69 moved that fee to the seller and made it graduated: 1 percent of the whole price for sales above $1 million up to $2 million, 2 percent above $2 million up to $2.5 million, 2.5 percent up to $3 million, 3 percent up to $3.5 million, and 3.5 percent above that.⁴⁶ The seller also pays the ordinary Realty Transfer Fee, as before.⁴⁵

What this means for you
As a buyer at $1.15 million you no longer write an $11,500 check to the State. As a seller at this price you now pay $22,890 in State fees, about 2 percent of the price, before commission and attorney. And the step at $2 million is a cliff, not a slope: a sale at $2,000,000 carries a $20,000 graduated fee and a sale at $2,000,001 carries $40,000, because the percentage applies to the whole price. A fifth of Paramus single-family sales now close at $2 million or more (Section 3), so this is a live negotiating point on new construction. Sellers know it, and it shapes where they will and will not move on price.

Year one

Add a maintenance reserve. A common rule is 1 to 2 percent of value a year, which on this house is $11,500 to $23,000; that is a planning figure, not a bill, and Section 15 lists what it tends to get spent on in a 1960s house.

A larger household might use 25,000 gallons of water a quarter. At that use the Paramus water line is about $1,030 a year at the rates in effect before August 1, 2026 (Section 19), against $752 at the Board of Public Utilities' 5,000-gallon benchmark used above.

Year two and after: annual reassessment

Paramus has no single revaluation date on which the tax line jumps. The Borough reassesses every property every year, as of the prior October 1, under a program that runs through tax year 2029 (Section 9). So the tax line does not step once. It follows the market, and it follows your purchase price.

Here is what the record shows for recent buyers. At the time of sale, the assessment on the books was a median 80.5 percent of the price paid. One cycle later, homes bought in 2025 were assessed at a median 91.0 percent of what they sold for. The Borough-wide ratio certified by the State for 2026 is 93.30 percent.⁴⁷

All four rows use 2025 rates, because the 2026 rate had not been published as of October 3, 2026. The first three are arithmetic on Section 9's ratios; the fourth is the planning figure from Section 9 and is a projection, not a published number.

Two things drive the last row, and neither is a revaluation. First, the levy grows: the Borough's 2026 municipal and library levy rose 3.4 percent and the school levy for 2026-27 rose 4.9 percent (Section 9). Second, the share of the levy carried by houses grows, because every year's reassessment resets houses and commercial property to market, and houses have been appreciating faster. That is why the average Paramus homeowner's bill rose 8.0 percent from 2024 to 2025 in a year when the tax rate went down. If house prices stopped outrunning commercial values, that second effect would stop too; and if your house loses value, your assessment follows it down the next year without an appeal.

What the example says

The mortgage is four-fifths of the monthly subtotal, and at 7.28 percent it is the line that has moved most in the last year: the same loan at the 6.34 percent average of a year earlier would cost about $577 a month less.⁴⁴ Nothing in this report changes that number, but it is why the rate assumption is stated first.

The tax line is the second largest and the only other one that changes on a schedule. It rises by about $1,700 after your first reassessment and by about $800 more as it settles, then grows with the Borough's budget and with house prices. A buyer who budgets $1,165 a month for taxes in year one, $1,375 by year three and $1,540 by 2028 is not surprised. Even at the 2028 figure it is below what the same price costs in Ridgewood or Washington Township today (Section 6).

The Borough and utility lines, water, pool, electric and gas supply, come to about $3,800 a year, with sewer and garbage inside the tax bill and no lead-pipe liability on the house. Two costs are not yet in that number: gas delivery and insurance, each plausibly larger than the water bill, and a treatment surcharge for the Haworth water plant that Veolia has asked for and the State has deferred (Section 19).

The line Paramus adds that a train town does not is the one in the commuting rows: with no station, a rail commuter pays another town's non-resident parking price, $480 to $1,500 a year, on top of the fare.

What I tell my buyers: the lender qualifies you on principal, interest, taxes and insurance, and uses the seller's tax bill to do it. In Paramus that bill is about $2,500 a year below where yours will settle, and you will reach the higher number in two reassessments, not ten years. Put $16,500 in the spreadsheet on day one, grow it 5 to 8 percent a year, and the spreadsheet will be right. And if you are selling above $1 million, the 1 percent fee is yours now, so price it in before you counter.

9. Taxes and Carrying Cost

The key points

• Paramus has the lowest property tax rate of the seven towns compared: 1.434% of market value in 2025.⁵¹
• On a $1,150,000 home that is about $16,500 a year, against $22,300 to $28,300 in the other six.
• The malls and the highway corridors pay about 45% of the tax levy. That is why the rate is low.
• Every home is reassessed every year. Your tax follows your price within a year or two, and there is no large one-time correction waiting.
• A falling rate is not a falling bill. The average homeowner's bill rose 8.0% in 2025 while the rate went down.⁵²

Paramus against its neighbors

The State publishes an effective tax rate for every town, which is the tax as a share of what a home is worth. It is the fair way to compare towns that assess differently.

Table 9.1. What a $1,150,000 home costs in property tax, 2025.

Source: New Jersey Division of Taxation.^51, 52

At the same price, Paramus is the cheapest of the seven to own, by $5,850 to $11,800 a year. Over ten years at $1.15 million, the gap against Glen Rock or River Edge is more than $115,000.

Paramus does lose two rows. Its average bill is not the lowest: Fair Lawn's is $12,418, because Fair Lawn's houses cost less. And its average bill grew fastest of the seven from 2024 to 2025, at 8.0%.⁵²

Where your tax dollar goes

Table 9.2. The 2025 tax bill on the average Paramus home, assessed at $871,335.

Source: Bergen County Board of Taxation; New Jersey Division of Taxation.^53, 52

The schools take under half the bill, and the Borough takes about a third. The Mayor and Council control a larger slice of your bill here than a council does in most Bergen towns.

Why the rate is low, and why your bill still rises

Homeowners in Paramus share the bill with Garden State Plaza, Bergen Town Center, Paramus Park and the Route 4 and Route 17 corridors. Everything that is not a house carried about 45% of the levy in 2025, roughly $87 million of the $193 million raised.⁵³

That share is shrinking slowly. It was 48.0% in 2022 and 45.0% in 2025, because house prices have risen faster than store and office values.^52, 54 From 2024 to 2025 the average home's assessment rose 9.1% while the whole tax base rose 4.5%. The rate fell from 1.514 to 1.499, and the average homeowner's bill still rose 8.0%. Since 2022 the average bill is up 19.5%.⁵²

What this means for you
Budget for your bill to grow faster than the Borough's and schools' budgets do, for as long as house prices outrun commercial values. It is still the lowest rate of the seven towns by a wide margin.

Annual reassessment: what a buyer should expect

Paramus has revalued every property every year since 2020, and the current program runs through 2029.^55, 56 Assessments here sit close to market value. The State's ratio for Paramus is 93.30%, where Ridgewood, Fair Lawn and Glen Rock are near 60%.⁵⁷ Towns near 60% have a town-wide revaluation ahead that will shift bills in one step. Paramus takes that adjustment a little each year.

For a buyer of an existing house, the pattern is this:

• When you buy, the assessment on the books is typically about 80% of your price.⁵⁸
• A year later, it moves to about 91% of what you paid.⁵⁹

On a $1,150,000 purchase, that is a first-year bill of about $13,960, about $15,690 the next year, and about $16,500 where it settles.

New houses are different in two ways. A home built in 2023 or later and sold in 2025 or 2026 is assessed at a median 96.7% of its price, so there is little step-up left.⁵⁹ But while a new house is still being built and sold, the tax shown on the listing can be the old house's bill (Section 2).

What this means for you
The seller's tax bill is a starting point, not your bill. Work from your price, at about 1.45%.

The risk in a mall-supported tax base

A base that is 45% non-residential is an advantage with a risk attached.

• The malls are a large share. Garden State Plaza alone is assessed at $1.78 billion, which is 13% of the Borough's taxable base.⁵⁹
• Commercial owners appeal their assessments as a matter of routine, and the Borough settles cases every year.^60, 61 When a commercial assessment comes down, the same levy is spread over everyone else. If $100 million came off the roll, the average residential bill would rise about $102.
• The Borough's reserve for appeals is small, $300,000 at the end of 2024.⁶²
• The hospital pays a fee, not taxes. The Valley Hospital is exempt at $375 million. The Borough budgets its community service fee at $1,000,000 for 2026, against $2,438,547 received in 2025.^59, 63
• The Borough is using more of its surplus each year to hold the rate down: $4.85 million in 2025 and $6.46 million in the 2026 budget.⁶³

On the other side, Borough debt is light, about 0.3% of the Borough's value against a legal limit of 3.5%, and the Borough collected 99.03% of its 2024 levy.^62, 64

What this means for you
None of this changes the comparison in Table 9.1. It is the reason to plan for steady increases and not to assume the rate keeps falling.

Appealing your assessment

• Deadline. In a year when the Borough reassesses, the appeal deadline is May 1. Use the date printed on your assessment notice, or confirm with the County Board of Taxation (201-336-6300).^65, 66
• The test. The question is whether your assessment is above what your home would have sold for on the prior October 1.⁶⁷
• The odds. Of 304 recent sales, 44% were assessed below the range the State treats as accurate and 3.3% above it.⁵⁸ Most Paramus homes are assessed under what they would sell for.

Appeal if the record of your house is wrong, such as the bedroom count or square footage, or if it has a problem the assessor cannot see from the street. Do not appeal because the number went up.

Relief programs

All three State programs are claimed on one form, PAS-1. The deadline for the 2025 benefit year is November 2, 2026.⁶⁸

Table 9.3. State property tax relief.

Source: New Jersey Division of Taxation.^{69, 70, 71, 72}

Senior Freeze matters more in Paramus than in a town that seldom reassesses, because assessments move every year and the reimbursement grows with them.

What I tell my buyers: use about 1.45% of your purchase price as the tax line in your budget, even if the listing shows less, because your assessment will be reset toward what you paid within a year. Then add 5% to 8% a year, not 2%, because that is what the average Paramus homeowner's bill has done while the rate was falling. On a $1.15 million purchase that is about $16,500 now and roughly $18,500 by 2028. It is still the lowest carrying cost of any town I compare Paramus with.

10. Schools

Paramus Public Schools runs eight schools: five elementary schools through grade 4, two middle schools for grades 5 to 8, and Paramus High School.^73, 74 Middle school starts in grade 5 here. Preschool for four-year-olds is at the high school's Early Childhood Center, and the program for three-year-olds is at Parkway.⁷⁵

Every figure below is published by the New Jersey Department of Education or the district. No consumer rating is reproduced. Test and attendance figures are for the 2023-24 school year.

The eight schools side by side

Table 10.1. Paramus schools: size and staffing.

Source: NJ DOE School Performance Reports for each school; enrollment from the State's fall counts.^{76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84}

District enrollment was 3,532 in 2024-25, down 9.3% from 2015-16.⁸⁵ The district expects that to turn: its State-approved facilities plan projects 3,744 students by 2029-30.⁸⁶

Paramus results against the State

Table 10.2. Paramus district and high school results against New Jersey, 2023-24.

Source: NJ DOE School Performance Reports for the district and Paramus High School.^73, 83

Paramus is above the State on every row but the last. Dual enrollment is where students earn college credit through a partner college. The high school offers 26 AP courses. Students sat 783 AP exams, and 71.9% of them scored 3 or higher.^74, 83

Elementary schools: NJSLA scores and attendance

The NJSLA is the State's spring test in English and math. The tables show the share of students who met or exceeded expectations on it, and the share who missed 10% or more of school days.

Table 10.3. Elementary schools, NJSLA scores and attendance, 2023-24.

Source: NJ DOE School Performance Reports.^{76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 73}

Every elementary school is above the State figure in every column. Differences between the five schools are a different matter: a grade here has 33 to 87 students, so a few children move a percentage several points, and the order changes from year to year. Do not read one year's table as a ranking.

Middle schools: NJSLA scores and attendance

Table 10.4. Middle schools, NJSLA scores by grade and attendance, 2023-24.

Source: NJ DOE School Performance Reports.^81, 82, 73

Both middle schools are above the State figure in every grade and subject.

What this means for you
All eight schools sit above the State figures on nearly every measure, so the choice of a house in Paramus does not turn on which school it feeds. If one school matters to you for another reason, such as distance or a program, confirm the assignment before you sign.

What Paramus spends per student

Table 10.5. Cost per pupil, Paramus and nearby districts.

Source: each district's 2026-27 budget filing with the State.^{87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94}

Paramus spends the most per student of the districts shown. Much of it is staff: Paramus has 10.6 students per teacher, against 11.6 in Fair Lawn and Glen Rock and 12.2 in Ridgewood.⁹⁵ That spending is paid through the lowest tax rate of the seven towns (Section 9).

What is planned

The State approved the district's long-range facilities plan in April 2026. It proposes additions at all five elementary schools, system upgrades at the middle schools and the high school, and no school closing, new school or change in grades.⁸⁶ No cost or timetable has been set. A project of that size could go to voters as a bond referendum, so it is the school decision to watch over the next two to three years.

How to confirm which school an address attends

The district assigns elementary and middle school by home address. It publishes an address lookup called "Find My School" on its registration page, and you can confirm at registration@paramusschools.org or 201-261-7800.⁹⁶ Zone maps on consumer real estate sites carry no stated source or date.

What this means for you
Run the address through the district's lookup and confirm with the district before you sign a contract. Treat the answer as the current assignment, not a guarantee.

What I tell my buyers: I cannot tell you which school is best, and the State's numbers would not let me if I tried, because all eight are above the State figures and the order among them changes every year. What I can do is make sure you know which school an address is assigned to before you bid. Look it up on the district's Find My School page, then call the district to confirm.

11. Crime and Safety

The key points

• Violent crime is rare: 7 to 10 offenses a year in a borough of 26,698 residents.^97, 98
• About nine in ten property offenses are larceny-theft, the category that includes shoplifting. Paramus has the malls, and an offense at a store or in a parking deck counts as a Paramus offense.
• A single Paramus "crime rate" misleads. It divides offenses at the malls and on the highways by the number of residents only.
• For a home, read two columns: burglary and motor vehicle theft.

Paramus by type of crime

Table 11.1. Offenses reported by the Paramus Police Department, 2022 through 2025.

Source: FBI Crime Data Explorer.⁹⁷ These are offenses reported to police, not convictions.

Burglary and motor vehicle theft are the two categories that happen at houses and driveways, and even they include stores, dealership lots and mall parking areas. Larceny-theft also covers theft from vehicles, and the FBI figures do not say how much of it happened at stores and how much at homes.

Paramus and nearby towns

Table 11.2. Offenses reported to the FBI, Paramus and nearby towns, 2025.

Source: FBI Crime Data Explorer.^{97, 99, 100}

Violent counts are small in every town. Paramus's burglary and motor vehicle theft counts are the highest in the table, and they include its commercial sites. The larceny column is not a like-for-like comparison, because no other town in the table has Paramus's retail.

What this means for you
When a website shows one crime rate for Paramus next to a neighboring town's, look past it to the categories. No public source reports crime by street or neighborhood. For a specific address, ask the Paramus Police Records Bureau what it can release.

Police, fire and ambulance

• Police: 102 sworn officers and 22 civilian employees in 2025, based at 1 Carlough Drive.^101, 102 Police are about one fifth of the Borough's 2026 budget.¹⁰³
• Fire: a volunteer department with five companies and more than 130 members, answering about 1,300 calls a year.¹⁰⁴
• Ambulance: Paramus Emergency Medical Services is a Borough department; paramedics from local hospitals provide advanced life support.¹⁰⁵

What this means for you
Before you close, give your insurer the address and ask what fire protection class it applies. That class sets the fire portion of your premium.

What I tell my buyers: do not compare one Paramus crime rate with one rate for the town next door. The Paramus count covers the malls and the highways, and it is divided only by the people who live here. Look at the burglary and motor vehicle theft columns, and if a specific street matters to you, ask the Paramus Police Records Bureau what it can release for that address.

12. Living Here

Paramus has no downtown and no train station. In their place it has a highway shopping district that carries 42% of the Borough's taxable value and closes one day a week.¹⁰⁶ This section covers what a Paramus address gives you outside the house itself: the stores and the Sunday law, the parks, the pool and golf course, the library, the hospital and the places families use.

The shopping corridor and your tax bill

The commercial district is not a street you walk. It is the frontage of Route 17 and Route 4, which cross in the south of the Borough, plus four shopping centers: Westfield Garden State Plaza, Paramus Park, Bergen Town Center and the Fashion Center. The Borough dates the first two to 1957 and 1958 and calls them New Jersey's first shopping centers.¹⁰⁷

In the 2026 assessment file, 460 commercial parcels carry $5.82 billion of assessed value, which is 42.3% of the $13.76 billion taxable total. The 8,087 residential parcels carry $7.59 billion, or 55.1%.¹⁰⁶ The stores are not a neighbor you tolerate; they pay close to half the bills. Section 9 covers what that does to your tax bill.

Highway traffic

Route 17 through Paramus carries more than 100,000 vehicles a day. A June 2019 count put it at 107,626†, and a traffic study filed with the Borough in 2021 cites a second count of 114,838.†¹⁰⁸ The same study found that the busiest hour on Route 17 was Saturday midday, not the weekday commute.¹⁰⁸

What this means for you
A house two blocks off Route 17 and a house in the middle of a residential section are the same town and not the same Saturday. Before you make an offer, drive from the house to the nearest highway entrance at noon on a Saturday. Expect it to be heavier between Thanksgiving and New Year's, when the malls are busiest. Section 16 covers the weekday commute.

The Sunday closing law

This is the part of Paramus that no listing site explains correctly. There are two laws, not one, and the Borough's is the broader of the two. This report takes no position on whether either law should exist.

The first is a state law that applies only in a county whose voters adopt it. Bergen County's voters did, and Bergen is described in press accounts as the only county where it still applies.†^109, 110 It bans Sunday sales of five kinds of goods: clothing, building and lumber supplies, furniture, home and office furnishings, and appliances.¹⁰⁹

The second is the Paramus ordinance, which goes further. It reads: "No worldly employment or business, except works of necessity and charity, shall be performed or practiced by any person within the Borough on the first day of the week."¹¹¹ The ordinance gives its own reason: the Borough is crossed by Routes 4 and 17 and the Parkway, and "the traffic peak on the aforesaid thoroughfares in the Borough is reached on Sunday."¹¹¹

Table 12.1. The two Sunday laws.

Source: New Jersey Supreme Court, 1986; Borough of Paramus Code.^109, 111

In practice, the malls and the highway stores are closed on Sunday. So are offices, which is the part that surprises people, because the ordinance covers "employment," not only retail. Restaurants, supermarkets selling food, pharmacies, gas stations, movie theaters and amusement venues operate. An open house is expressly permitted, which is why you can tour a Paramus house on a Sunday.¹¹¹

The Paramus ordinance does not depend on the county law. In 1986 the New Jersey Supreme Court held that a town may keep a Sunday closing ordinance broader than the state statute.¹⁰⁹ That is why the Paramus ordinance would survive a county repeal.

One open question sits outside the Borough. Retailers at the American Dream complex in East Rutherford, also in Bergen County, began opening on Sundays around January 2025. In August 2025 Paramus sued in Superior Court. The other side says the complex sits on state-owned land and the law does not apply there.†^112, 113 A motion to dismiss was argued on June 9, 2026, and the judge reserved decision.†¹¹⁴

What this means for you
Sunday in Paramus is quiet in a way the other six days are not, and that is by law, not by habit. The stores that carry 42% of the tax base earn on six days while competitors in neighboring counties, and now one in this county, trade on seven. The court case will not change the Paramus ordinance, but it bears on what a Paramus storefront is worth, and so on who pays the Borough's bills in ten years.

Borough parks, golf and the pool

The Borough lists 18 municipal parks.¹¹⁵ The largest sports sites are the Cliff Gennarelli Paramus Sports-Plex (lighted fields and courts, a playground and a fitness walk), Petruska Park (ball fields, playground, lighted basketball and roller hockey court, and the Recreation office), Reid Park (over 20 acres, with a nature trail) and Parkway Plex. The rest are neighborhood playgrounds and passive or memorial parks with trails, woodland and monuments.¹¹⁵

Paramus Golf Course at 314 Paramus Road is owned by the Borough and has a miniature golf course alongside. Annual membership is $60 for any golfer. A cart for 18 holes is $40 plus tax. Miniature golf is $12 for adults and $8 for children and seniors.¹¹⁶ A resident who plays more than three weekday rounds a year recovers the $60.

Paramus Municipal Pool at 530 Van Binsberger Boulevard is an outdoor, unheated complex with a kiddie pool, an intermediate pool and a café. It is membership only: no day passes are sold, and members may bring up to six guests a day for a fee.¹¹⁷ In 2026 the full season opened June 26, with pre-season weekends from May 23.¹¹⁸

Table 12.2. What residents pay, 2026.

Source: Paramus Golf Course 2026 rates; Borough of Paramus 2026 pool brochure.^116, 118 Pool discounts, one per membership: 50% for seniors 62 and over, volunteers, veterans and employees; 10% early bird through April 30; 10% for new members.

A resident family of four pays $525 for the pool season, or $472.50 at the early-bird rate. Non-residents may join, at $975 for the same family.¹¹⁸

Recreation programs. The Recreation Department runs youth and adult programs from its office at 475 North Farview Avenue. The Fall 2026 brochure lists football for grades 1 to 8 ($300), wrestling for kindergarten to grade 8 ($100), a basketball clinic ($165), volleyball including a travel team, cross country ($120), tennis ($140), pickleball, chess, arts and crafts, and a Diff-Abilities program for ages through 21. Members of the Borough's volunteer organizations receive 50% off.¹¹⁹ The Paramus Spartans Soccer Club is independent; see the club's site for programs and fees.¹²⁰

Van Saun County Park

Van Saun, at 216 Forest Avenue, is a Bergen County park, not a Borough one. It holds the Bergen County Zoo, a miniature train and a carousel. Zoo admission depends on residency: adults (15 to 61) $6 to $10, children (3 to 14) $4 to $7, seniors and visitors with disabilities $2 to $4, under 3 and active military free. The train and carousel are $3 a ride, cash only, 10 am to 5 pm. Zoo hours are 10 am to 4:30 pm daily, weather permitting.¹²¹ Ask at the gate which price applies to Bergen residents.

From late November to early January the County runs Winter Wonderland at Van Saun: two ice rinks (one for ice bumper cars), the carousel, the train, food trucks, a heated tent and a craft market.^122, 123 The County's published prices for the season that opened in November 2024 were $20 for all-access (admission, skating and one carousel ride), or $10 for seniors, veterans and active military; skating alone $10; skate rental $5; ice bumper cars $12.¹²⁴ Check the County's parks page for the coming season's dates and prices.

The County also maintains Saddle River County Park, a 577-acre linear park with a multi-use path of about 6 miles. Its Dunkerhook Area, on the Paramus and Fair Lawn line, has three tennis courts, picnic pavilions, athletic fields, a playground, fishing and the Easton Tower, a county historic site beside a waterfall.¹²⁵ Paramus owners pay for both county parks only through the county levy.

The library

The Paramus Public Library has two buildings. The main library at 116 East Century Road is open seven days: 9:30 am to 9 pm Monday through Thursday, to 6 pm Friday, to 5 pm Saturday, and 1 pm to 5 pm Sunday. The Charles E. Reid Branch at 239 West Midland Avenue is open Monday through Friday from 10 am and is closed on weekends.¹²⁶ The library belongs to the Bergen County Cooperative Library System, lends museum passes and wireless hotspots, and runs story times and English as a second language classes.¹²⁶

The library is funded by a formula in State law, not by a yearly choice of the Council. The 2025 library levy was $4,594,845, about $172 per resident, and it rises automatically as property values rise.¹²⁷

Table 12.3. Library use in four towns.

Source: federal Public Libraries Survey figures as republished by the libraries.org directory.†¹²⁸ These figures are several years old; the New Jersey State Library publishes current library statistics.¹²⁹

On these figures Paramus lends more per resident than the other three towns, and it does so from the smallest collection per resident of the four.

What this means for you
The library is funded by formula, heavily used, and has two buildings with Sunday afternoon hours. If a deep collection matters to you more than a busy one, your card works at every library in the county cooperative.

The Valley Hospital

The Valley Hospital moved from Ridgewood to Paramus on April 14, 2024. It sits at 4 Valley Health Plaza on a 40-acre campus between Route 17 and the Parkway, with 370 private single-patient rooms, an emergency department, a cancer center and a retail pharmacy.^130, 131

Day to day, that means a full emergency department inside the Borough and a large employer whose staff work every day of the week, Sunday included. It also brings ambulance traffic to Winters Avenue and the Route 17 ramps. Trade press reports say Valley plans a new patient wing; one report puts it at 100 additional licensed beds and another at more than 135.†^132, 131 The Planning Board's file is the place to confirm it. If you are buying on the streets off Winters Avenue or West Ridgewood Avenue, that application is one to follow.

Family venues and local history

Two indoor venues on Route 17 come up often with families. Kids Empire Paramus, at 305 Route 17, is an indoor playground: $22.90 per child ages 1 to 17, two adults free per child, open Monday to Thursday 10 am to 8 pm and Friday to Sunday 10 am to 10 pm.¹³³ Xtreme Energy, at 557 Route 17, is listed as a trampoline park†; call for hours and prices.¹³⁴ Amusement is a permitted Sunday activity, which is why an indoor playground can open on the day a shoe store cannot.¹¹¹

The Fritz Behnke Historical Museum at 330 Paramus Road tells the story of the town's farming years, when the west side grew celery on muck soil. It is open Sundays from 1 pm to 5 pm except holidays.¹³⁵ The muck soil matters to a buyer for a second reason, which Section 15 takes up.

On the calendar, the 2026 Independence Day fireworks were held Friday, July 3 at Paramus High School's stadium.¹³⁶ Loose leaves are accepted at the curb only from October 5 to November 29, 2026.¹³⁷

Houses of worship

The 2026 assessment file carries 45 parcels in the "church and charitable" exempt class.¹⁰⁶ That class includes charitable organizations as well as congregations, so it is a ceiling and not a count of congregations. The Borough Clerk and each congregation's own site are the sources for locations and service times.

No train station

Paramus has no NJ Transit rail stop inside its borders. Commuters use bus service on Routes 4 and 17 or drive to a station in a neighboring town. Section 16 gives the routes, the park-and-ride lots and the nearest stations.

What I tell my buyers: come twice before you offer, once on a Saturday at noon and once on a Sunday at noon, and drive the same route both times. The difference between those two drives is the Sunday law. Then ask me where the American Dream case stands. The ordinance protects your Sunday whatever the court decides, but the ruling says something about the stores that pay 42% of the Borough's taxes.

† Reported by a press or other secondary source and not confirmed against a primary document.

† Figures marked with a dagger are best-effort research, so verify them with the issuing office (the Borough of Paramus, the school district, the county, the state or the utility) before making judgment calls or decisions on them.

13. Housing Pipeline and the Fourth Round

In October 2024 the State assigned every New Jersey town an affordable housing obligation for 2025 through 2035, called the Fourth Round. Paramus's figure was 1,523 homes, cut to 1,000 by a State cap on any one town.¹³⁸ That 1,000 is the number that circulated in town. It is not the number the Borough has to build. The binding number is 87, and most of it was approved before the plan was written. The larger story is the market-rate building on the highways and at the malls: about 2,100 homes approved or under construction, almost none of them inside a single-family neighborhood.

What the Fourth Round requires

State law lets a town that has run out of buildable land ask for an adjustment. The adjustment splits the obligation in two. One part is what the town must actually deliver. The other part, called unmet need, is answered with zoning that allows affordable homes if and when owners choose to redevelop. Paramus has used this adjustment since the first round.¹³⁹

Table 13.1. The Fourth Round numbers for Paramus. As of October 3, 2026.

Source: NJ Department of Community Affairs; Borough of Paramus Fourth Round housing plan.^{138, 140, 141}

The Planning Board adopted the plan in June 2025 and filed it with the court before the State deadline.¹⁴² The plan was challenged. The challenge from Fair Share Housing Center was settled, and a second one, from an owner who wanted to develop a 19-acre vacant lot, was deemed not feasible.¹⁴³ The Borough then adopted an amended plan and the ordinances that carry it out in March 2026, ahead of the State deadline.^143, 144

One step is still open: whether the court has issued its compliance certification. That certification is what protects the Borough from builder's remedy lawsuits through July 2035. The Borough's affordable housing page posts no order, so confirm with the Borough Clerk.¹⁴⁵

The 87 is covered by three projects plus credits carried over from earlier rounds: 30 credits from the apartments at 615 Winters Avenue, 12 from the townhomes at Paramus Road and West Ridgewood Avenue, at least 22 from the Oster site at 10 Route 17, and 23 surplus credits.¹⁴⁶

The repair figure works differently. The State's 254 is a formula estimate. The Borough answered it with a house-by-house survey that found 22 qualifying homes, and the plan commits to fund 19 of them at an average of $25,000 each, with referrals to Bergen County's Home Improvement Program.¹⁴¹ If you own an older home and your household is income-eligible, that program can pay for a roof, a furnace or wiring.

What this means for you
The "1,000 units" headline is not a building program. The number Paramus must deliver is 87, and it is met by projects already approved on Winters Avenue, on Paramus Road and at 10 Route 17.

Where the density goes

Unmet need is a zoning requirement, not a construction requirement. Paramus answers it with two tools that already existed.¹⁴⁷

• The highway zone. On 559 acres along most of Route 17 and Route 4, an owner may build mixed-use housing at up to 24 homes per acre. The plan says this zone could yield "as many as 2,683 affordable housing units over the long term if every property was redeveloped." That will not happen, but the zone is why apartments are replacing parking lots at the malls.
• The nursery plan. Six nursery and farm tracts are zoned for housing that includes affordable homes. The plan expects about 15 more affordable units from the tracts not yet approved.

Paramus did not need to draw new zones for the Fourth Round. The zoning that lets apartments replace parking lots and retail boxes on the highways was already on the books, and the three mall projects below all came through it. Under it, 1,361 apartments at three malls were approved in about two years.

One rule does reach every neighborhood. Since March 2026, any new multifamily development of five or more homes, at six or more homes per acre, must set aside 20% as affordable, whether rental or for sale.¹⁴⁸ Before the change the share for rentals was 15%.¹⁴³

Developers also pay into the Borough's Affordable Housing Trust Fund. It held about $4.4 million in March 2026 and was projected to collect about $12 million over ten years.¹⁴³ The fund is paid by developers, not by the tax levy.

The real pipeline: about 2,100 homes

The affordable housing arithmetic is small. The construction that rides on the same zoning is not.

Table 13.2. Housing projects approved or under construction. As of October 3, 2026.

Source: Paramus Planning Board minutes, Borough of Paramus 2026 tax list and press reports, as footnoted.

For scale, the tax list carries 8,087 residential parcels in Paramus.¹⁵⁶ If every project in the table is built, the Borough adds about one home for every four that exist today, before the 1,039 homes in the Garden State Plaza's later phases. Roughly 1,500 of the 2,096 are rental apartments at the three malls and on Winters Avenue. Another 332 are senior or assisted living, 185 are in buildings that are 100% affordable, and 82 are for-sale townhomes.

Two notes on the table. The Oster site kept changing: it was approved in November 2020 as 104 apartments with 45 affordable, and by June 2026 it was 65 apartments, all affordable.^143, 157 And the Planning Board also approved a separate building of 159 apartments at Paramus Park.¹⁶⁵ It is left out of the total because it may overlap with the 360 homes marketed as Vermella Paramus. If it is additional, the total is 2,255.

Where the new homes concentrate:

• The south end, around the Route 4 and Route 17 interchange: Garden State Plaza (575 now), Bergen Town Center (426), the Oster site (65) and Columbus Way (120).
• From Road and Winters Avenue, by the hospital: 496.
• Pascack Road, at the north end: 332 senior units.
• Paramus Road: 82 townhomes in two communities.

The interior single-family neighborhoods, including Ridge Ranch, receive none of it. What changes there is house size, lot by lot (Section 2).

What this means for you
If your house backs onto Route 17 or Route 4, or sits near From Road, Winters Avenue, Pascack Road or Paramus Road, look up the approved plan nearest you. If you live on an interior street, the Fourth Round plan does not put a project on your block.

The new townhomes

You have seen these going up on empty lots. All three communities are by one builder, Rock Solid Builders of Fair Lawn.^162, 166

Table 13.3. New townhome communities. Sales through October 2, 2026.

Source: Borough of Paramus 2026 tax list; NJMLS closed sales.^156, 167

Three things the listing sites will not show you.

• Victoria's Estates is less than half sold. Of 42 units, 14 had closed, 4 were under contract and 5 were listed at $1,695,000 to $1,875,000.¹⁶⁷
• Gabriel Estates is not new construction. It was built in 2018 as a rental community, and the owner began selling the units one by one in late 2025.¹⁶⁶
• These townhomes moved the borough-wide number. The NJMLS median for condos and townhouses was $770,000 in 2021 and $1,460,000 in 2026 to date. Most of that move is a change in what is being sold, not a rise in the value of the same homes. The 2000-era townhomes off Paramus Road closed at medians of $875,000 to $940,000 over the same period.¹⁶⁷

What this means for you
If you are comparing a $1.8 million new townhome with a $1.8 million new house on a teardown lot, you are choosing between a homeowners' association and a yard. If you are selling an older townhome, the headline "median townhouse price" is not your comp.

The hospital quadrant

The Valley Hospital opened on April 14, 2024 on a campus of about 40 acres off Winters Avenue, between Route 17 and the Garden State Parkway, with 370 beds.¹⁶⁸ The hospital paid for road work as part of its approval, including the widening of Ridgewood Avenue and signal changes.¹⁶⁹

It is not finished growing. In July 2026 the hospital brought the Planning Board a concept plan that would add approximately 100 licensed beds and a new parking structure, with construction expected to start in 2027.^170, 171 The same quadrant now holds the 136 apartments approved on Winters Avenue, the 360 at Vermella on From Road, a hotel expansion and a pending plan from a second health system.¹⁷²

What this means for you
If you live between Midland Avenue and Ridgewood Avenue east of Route 17, the hospital quadrant, not the malls, is the change you will feel in traffic.

Traffic, schools and taxes, two to three years out

Traffic. Route 17, Route 4, From Road, Winters Avenue and Pascack Road carry the new trips. The first 575 Garden State Plaza apartments are scheduled to fill between mid-2028 and early 2029.¹⁵⁰ Plan your commute around that date, not today's.

Schools. The new supply is weighted toward one- and two-bedroom rentals and age-restricted homes. The Winters Avenue building was recorded with 4 three-bedroom apartments out of 136. The Bergen Town Center mix, as reported, has 14 three-bedrooms out of 426. The Planning Board made the Garden State Plaza developer remove closets from dens so they could not become bedrooms.^{155, 149, 151} That limits the enrollment effect but does not remove it. The district's State-approved facilities plan projects enrollment rising from 3,433 in 2025-26 to 3,744 in 2029-30 (Section 10). The 82 for-sale townhomes and the 65 affordable apartments at 10 Route 17 are the ones most likely to add students.

Taxes. Rental buildings on former parking fields are assessed as commercial property. They add value to the tax base without adding single-family lots. The all-affordable Genesis building is different: it is to pay a percentage of its revenue under an agreement with the Borough instead of conventional taxes.^173, 174 How new construction moves your bill is covered in Section 9.

What I tell my buyers: the "1,000 units" headline and the "87 units" headline are both true and both miss the point. The apartments you will actually see are the 2,000 or so already approved at the malls, by the hospital and on Pascack Road, and almost none of them sit inside a single-family neighborhood. Before you buy within a few blocks of Route 4, Route 17, From Road or Paramus Road, ask me to pull the approved site plan nearest the house.

14. Zoning and What You Can Build

Paramus does not cap house size with a floor area ratio. The code says so directly: "there shall be no maximum floor area ratio."¹⁷⁵ Four things limit a house instead: the required yards, a 25% cap on the building's footprint, a 50% cap on everything paved or built (house, driveway, walks, patio, pool surround), and a height limit of 30 to 35 feet. On a standard Paramus lot those rules allow a house more than twice the size of the 1950s house it replaces, with no hearing. That is the zoning half of the teardown story in Section 2.

The rules in one table

The single-family zones are named for their minimum lot width in feet. Most of the Borough is R-75 (5,198 parcels) or R-100 (1,971).¹⁷⁶

Table 14.1. Single-family zoning limits. As of October 3, 2026.

Source: Borough of Paramus Code, Chapter 429, and the Borough's residential zoning handout.^177, 178 All zones allow two and a half stories under a pitched roof; a flat roof is limited to 20 feet and two stories. A corner lot has two front yards, which shrinks what fits on it. Every new house needs an enclosed garage. An older lot that is smaller than today's minimum can still be built on without a variance.¹⁷⁵

What that allows on a typical lot

The most common lot in Paramus is 75 by 125 feet in R-75 (9,375 sf).¹⁷⁶ The 25% cap allows a 2,344 sf footprint. Two full floors on that footprint is about 4,690 sf, garage included, before the attic half story or the basement.

Source: Table 14.1 arithmetic; Borough of Paramus 2026 tax list.¹⁷⁶

Builders are using most of what the code allows, and they are doing it without a hearing. Nothing adopted since 2017, and nothing on the Council's or Planning Board's published agendas, reduces the size of house allowed on a single-family lot.^179, 180

What this means for you
If you own a 1950s house in R-75, the right to build on your lot is worth more than the house. If you are buying next to one, assume it will be replaced by a house about twice its size.

The limit owners actually hit is the pool, not the house

A new house at full footprint, plus a driveway and front walk, already uses about 3,300 of the 4,688 sf of paved and built surface allowed on a 75 by 125 lot. That leaves about 1,400 sf for a patio, pool coping and equipment pad. A second story on an older cape, or a modest rear addition, usually fits with room to spare.¹⁷⁸

When a plan exceeds a limit, the owner asks the Board of Adjustment for a variance at a public hearing. The Board's record shows how rarely a house needs one. Of 24 meetings scheduled from September 2025 through September 2026, eight were canceled for lack of business, in a town where the State counted 52 houses demolished in 2024.^181, 182 Eighteen single-family applications were heard. None asked for extra height, and none asked for a bigger footprint for the house itself. They were for what goes around the house: additions into a yard, pools and patios, fences on corner lots, driveways. The one denial was a carport two feet from a neighbor's line.¹⁸¹

What I tell my buyers: in Paramus the house is rarely the zoning problem. The pool is. Before you make an offer on new construction, I ask the builder for the zoning table on the approved plot plan and read two lines: building coverage and impervious coverage. If the second one says 47% or 48%, the patio and pool you are picturing means a hearing at the Board of Adjustment, and I would rather you know that before closing than after.

What a teardown involves, and what a neighbor can expect

• Demolition takes a construction permit and a $3,000 security deposit. There is no review, no required notice to neighbors and no waiting period, except on the Borough's short list of designated historic properties, where the Board can delay a demolition up to six months.^183, 184
• Soil. Digging a full basement usually moves more than 400 cubic yards, which requires a public hearing at the Planning Board. Twelve single-family lots had one between October 2025 and October 2026.^185, 186 For a neighbor, this is the only public hearing a standard teardown gets, and the place to ask about truck routes, retaining walls and where the roof water goes.
• Work hours. Contractors may work in a residential zone only between 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.¹⁸⁷
• Trees. Borough street trees are protected: removing one takes a permit and fees.¹⁸⁸ Trees on a private developed lot are lightly regulated, apart from required buffers and wetlands. The Borough has also adopted a tree removal ordinance under its State stormwater permit, so call the Shade Tree office (201-265-2100 ext. 4120) before taking down any tree.¹⁸⁹

The State's permit counts show the pace: 25 houses demolished in 2015, 57 in 2023 and 52 in 2024, with new one- and two-family permits running at about the same number each year.¹⁸² Paramus is replacing houses, not adding them.

Why the teardowns are in R-75

R-75 holds 68% of the Borough's single-family houses, 84% of those built since 2015 and 109 of the 116 teardown pairs in Section 2.^176, 190 The lot allows roughly two and a half times the house that stands on it, and a builder can count on that size without a hearing. In R-100 the existing houses are larger and cost more to buy, so the gain is thinner.

What this means for you
If you are selling an original house, builders are part of your buyer pool, and they pay for frontage, a rectangular shape and a lot of 9,375 sf or more. A corner lot is worth less to them than its area suggests. If you are buying a new house, check how much of the 50% allowance is left before you plan a pool.

Second units and in-law suites

Paramus single-family zoning does not allow an accessory dwelling unit. A second unit with its own kitchen is permitted only in the small two-family zone (R-2F); anywhere else it needs a use variance, the hardest kind to win, requiring five of seven Board votes.^{175, 191, 192} If your plan depends on rent from a basement or an in-law apartment, it does not work here. Ask the Zoning Officer (201-265-2100 ext. 2237) how the Borough treats a second kitchen for extended family.

Affordable housing does not change these rules

The Borough's Fourth Round housing plan places new density on the highway corridors and on named commercial sites, not in the single-family zones.¹⁹³ The owners who should read it are those whose lot backs onto Route 17 or Route 4 or sits near one of the named sites. Section 13 covers each project.

15. Inspection Issues by Build Era

The key points

• Paramus is a 1950s town. Half of the homes standing today went up before 1960, and four in ten went up in the 1950s alone.¹⁹⁴
• The decade a house was built predicts what an inspector finds more closely than its price does.
• Three extra checks answer what a general inspection cannot: a tank sweep, a sewer camera and an electrician's look at the panel. Together they cost under $1,000.
• The Borough requires a certificate before a home is sold, and every open permit must be closed first.^195, 196 This is the rule that delays closings.
• New houses need an inspection too. Since 2015, 528 single-family houses have been built in Paramus, most of them on lots where an older house came down.¹⁹⁴

A dagger (†) marks a figure or statement that rests on a secondary source or is not confirmed against the primary document.

When Paramus homes were built

Table 15.1. Paramus homes by build era.

Source: Borough of Paramus tax list.¹⁹⁴ The 1950s are 39.5% of the total, and the median year built is 1960. The tax list shows the year of the house standing now, so a teardown lot shows the new house, not the old one.

What this means for you
If you are buying an original Paramus house, you are almost certainly buying a 1950s or 1960s house, and those two rows of the next table are the ones to read twice. If you are buying new, read the last row and the new-construction list below.

What to expect by build era

Table 15.2. Typical findings and the inspections to order, by build era.

A few of these need a word of explanation:

• Old wiring and panels. Many insurers ask for knob-and-tube wiring to be replaced before they will issue a policy, and they routinely require replacement of Federal Pacific and Zinsco panels. A 60-amp or 100-amp service cannot carry an EV charger, a heat pump or an induction range without an upgrade.
• Aluminum wiring. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reports that homes built before 1972 and wired with aluminum are "55 times more likely" to have connections reach fire-hazard conditions than copper-wired homes.¹⁹⁷ An electrician can tell in a few minutes at the panel.
• Asbestos. Assume nine-inch floor tile in a 1950s basement contains it until tested.¹⁹⁸ Left intact, it is generally managed in place. Disturbing it means licensed abatement.
• Lead paint. For any home built before 1978, the seller must disclose known lead paint and give the buyer 10 days to test, unless the buyer waives that in writing.¹⁹⁹ That covers about three of every four Paramus homes.
• Radiant heat in the slab. Some 1950s ranches and capes were heated by tubing cast into the concrete floor. When it leaks, the repair is a new heating system, not a patch.
• Radon. The State rates Paramus as low radon potential. Of 3,921 Paramus homes tested, 108, or 3 percent, were at or above the EPA action level.²⁰⁰† A test adds roughly $100 to $150 to an inspection, and a mitigation system runs $1,200 to $2,000. A seller who has tested must give the buyer the results when the contract is signed.²⁰¹

Oil tanks

Many early Paramus houses were built with oil heat and converted to gas later, often with the tank left in the ground.

• Check for one. A tank sweep with a metal detector or ground-penetrating radar costs a few hundred dollars.
• An abandoned tank is still a question. New Jersey allows a tank to be abandoned in place, but lenders and insurers increasingly do not accept it. Removal needs a permit from the Building Department.
• A leak must be reported to the State right away at 877-WARN-DEP.²⁰²
• Plan to pay out of pocket. A clean removal runs roughly $1,500 to $3,000. Where soil has to be cleaned up, the cost is $10,000 to $50,000 or more. The State's grant fund holds applications until money is available, with an estimated wait of "3.5 years from the date of receipt."²⁰³

The sewer line

Cast-iron drain pipe has a working life usually put at 75 to 100 years. A house built in 1951 is 75 this year. A sewer camera inspection costs a few hundred dollars and is the only way to see the line from the house to the street. In a house with no basement, the plumbing runs under or through the slab, so the camera matters more.

What I tell my buyers: in Paramus the question is rarely whether the house has a 1950s problem. It is which ones have already been fixed. A tank sweep, a sewer camera and an electrician's look at the panel cost under $1,000 together, and they answer the three questions the general inspection cannot. On a new build I ask for the final CO and the warranty certificate before I ask about the countertops.

Flood: past claims and how to check an address

About 782 acres of Paramus, 11.6% of its land, sit in FEMA's mapped flood zone.²⁰⁴ Much of that is county parkland along the Saddle River, but not all of it.

Table 15.3. Flood insurance claims in ZIP 07652, by year of loss.

Source: FEMA flood insurance claims data.²⁰⁵ FEMA does not tie claims to streets.

Ida itself produced 29 of the 2021 claims and $2,260,519 in payments. Ten of those 29 claims, carrying $1,096,348 of the total, were on homes outside the mapped flood zone.²⁰⁵

How to check an address:

• Look at the FEMA flood map at msc.fema.gov, on the NJDEP flood mapper, or at the Building Department, 1 Jockish Square.
• Know which parts of town to check first. The Borough's drainage rules point to the strip west of Paramus Road down to the Saddle River (which includes the Dunkerhook area), the Sprout Brook corridor through the middle of town between Midland Avenue and Ridgewood Avenue, and the blocks north of Midland Avenue toward Green Valley Road and Roosevelt Boulevard.²⁰⁶
• Read the seller's flood disclosure. Since March 20, 2024, every New Jersey seller, including one selling "as is," must state whether the property is in a flood zone, whether it has flooded and whether flood claims have been filed.²⁰⁷ Ask for it before you bid.
• Ask before you plan to rebuild. State rules adopted in July 2023 raised the required elevation for new and substantially improved buildings in river flood areas.²⁰⁸ Near the Saddle River or Sprout Brook, that changes the foundation and the cost.

What this means for you
In Ida, about a third of the Paramus flood claims and nearly half of the dollars came from houses the FEMA map does not put in the flood zone. Lenders require flood insurance only inside the mapped zone. If the house is in one of the areas above, or near any stream, get a flood insurance quote during attorney review whether or not the lender asks for one. Outside the mapped zone it is usually inexpensive.

What Paramus requires at resale

Paramus requires an application for a Certificate of Compliance before a home is sold or rented.¹⁹⁵ The fee is $100.²⁰⁹ The Borough states that "occupancy without a Certificate is a violation of the Uniform Construction Code and is subject to a penalty of up to $2000."²¹⁰

The inspector checks smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, the house number, the Borough-issued garbage and recycling containers, the fence around any pool, and, if the house has a generator, solar panels or battery storage, a printed warning label within 18 inches of both the main electrical panel and the electric meter. A handwritten label does not pass.^196, 211 Hardwired alarms from the original construction may not be swapped for battery units.

A fire extinguisher is no longer required at sale. The State dropped that rule on February 3, 2025, and the Borough's guideline sheet calls one recommended.^211, 196 It costs about $25† and belongs within 10 feet of the kitchen anyway.

Inspections are held Monday through Friday, 9:00 am to 12:00 pm, and are scheduled after the Borough receives the application and payment. All open construction permits must be closed at least one week before scheduling.^210, 196 Building Department: 201-265-2100, ext. 2230.

What this means for you
The open-permit rule is the one that delays closings. A 1950s house often has a permit that was opened and never closed, or work done with no permit at all. Sellers: pull your permit history at the Building Department before you list. Buyers: ask for the Borough's certificate and the permit history, and treat finished space with no permit as a cost.

New-construction checks

Section 2 covers the economics of new construction, and Section 9 covers the added tax bills that follow completion. What to check on the house itself:

• The certificate of occupancy. Ask for the final Certificate of Occupancy from the Paramus Building Department, not a temporary one, and for confirmation that every permit is closed.
• The warranty. New Jersey requires the builder to be registered with the State and to enroll the home in a warranty plan: one year on workmanship and materials, two years on mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, ten years on major structural defects. The warranty runs with the house. Ask for the certificate at contract.²¹²†
• Grading and drainage. A larger house on a 1950s lot covers more of the ground than the house it replaced. Look at where the roof leaders discharge and how the lot is graded toward the neighbors.
• The punch list. Write it before closing and attach it to the contract with a completion date and a holdback.
• Stucco. Where stucco or synthetic stucco is used, ask a certified inspector for a moisture survey.

Two more things to look up

• The water service line. The water company's notice, posted by the Borough, states: "If lead is found, Veolia will remove it AT NO COST TO THE HOMEOWNER."²¹³ Look up the address in Veolia's online service line inventory before you offer. If the line is listed as lead, galvanized or unknown, call 1-800-422-5987.
• Nearby cleanup sites. The State lists 51 known contaminated sites in Paramus, almost all of them along Route 17 and Route 4.²¹⁴ A listing is a record that a cleanup is being supervised, not a finding that neighboring homes are affected. Look up the nearest site on NJDEP DataMiner before the inspection period ends.

† Figures marked with a dagger are best-effort research, so verify them with the issuing office (the Borough of Paramus, the school district, the county, the state or the utility) before making judgment calls or decisions on them.

16. Commute

The key points

• Paramus has no train station. No rail line crosses the Borough.
• The bus is the in-town way to Manhattan. NJ Transit routes on Route 4, on Route 17 and at the malls run to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the George Washington Bridge Bus Station.²¹⁵
• Rail means a drive of three to six miles to a station in a neighboring town, where the parking rules were written for that town's residents. A Paramus resident pays from $125 a year to $125 a month, depending on the station.^216, 217
• Most people drive. Route 4, Route 17 and the Garden State Parkway all cross Paramus. For a daily drive to an office below 60th Street, the tolls alone come to about $5,000 a year.^218, 219

A dagger (†) marks a figure that comes from a secondary source, such as a news report or a published schedule; confirm it with the agency before you rely on it.

How Paramus gets to work

The average trip to work for a Paramus worker is 30.8 minutes, about the same as New Jersey's 30.5 and below the New York metro area's 35.6.²²⁰ Of 12,076 workers, 62.6% drove alone, 6.0% carpooled, 7.9% used public transportation and 21.7% worked from home.²²¹

What this means for you
More than one Paramus worker in five works from home and fewer than one in twelve rides transit. If you commute to Manhattan every day you are in a minority here. The transit is workable, but you have to plan it from the specific house.

Rail: eight stations nearby, none in town

Eight stations ring Paramus on three NJ Transit lines. Every one of them goes to Hoboken, with a change at Secaucus Junction for New York Penn Station. None offers a one-seat ride to Manhattan.²²²

Table 16.1. Nearby rail stations and parking for a Paramus (non-resident) commuter, 2026.

Drives are measured from Paramus Borough Hall, in the center of town, with no traffic.²³⁰ The Broadway lot is across the street in Elmwood Park and is managed by that borough; call 201-796-1457 to confirm the price and whether permits are available.

On the schedule, Radburn has the most service of the stations closest to Paramus. Eight trains leave for Hoboken between 6:00 and 8:59 am on weekdays.†²³¹ The fast train reaches Hoboken in 31 minutes and New York Penn Station in about 39 to 40 minutes.^229, 232 The Pascack Valley stations (New Bridge Landing, River Edge, Oradell) have about two trains an hour in the morning peak, and the trip to Penn Station from River Edge or New Bridge Landing is roughly 45 to 55 minutes.²³³

What this means for you
A Paramus resident has four real choices. Broadway at $125 a year is the cheapest by a wide margin, if you can get one of 80 permits. New Bridge Landing has no residency question at all ($5 a day or $480 a year). Glen Rock-Boro Hall is $100 a month. Radburn, the station with the most trains, is $125 a month, or $1,500 a year, and Fair Lawn no longer sells daily permits. River Edge and Oradell are closed to you. Add $125 to $1,500 a year for parking to the rail fare when you compare a Paramus house with one in a station town.

Bus

NJ Transit runs two groups of Manhattan routes through Paramus. One goes to the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42nd Street. The other goes to the George Washington Bridge Bus Station at 178th Street, for the A train and the 1.

Table 16.2. NJ Transit bus routes from Paramus to New York.

How often and how long, from published schedules:†

• 163: trips every 20 to 40 minutes, first weekday trip 6:00 am, last 1:30 am. From Paramus Road north of Century Road to Port Authority is 56 minutes.^234, 230
• 168: on weekday mornings the New York-bound service is the 168T Turnpike Express, from 6:10 am.²³⁶
• 171 and 175: from Route 4 at Spring Valley Road to the GWB Bus Station is 38 minutes, about every 30 minutes with both routes.²³⁰
• ShortLine (Coach USA): stops on Route 17 at Century Road, with scheduled running times of 25 to 32 minutes to Port Authority.²³⁷

Sunday service is lighter. Most Paramus retail is closed on Sunday under Bergen County's blue laws, and nine of the 22 NJ Transit routes that touch Paramus do not run at all.^215, 238

Park-and-ride. There is one free commuter lot in town, at Garden State Parkway Interchange 165. It has 60 spaces† and is open 4 am to 2 am Monday to Friday except holidays, with a two-hour limit at other times.^239, 240 Just north of the Paramus line, the Ridgewood Route 17 Park and Ride has 367 spaces, with service on the 163, the 164 and ShortLine to Port Authority. It needs a Village of Ridgewood permit, reported at about $975 for 2026.†^229, 240 Garden State Plaza, Bergen Town Center, Paramus Park and Bergen Community College are bus stops, not park-and-rides. Ask each owner before you leave a car there all day.

What this means for you
The Route 17 express run is the fastest scheduled way out of Paramus, about half an hour to 42nd Street on paper against roughly an hour on the 163. The trade is that the stops are on the highway and you need a way to reach them. A house within walking distance of a Route 4 or Route 17 stop, or of one of the malls, has a real commuting advantage over one in the middle of a residential section, and listings do not say so.

Driving

Paramus sits at the crossing of Route 4 and Route 17, with the Garden State Parkway running through the east side of town. Route 4 east leads to the George Washington Bridge, about 10 miles and about 15 minutes from Borough Hall with no traffic.† Route 17 south to Route 3 leads to the Lincoln Tunnel, 16.8 miles and about 26 minutes.†²³⁰ Weekday peak times are longer and vary widely from day to day. The Parkway has five Paramus exits (160, 161, 163, 165 and 166),† but no single one gives full access in both directions, which matters when you test the drive from a specific house.²⁴¹

Table 16.3. Tolls for a passenger car into Manhattan, 2026.

Bridge and tunnel tolls are collected entering New York only. A Paramus driver going to an office below 60th Street through the Lincoln Tunnel at peak pays $16.79 plus $9.00 less the $3.00 credit: $22.79 a day before parking, or about $5,000 over 220 working days. By the bridge and down into the zone, with no credit, it is $25.79 a day.

These costs rise every year. NJ Transit fares go up 3 percent each July 1, and Parkway and Port Authority tolls rise each January.^243, 242 The congestion toll is set to rise to $12 in 2028 and $15 in 2031.²¹⁹

What this means for you
Driving is the default in Paramus, and for a job in New Jersey or Rockland it is a real advantage: three highways and no rail schedule to keep. For a daily Midtown job, budget about $5,000 a year in tolls and a 3 percent annual increase on whichever fare or toll you use.

Fares and timetables depend on the exact stop and train. Before you bid on a house, price and time your own trip on njtransit.com, from the stop you would use, for a weekday morning.

What I tell my buyers: Paramus does not have a train, and I say that in the first conversation, not the last. What it has is the Route 17 and Route 4 buses, three highways, and eight stations within six miles that each set their own rules for outsiders. Before you fall for a house, stand at the bus stop you would use at 7 am on a Tuesday, or drive to Radburn or New Bridge Landing and time it. The commute from a house near Route 17 and the commute from a house two miles east of it are different commutes.

† Figures marked with a dagger are best-effort research, so verify them with the issuing office (the Borough of Paramus, the school district, the county, the state or the utility) before making judgment calls or decisions on them.

17. Neighborhood Profiles

The key points

• Paramus has no official neighborhood map. Names such as Ridge Ranch, Arcola, Dunkerhook and "the east side" are not fixed attributes of an address, so this section uses areas with stated road boundaries.²⁴⁴
• The age of the house matters more than the area. In 2025 and 2026 older houses sold at a median of $958,000 to $1,070,000 in each of the six areas, and new houses at $2,150,000 to $2,300,000 wherever there were enough sales to report.²⁴⁵
• Rebuilding is heaviest in the Ridge Ranch area. It holds 24 percent of the Borough's single-family houses and 37 percent of those built in 2015 or later.²⁴⁶
• Assessments track sale prices evenly. The 2026 assessment runs 86 to 90 percent of the 2025 to 2026 sale price in each of the six areas.^246, 245
• School assignment goes by address, not by area name. Confirm it with the district before you sign a contract.²⁴⁷

How the areas are drawn

The first six areas follow the Borough's six census tracts, which are printed on every parcel in the tax list, and the seventh, Ridge Ranch, follows the roads residents use for it.^244, 246 Two roads do most of the dividing. Route 17 splits the Borough west from east, and Midland Avenue, Century Road and East Ridgewood Avenue split it south to north. The Garden State Parkway and Route 4 matter for noise and access (Sections 12 and 16) but are not dividing lines here. The bounding roads given for each area are approximate. Read each as "roughly bounded by". The Ridge Ranch area overlaps three of the six areas, so its houses are counted in those rows as well.

The areas side by side

Table 17.1. The single-family houses in each area, 2026 tax list.²⁴⁶

Table 17.2. What sold in each area, January 1, 2025 through October 2, 2026.²⁴⁵

Of the 380 Borough sales, 369 are placed in one of the six areas. The fewer the sales in a row, the less weight its median can carry; South of Century Road, with 24, has the fewest.

Table 17.3. Teardown purchases and new-home sales in each area, January 2020 through June 2026.²⁴⁸

A "teardown purchase" is defined in Section 2. A "new-home sale" is a sale at $1 million or more of a house built in 2019 or later that is not itself a teardown purchase. Purchases made in late 2025 and 2026 are undercounted because the replacement house is not yet on the tax list.

What the tables say together

The median in each area is set by the mix of old and new houses, not by the address. In 2025 and 2026 the older houses sold for nearly the same median in five of the six areas: $958,000 in the southeast, $977,500 in the east, $993,000 in the northwest, $990,350 in the northeast and $970,000 south of Century Road. The area between Century Road and Midland Avenue was a step higher at $1,070,000. New construction sold between $2,150,000 and $2,300,000 wherever there were enough sales to report.²⁴⁵ The east area's $1,300,000 median is the highest in Table 17.2 because one sale in three there was a new house, not because its older houses cost more.

Assessments track sale prices evenly across town. The 2026 assessment runs 86 to 90 percent of the 2025 to 2026 sale price in each of the six areas.^246, 245 That is what annual reassessment (Section 9) is supposed to produce, and it means no part of Paramus is carrying a hidden tax adjustment relative to another.

What this means for you
Do not pay a premium for an area or a name. Price the house against its own type, old or new, anywhere in the Borough.

The six areas

Southeast (421.01). Farview Avenue on the west, Haase Avenue and Spring Valley Road on the north, Century Road and Howland Avenue on the south, and the Borough's eastern line at River Edge and Oradell. Streets include Terhune Avenue, Burlington Road, Lawrence Drive and Hickory Avenue. It has the oldest and smallest single-family houses in the Borough (median year built 1953, median living area 2,057 square feet) and the only R-50 zoning in town: 167 parcels on 50-foot frontages. Its median 2026 assessment, $756,700, is the lowest of the six. The median sale closed at 98.8 percent of asking in 29 days.^246, 245

East, Farview Avenue to the Oradell line (421.02). Farview Avenue on the west, East Ridgewood Avenue on the north, Haase Avenue and then Spring Valley Road on the south and southeast, and the Borough's eastern line. East Midland Avenue runs through the middle. Streets include McKinley Boulevard, Concord Drive, Bullard Avenue and Seton Hall Drive. It is the largest single-family area (1,453 parcels), 82 percent R-75. It has the highest count and share of houses built in 2015 or later (130, or 8.9 percent) and leads in teardown purchases (53) and new-home sales (61) since 2020.^246, 248

Northwest (423.01). Route 17 on the east, West Midland Avenue on the south, and the Borough's western and northern lines. Streets include Roosevelt Boulevard, Birchwood Road, Green Valley Road and West Ridgewood Avenue. Thirty-six percent of its houses are in R-100, the highest large-lot share of the six, and the median lot is 0.273 acres. Its median 2026 assessment, $849,800, is the highest of the six. It has 20 teardown purchases since 2020, fewer than any area but South of Century Road, and its new-home median of $1,557,500 is the lowest of the areas with enough sales to report.^246, 248

Northeast (423.02). Route 17 on the west, East Midland Avenue and then East Ridgewood Avenue on the south, and the Borough's northern and eastern lines. Streets include Pascack Road, Oradell Avenue, Arbor Road and Georgian Drive. Zoning is 57 percent R-75, 35 percent R-100 and 8 percent RML (120 houses). Only 5.2 percent of houses date from 2015 or later, the second-lowest share, yet 43 teardown purchases have closed here since 2020, the second-highest count, at the highest median price paid ($710,000). Older houses here sold at a median of 104.2 percent of asking, the highest figure in the Borough.^{246, 245, 248}

Century Road to Midland Avenue (424). Century Road on the south, Midland Avenue on the north, Farview Avenue on the east, and the Borough's western line at the Saddle River. Route 17 and the Garden State Parkway both run through it. Streets include Lockwood Drive, Wedgewood Drive and Valley View Avenue east of Route 17, and Morningside Road, Dunkerhook Road and part of Paramus Road west of it. Median year built is 1955, the second oldest of the six. Older houses here sold at a median of $1,070,000, about $80,000 to $110,000 above the other areas, and there have been 38 teardown purchases since 2020.^{246, 245, 248}

South of Century Road (425). Century Road and Howland Avenue on the north and the Borough's southern line, the full width of the Borough. Route 4, Route 17 and the Garden State Parkway all cross it. Streets include Arcola Avenue, Brookfield Avenue, Knollwood Drive and Alpine Drive. It holds every condominium and townhouse parcel on the Borough tax list (238) and every two-family parcel (112). It has the fewest single-family parcels (948), the lowest share built since 2015 (3.8 percent) and the fewest teardown purchases (13 since 2020). The median single-family sale closed at 99.3 percent of asking in 35 days.^{246, 245, 248}

What this means for you
If you want a townhouse or a two-family, most of the supply is south of Century Road. Check the specific street there against the highway and retail traffic in Section 12 and the pipeline in Section 13. About 1,190 of the roughly 2,100 units approved or under way are at the Route 4 and Route 17 interchange at the south end of the Borough.

The Ridge Ranch area

Residents use "Ridge Ranch" for the area bounded by Midland Avenue on the north, Forest Avenue on the east, Century Road on the south and Route 17 on the west. Century Road ends at Spring Valley Road, so the southeast corner follows Spring Valley Road up to Forest Avenue. The area contains 1,857 single-family parcels, 24 percent of the Borough's single-family houses, and 97.5 percent of them are zoned R-75.²⁴⁶ The median lot is 0.230 acres, against 0.267 acres in the rest of Paramus.

This is where new construction is most concentrated:

• New houses. The area holds 37 percent of the Borough's houses built in 2015 or later (198 of 528). The share is higher east of Farview Avenue (13.0 percent) than west of it (7.7 percent). One house in nine in the area is now less than twelve years old.²⁴⁶
• Teardowns. Eighty of the Borough's 206 teardown purchases since 2020 (39 percent) and 93 of its 208 new-home sales (45 percent) are inside this boundary.²⁴⁸
• Prices paid by builders. The median a builder paid for the old house rose from $522,100 in 2020 to $802,500 in 2024. The median finished house rose from $1,390,000 in 2020 to $2,200,000 in 2025.²⁴⁸
• Old and new sell differently. The 2025 to 2026 median of $1,255,000 is a blend. Houses built in 2019 or later sold at a median of $2,262,500, at 98.2 percent of asking, in 40.5 days. Older houses sold at a median of $999,999, at 100.0 percent of asking, in 21.5 days, in line with the rest of the Borough.²⁴⁵

What this means for you
If you own an original house on a 75-foot lot in this area, the floor under your price is what a builder will pay for the lot, and that floor rose about 54 percent in four years. If you are buying one to live in, you are competing with that same builder. If you are buying one of the new houses, there were 21 comparable new-home sales inside this boundary in 2025 alone. Section 2 shows how to use them, and Section 14 covers what the R-75 zone lets a builder put up.

Elementary school assignment

Paramus Public Schools operates five elementary schools through grade 4 (Memorial, Midland, Parkway, Ridge Ranch and Stony Lane), two grade 5 to 8 middle schools (East Brook and West Brook) and Paramus High School (Section 10).²⁴⁷ The district assigns schools one address at a time through the "Find My School" lookup on its registration page, so this report does not assign streets or areas to schools. For a specific address, use the lookup or call the district's central registration office (201-261-7800).²⁴⁷

What this means for you
Confirm the assigned elementary and middle school for a specific address with the district in writing before you sign a contract. Do not rely on the listing, on a consumer website's boundary map, or on the name of the area.

What I tell my buyers: in Paramus the name of the area tells you less than the year the house was built. An original 1950s house sold for about $1 million in 2025 and 2026 almost everywhere in town, and a new one for about $2.2 million almost everywhere in town. So I price the house against its own kind first, and then I look at the block: how many lots on it have already been rebuilt, and how many are likely to be.

18. Demographics, Ownership and Equity

The key points

• Paramus is a town of owners. 82.6 percent of occupied homes are owner-occupied, against 65.3 percent in Bergen County.²⁴⁹
• Owners stay a long time. Two-thirds have been in the house since before 2010, and about a quarter since 1989 or earlier.²⁵⁰
• Two of every five owners have no mortgage. The share is 41.1 percent, against 38.4 percent countywide.²⁵¹
• A paid-off house costs less to keep here than in the county. A mortgaged one costs more. Median monthly cost is $1,353 without a mortgage and $3,794 with one.²⁵²
• The population is stable. It was 26,342 in 2010, 26,698 in 2020 and an estimated 26,723 in July 2025.^{253, 254, 255}

Paramus and Bergen County side by side

Table 18.1. Paramus and Bergen County, main measures.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau. Most of these figures come from a sample survey, so treat small differences between the two columns as ties.

Population and households

Paramus grew 2.4 percent in the 2000s, from 25,737 residents to 26,342, and 1.4 percent in the 2010s, and it has been essentially flat since.^{264, 253, 254} The Borough has 8,813 housing units, and six of every seven are detached single-family houses.²⁶⁰ Half of the housing (50.1 percent) was built in the 1950s and 1960s, which is why Section 15 spends time on what to check in a house of that age.²⁶⁵

More than one resident in four (26.2 percent) is 65 or older.²⁶⁶ Median household income is $144,349, against $124,884 in the county.²⁶²

What this means for you
Paramus is not shrinking. The number of housing units is close to fixed, the population is stable, and demand for houses is not being driven by a growing or a falling head count.

Ownership and how long owners stay

Paramus's owner-occupancy rate is 17 points above the county's.²⁴⁹ Owners also stay longer than owners elsewhere in the county.

Table 18.2. When current owners moved in, share of owner households.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau.²⁵⁰

Two-thirds of Paramus's owners have been in their house for more than fifteen years, ten points above the county. The largest single group, 24.7 percent, arrived in 1989 or earlier. These owners bought at a small fraction of today's prices. Even owners who bought from 2010 to 2014 did so when the single-family median was between $509,000 and $550,000 (Section 5).

The survey figures understate recent arrivals. The Borough tax list, which records every deed, gives a second reading. Among the 6,630 single-family parcels with a recorded sale date, the median time since the last sale is 11.4 years, and close to one house in four (23.7 percent) has had a deed recorded since the start of 2021.²⁶⁷ The tax list counts every recorded deed, including transfers within a family, transfers into a trust, and a builder's purchase of a house it will tear down, none of which is a new household moving in. Reading the two sources together, somewhere between 45 and 67 percent of single-family houses have had the same owner since before 2010.

What I tell my buyers: the seller across the table from you has, more often than not, owned the house for twenty or thirty years, owes little or nothing on it, and may already have a builder's number in hand. That seller is not under pressure to accept anything. So I do not write offers that assume the seller needs us. I find out what the lot is worth to a builder first, because that is the price we actually have to beat.

Equity: who owes nothing

The Census does not measure equity. The closest public measure is whether an owner has any mortgage at all. In Paramus, 2,875 of 6,992 owner households (41.1 percent) own free and clear, a higher share than the county (38.4 percent) or the state (36.1 percent).²⁵¹ That fits the table above: a quarter of owners have been in the house since before 1990, long enough to have paid off a 30-year loan. Many of the other three in five also hold large equity, because they bought years ago at lower prices.

Owners often underestimate what they hold. The median value owners reported to the Census is $813,900.²⁶³ The 2026 year-to-date median single-family sale price in Section 3 is $1,150,000. Owners who have not sold recently anchor on older prices.

What this means for you
As a buyer, many of the sellers you meet owe nothing on the house and are choosing when to sell, not being forced to. As a long-time owner, the equity is real but it is only reachable by selling or borrowing. Do not rely on your own sense of what the house is worth. Ask for closed sales of houses like yours from the last six months.

What it costs to carry a house

The cost of owning without a mortgage is mostly property tax, insurance and utilities, and Paramus's median is $145 a month below the county's.²⁵² That is the Borough's low tax rate at work, and Section 9 gives the actual median tax bill.

The Census also counts how many owners spend a large share of income on housing.

Table 18.3. Owners whose monthly housing costs take a large share of household income.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau.²⁶⁸

The two halves of the table point in opposite directions. Among owners without a mortgage, only 3.1 percent pay half or more of their income in housing costs, against 11.2 percent countywide. Low property taxes are why a paid-off house in Paramus is affordable to keep on a retirement income. Owners with a mortgage are stretched further than the county's: 43.1 percent pay 30 percent or more of income, against 34.7 percent, and one in five pays half or more. Those are the recent buyers, at recent prices. The Borough's median income is only 16 percent above the county's, while its home values are 31 percent above.

What this means for you
If you are buying with a mortgage, plan the budget on the full carrying cost in Section 9 and Section 19, not on the low tax bill alone. The low taxes help most once the loan is gone.

Renters and investor ownership

Paramus has 1,472 renter households, 17.4 percent of occupied homes.²⁴⁹ Most of them live in building types other than single-family houses.

For single-family houses, the tax list shows where the tax bill is mailed. For 885 of the 7,636 single-family parcels (11.6 percent), the bill goes to an address other than the property, and for 503 of those the other address is also in Paramus.²⁶⁷

What this means for you
Investor ownership of single-family houses in Paramus is small by either measure. The buyer you compete with for an older house is far more likely to be a builder than a landlord.

Getting to work

Of Paramus workers, 62.6 percent drive alone, 21.7 percent work from home (up from 6.9 percent in the 2015 to 2019 survey), 7.9 percent use public transportation and 6.0 percent carpool, and the average trip for those who travel is 30.8 minutes.^{269, 270, 271} Paramus has no train station, so if you commute to Manhattan every day, read Section 16 before you choose a house here.

19. Cost of Living Beyond the Mortgage

The key points

• Water comes from a private company, not the Borough. Veolia's rates are set by the State. They rose on August 1, 2026 by about $1.95 a month (3.21%) for a household using 5,000 gallons a month.²⁷²
• A bill for PFAS treatment is still ahead. Veolia asked for a surcharge to pay for treatment at the plant that serves Paramus. The State put the request off, so owners are not paying it yet.²⁷²
• Most households get no sewer bill and no garbage bill. Both are paid through the tax rate.^273, 274
• Veolia replaces lead water service lines at no cost to the homeowner.²⁷⁵
• Budget roughly $3,000 to $4,000 a year for utilities and Borough charges, before insurance and before gas delivery.

What an owner pays each year

Table 19.1 uses a four-bedroom house, a family of four and a standard 5/8" water meter.

Table 19.1. Recurring costs beyond mortgage and property tax.

Water at 5,000 gallons a month, electric, gas supply and the pool add up to $3,818 a year. That total leaves out gas delivery and insurance, the two largest missing lines. A four-bedroom house with central air will also use more than 650 kWh in summer.†

What this means for you
Plan on roughly $3,000 to $4,000 a year for utilities and Borough charges, then add insurance and gas delivery from quotes for the specific house.

Water: Veolia

Paramus does not own its water system. Water is supplied by Veolia Water New Jersey, a private company whose rates are set by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, not by the Borough Council. The system that serves Paramus serves about 807,000 people.²⁸⁵

You pay a fixed monthly charge based on meter size, a charge for each thousand gallons used, and State-approved surcharges.²⁷⁶ In its latest rate case Veolia asked for $38.6 million more in revenue. The State approved $17.5 million, less than half, effective August 1, 2026.²⁷² Your first bill dated after August 1, 2026 shows the new charges.

PFAS. New Jersey's limits are 14 parts per trillion for PFOA and 13 for PFOS.²⁸⁶ The federal rule sets 4 parts per trillion for each, with compliance due in 2029. EPA has said it would keep those limits and move the deadline to 2031, but that extension is a proposal, not a final rule.²⁸⁷ To see the measured levels in your water, read Veolia's latest Consumer Confidence Report at mywater.veolia.us and compare its PFOA and PFOS averages with those limits.

The plant that treats the water Paramus drinks will need PFAS treatment. Veolia asked the State for a surcharge to pay for it, and the State did not grant it because the cost figures were not yet available. A later request is expected.²⁷² When the cost is set, it will arrive as a new line on your bill.

Lead service lines. Veolia replaces customer-owned lead service lines "at no cost to the homeowner," and reports more than 16,000 replaced across 60 communities.^275, 288 The cost is spread across all customers through the $2.39 monthly surcharge in Table 19.1, which can rise to no more than $4.87 in any year.²⁷⁷

Of 8,029 Paramus homes with a recorded year built, 470 were built before 1940 and 3,522 from 1940 through 1959.²⁸⁹ Year built does not tell you the pipe material. Veolia's online service line map does, by address.²⁹⁰

What this means for you
Look up the address on Veolia's service line map before you make an offer. Keep your water bills, so you can see the change when a PFAS charge is added.

Sewer, garbage and recycling

Sewer. A household that uses less than 300,000 gallons of water a year gets no sewer bill. That is about 820 gallons a day, three times the larger household in Table 19.1. Below that line, sewer is paid through the tax rate. Above it, a charge applies, which a large house with heavy lawn watering on the house meter can reach.²⁷³ Ask the Borough for the amount if that describes the house.

Garbage and recycling. The Borough's Department of Public Works collects both with no separate fee.^274, 278

• Garbage is picked up twice a week: Monday and Thursday south of Midland Avenue, Tuesday and Friday north of it.
• Vegetative waste is picked up on Wednesday.
• Recycling is picked up one weekday a week. Your day is marked on your container.
• Loose leaves are collected at the curb from October 5 to November 29, 2026 only.

Collection is at the curb, in the Borough's covered containers, with no rear-yard collection.²⁷⁴ Construction debris is not collected, which matters to anyone renovating.²⁷⁸ If a holiday falls on your recycling day, that pickup is cancelled, not moved.²⁹¹ For bulk items, call the Department of Public Works.

Permit fees for common projects

Table 19.2. Common Borough permit fees.

Electrical and plumbing permits are separate, with residential minimums of $50 and $75.²⁹² A $100,000 kitchen and bath renovation carries a $2,500 building fee before those are added, so budget permits at roughly 3% of a renovation.

Paramus does not generally require a permit to remove a tree on your own developed lot, with exceptions for required buffers and wetlands. The tree between the sidewalk and the curb is the Borough's, and taking one out to widen a driveway costs $2,000.^293, 294

What this means for you
If you are selling, order the $100 Borough certificate when the contract is signed. If you are buying to renovate, add about 3% for permits.

Insurance

The New Jersey average homeowner's premium of $1,417 covers every house in the state.²⁸¹ A $2 million new-construction home insured to replacement cost will not be near it. Many Paramus homes date from the 1940s and 1950s (3,522 of 8,029 dated homes).²⁸⁹ These often have original electrical service and, in some cases, a buried heating-oil tank. Most insurers will not cover a tank for leakage, and most buyers' attorneys require a tank sweep.

Lenders require flood insurance only if the house is in a FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area. About 11.6% of Paramus's land is in the mapped floodplain, along the Saddle River, Sprout Brook and the other streams listed in Section 15.²⁸² The FEMA lookup by address is free.

Paramus has no train station, so there is no resident commuter parking permit to buy. Section 16 lists what other towns charge non-residents, and Section 12 has the full pool and golf rates.

What I tell my buyers: Three checks cost nothing. Look up the address on Veolia's service line map, look it up on FEMA's flood map, and ask the seller in writing whether there is or ever was an oil tank. Then read your first water bill line by line and keep it. The day a PFAS surcharge appears on it, you will want to know what the bill looked like before.

† Confirm this figure before you rely on it.

† Figures marked with a dagger are best-effort research, so verify them with the issuing office (the Borough of Paramus, the school district, the county, the state or the utility) before making judgment calls or decisions on them.

20. Reasons to Buy Here

Most of this report is detail. This page is the short answer to why people choose Paramus over the towns around it, with the section that backs each one.

1. The lowest property tax rate of the seven towns compared. A $1,150,000 home costs about $16,500 a year in tax here, against $22,300 to $28,300 in the other six (Section 9). On the same house, that is about $5,800 to $11,800 a year you keep.

2. Schools funded above every district compared. Paramus spent $23,990 per pupil in 2024-25, the most of the districts in Section 10, and that spending is paid for through the same low tax bill.

3. No revaluation shock. The Borough reassesses every home every year, so your bill moves in small steps and you are not waiting on a town-wide reset (Section 9).

4. Values have risen. The median sale price is up 50% since 2021 (Section 3).

5. Homes sell quickly. Under $1 million the median home sells in 18 days at just over asking, so if you need to sell, buyers are there (Sections 3 to 5).

6. You can build. There is no floor area ratio. A house or addition that meets the yard, coverage and height limits needs no hearing, which is why the land under an older house holds its value (Section 14).

7. Daily life is inside the Borough. The shopping, the library and Van Saun County Park are all in town (Section 12).

What this means for you
If you are comparing Paramus with a neighboring town at the same price, put the tax difference into your monthly budget first. It often buys more house here than the listing prices suggest.

What I tell my buyers: the tax rate is the reason I hear most often after people move in, and it was not always the reason they came. Run the monthly payment on the same price in two towns before you decide. Then read Section 21, because every town has trade-offs and you should see both pages together.

21. Reasons Not to Buy Here

A report that only makes the case for a town is a brochure. Section 20 gave the reasons people buy in Paramus. These are the six trade-offs that come with them, and who each one matters to.

1. There is no train. A rail commuter drives to another town and pays its non-resident parking price, where a permit is available at all (Section 16). This matters most if you commute to Manhattan every day. It matters little if you drive to work or work from home.

2. Sunday is closed, and the other six days are busy. Borough Code Chapter 391 keeps most stores shut on Sunday. Many residents count that as a reason to live here. The rest of the week, Route 17 carries more than 100,000 vehicles a day and peaks at midday Saturday (Section 12). Drive from the house to the highway at noon on a Saturday before you offer.

3. The house next door can be replaced by one twice the size. The same rule that lets you build lets your neighbor build (Section 14). On a block of 75-foot lots, expect construction within sight during a five-year stay. It also means the new houses become the comparable sales for yours.

4. Under $1 million, you compete with builders. About one in six houses sold under $1 million from 2021 through 2024 has since been torn down. Those buyers pay over asking and move fast (Section 2). This matters to a first-time buyer; for a seller of an original house it is an advantage.

5. About 2,100 homes are coming, most of them on the highways. They are mainly rental apartments at the malls and by the hospital (Section 13). Almost none is inside a single-family neighborhood, but it means more traffic from 2028 on.

6. At $2 million and up, plan to stay. That tier has 5.1 months of supply and sells at a median 97.5% of asking (Sections 3 and 5). If you may need to sell within a few years, you will be selling against newer houses.

What I tell my buyers: I live here, and none of these six has made me want to leave. If the train is the thing you cannot give up, Paramus is the wrong town and I will help you look in one that has it. If it is not, you are trading a train station for the lowest tax rate in the area, and most of my buyers take that trade.

22. Your First 90 Days as a Paramus Owner

Most of this report is about getting the house. This page is about the first three months after you have it: the deadlines that are easy to miss and the calls that are easier to make now than later. Dates are Borough, County or State schedules as of October 3, 2026; confirm the current year's dates with the office named. The Borough's main number is 201-265-2100.

Before closing

• The Borough's Certificate of Compliance. Paramus requires one before a home is sold. The seller applies to the Building Department (ext. 2230); inspections are weekday mornings, and the Borough will not schedule one until every open construction permit on the property has been closed for at least a week. Ask for the certificate and the permit history early, because an old open permit is the item most likely to move a closing date. The fee is $100 (Borough Code § A460-14A). (Section 15)²⁹⁵
• Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, and the power label. The inspector checks alarms on every level and near bedrooms. A house with a generator, solar panels or battery storage needs a printed warning label at both the electrical panel and the meter. A fire extinguisher has not been required at sale since February 2025; the Borough still recommends one. (Section 15)
• On a new house. Ask for the final certificate of occupancy, not a temporary one, and the new home warranty certificate. Ask what assessment the tax figure on the listing is based on. (Sections 2, 15)
• Look up the water service line. Veolia publishes an address lookup showing whether the line is lead, galvanized or unknown. If it is, Veolia's notice says replacement is at no cost to the homeowner; the number on the notice is 1-800-422-5987. (Sections 15, 19)²⁹⁶
• Ask two questions the disclosure form does not. Is there, or was there ever, an oil tank, above or below ground? What is the water service line made of? (Section 19)
• Run the flood map and get a quote. FEMA's Map Service Center by address, free. In Ida about a third of the flood claims in ZIP 07652 were on policies outside the mapped zone, so ask an insurer for a flood quote during attorney review if the house is near any stream. (Section 15)
• Run the address through the school district's lookup. "Find My School" is linked from the district's registration page. Confirm the assignment with the district (registration@paramusschools.org, 201-261-7800) before you sign if a particular school matters to you. (Sections 10, 17)²⁹⁷
• Transfer the water account. Veolia bills the owner directly. Call Veolia customer service before closing to arrange a final meter read and put the account in your name. (Section 19)

The first month

• Garbage and recycling. Garbage is Monday and Thursday south of Midland Avenue, Tuesday and Friday north of it; vegetative waste on Wednesday; recycling one weekday by color-coded section, marked on your container. Curbside only, in the Borough's automated containers, out no earlier than 6 pm the evening before. No fee. Construction debris is not collected. Electronics by appointment with Public Works (ext. 3100). Check that the Borough-issued containers stayed with the house; the resale inspection requires them. For bulk item rules, call Public Works (ext. 3100). (Sections 15, 19)²⁹⁸
• Overnight parking. The Police Department's page states no street parking from 2 am to 6 am on local streets. Plan the driveway accordingly, and call the non-emergency number (201-262-3400) if guests need to stay on the street.²⁹⁹
• Property tax bill. Quarterly, due February 1, May 1, August 1 and November 1, with a ten-day grace period. The Tax Collector does not accept a postmark; the payment has to arrive. Interest is 8 percent on the first $1,500 overdue and 18 percent above it. The bill you inherit is on the seller's assessment; yours moves toward your price at the next annual reassessment. Put about 1.45 percent of your price in the budget from day one. (Sections 8 and 9)³⁰⁰
• Sewer. There is no separate bill for a household using under 300,000 gallons of water a year; it is inside the tax rate. (Section 19)
• Library card. Free to anyone who lives, works, owns property or attends school in Paramus. Apply in person at the main library (116 East Century Road) or the Reid Branch (239 West Midland Avenue) with a driver's license, tax bill, utility bill or similar proof of address. A child's card needs a parent's signature. (Section 12)³⁰¹
• Recreation. The Recreation Department registers programs through Community Pass from its office on Farview Avenue at Petruska Park. Fall 2026 programs ran $100 to $300. Members of the Borough's volunteer organizations pay half. (Section 12)
• School registration. Start at the district's registration page and its Registration User Guide; all students must live with a parent or guardian in Paramus. The list of required documents, the kindergarten age cutoff and registration dates are in the guide. Note that elementary school here ends at grade 4 and middle school starts at grade 5. (Section 10)²⁹⁷
• Dog license. $12 a year for a neutered dog under the Code's fee chapter; see the Borough's "Dog & Cat Licensing" page for the renewal month and where to apply.
• Trees. The tree between the sidewalk and the curb is the Borough's. Removing one to widen a driveway costs $1,500 plus a $500 replanting fee. The Borough has also posted a newer tree removal ordinance for private lots, so call the Shade Tree office (ext. 4120) before taking down any tree. (Sections 14, 19)

Dates that come around once a year

If you plan to renovate

Before you hire an architect, get three numbers for your lot: its area, the footprint of everything with a roof, and the total hard surface including the driveway, walks and patio. Paramus has no floor area limit; what binds is 25 percent building coverage and 50 percent impervious coverage, the yards, and a height of 30 to 35 feet depending on the zone. On most lots the house is not the problem; the pool and patio are. Those three numbers against the Section 14 tables tell you whether your project is a permit or a hearing.

• A zoning permit for a residential addition is $150; a variance application for a single-family lot is $650 plus $500 in escrow; building fees on a renovation run about $25 per $1,000 of cost before the electrical and plumbing subcodes. (Section 19)
• Moving more than 400 cubic yards of soil, which a full basement usually exceeds, needs a major soil permit and a public hearing at the Planning Board. (Section 14)
• Contractors may work in a residential zone only between 7 am and 7 pm. (Section 14)
• A second dwelling unit with its own kitchen is not permitted in the single-family zones. (Section 14)
• Near any of the eleven regulated streams, a new house or a substantial improvement has to be built to the higher flood elevation in the Borough's 2025 flood chapter and the State's 2023 rule. (Section 15)
• An improvement is picked up by an added assessment from the first of the month after it is substantially complete, and the bill for the remaining months is due November 1. Expect a visit from the assessor as well as the code official once you pull a permit. (Section 9)³⁰³
• Keep every permit card and final approval. You will need a closed permit file the day you sell.

What I tell my buyers: three things to do the week you go under contract, not the week you move in. Get the seller's permit history from the Building Department, look the address up on Veolia's service line map and FEMA's flood map, and run it through the school district's lookup. Everything else on this page can wait for the boxes to be unpacked.

Data & Citations

This is how we underwrite a town. Public records, proprietary MLS sales data, and sources that never make it online, read in full, cross-checked against each other, and weighed with the judgment of a principal who has put his own capital behind this work. Every figure traces to a source: the materials below are grouped by the section they support, and numbered footnotes follow.