2. The 2027 Revaluation

If you buy a house in Ridgewood this year, the property tax figure on the listing sheet is not the tax you will pay.

The Village is currently conducting a revaluation of every taxable property, at the direction of the Bergen County Board of Taxation and the New Jersey Division of Taxation. Appraisal Systems, Inc., of Glen Rock has the contract. Notification letters went to property owners on March 20, 2026, and field inspectors are walking homes now, taking exterior measurements and, where owners permit, interior inspections. The new assessments take effect for the 2027 tax year.¹

It is the first full revaluation since 2008. The Village reassessed in 2013 and has carried that roll, with only new-construction and appeal adjustments, for thirteen years.²

This matters more than it sounds like it should.

What a revaluation actually does

A revaluation does not raise taxes at the town level. The Village, the school district and the county decide how much money they need; the assessment roll only determines who pays which share of it. Reset every assessment to current market value and the total collected stays roughly the same, but the distribution shifts, sometimes sharply.

The shift depends on how far current assessments have drifted from what houses actually sell for, and that drift is measurable. New Jersey publishes an equalization ratio for every municipality each year, expressing assessed value as a percentage of true market value.

Ridgewood’s certified ratio for tax year 2026 is 60.52 percent.³

Assessments across the Village sit at roughly three-fifths of market value. The ratio was 86 percent as recently as tax year 2021; it has fallen 26 points in five years, which is the 2021 to 2026 price run in Section 3 expressed as an assessment statistic.⁴ That figure is an average, and the word matters: the whole reason a revaluation gets ordered is that the drift is uneven. Some homes are assessed at 75 percent of what they would sell for. Others at 45 percent. Under the current roll, the second owner is paying materially less than their share, and the first is subsidizing them.

The revaluation ends that. Every property resets to full market value, and the burden redistributes accordingly.

The rule of thumb

Compare your assessment to what your house would sell for today.

• Assessed below 60 percent of market value: expect your share to rise
• Assessed near 60 percent: expect roughly no change
• Assessed above 60 percent: expect relief

The bigger the gap in either direction, the bigger the move.

What recent buyers actually look like

This is not a hypothetical. The deed record answers it.

Every sale recorded in Ridgewood in 2025 and 2026 carries the current assessment and the price paid. Dividing one by the other for every home sale in that window gives exactly the ratio described above, for the people who bought most recently.⁵

Seventy percent of recent buyers are assessed below 55 percent of what they paid. Eighty-three percent are below the Village ratio of 60.52 percent. Fewer than one in ten is above it.

Read that against the rule of thumb. The typical 2025 to 2026 buyer is assessed at 50.9 percent of price against a Village ratio of 60.52 percent. On the arithmetic of a revaluation, that buyer’s share of the levy rises by the ratio of the two, about 19 percent, before any budget growth. On the state’s average residential bill of $20,596, a 19 percent share increase is roughly $3,900 a year; on a house that closed at the 2026 median of $1,460,088, where the tax at the state’s effective rate is already about $28,400, it is roughly $5,400.⁶ The exact figure depends on the 2027 tax rate, which will itself fall as total assessed value rises. The direction is not in doubt.

The drift is not uniform across the Village. Section 14 reports the same ratio by census tract: 49.7 percent on the west side below the Heights (tract 472), 50.9 to 51.6 percent across the east, north and south (tracts 471, 474, 475), and 54.6 percent in the large-lot tract north of West Ridgewood Avenue (tract 473). The tract where the most expensive houses sit has drifted least.

Why this is urgent for buyers right now

Section 3 of this report documents that Ridgewood buyers in 2026 are paying a median of 111.2 percent of asking price. Homes are selling for more than they list for, consistently, across most of the market.

Those transactions are the evidence the revaluation will use.

A buyer who closes at $1.6 million on a home assessed at $950,000 has just created a public record establishing that the assessment is roughly 59 percent of market. When the new roll takes effect for 2027, that assessment will move toward what was actually paid.

Practical consequence: the tax line in the MLS listing describes the seller’s cost, not yours. For any Ridgewood purchase this year, the useful exercise is to divide the current assessment by the price you expect to pay. If that number lands meaningfully below 0.60, budget for an increase. Section 6 gives the better starting point: 1.944 percent of purchase price, the state’s effective rate on true value, rather than the seller’s bill.⁷

The effective rate, and the number that is wrong on the internet

Consumer tax sites publish an “effective rate” for Ridgewood near 2.8 percent and a “median home value” near $608,000. Both are assessment figures dressed up as market figures: the value is an assessed value, and the rate is the general rate applied to it. The state’s 2025 effective tax rate for Ridgewood, general rate multiplied by the equalization ratio, is 1.944 percent of true market value, and the state’s average residential bill is $20,596.⁸ Anyone using the consumer figure to model carrying cost on a purchase price will overstate the tax by roughly 45 percent. Anyone using the seller’s bill will understate it. The state’s number is the one to use.

The appeal calendar, which is easy to get wrong

Bergen County does not run a single appeal deadline. In 2026 there are five different dates depending on which municipality a property sits in. Municipalities undergoing revaluation or reassessment operate on a May 1 deadline rather than the standard April 1.⁹

Miss it and there is no remedy. The appeal is forfeited for the year, and you wait twelve months.

On the current roll, an appeal succeeds only where the assessment exceeds the upper limit of the common level range, 69.60 percent of market value for 2026.¹⁰ In a market where sales run 111 percent of asking, that is a narrow door, and the deed record above shows fewer than one buyer in ten is anywhere near it. Appeals are largely a 2027 question. When the 2027 assessment notices arrive, the window to contest is short and the deadline for a revaluation town is not the one most people have heard of. Verify the current-year date with the Bergen County Board of Taxation before relying on any published figure, including this one.

What to do

1. Look up your current assessment in the Village tax records
2. Divide it by a realistic estimate of current market value
3. If the result is well under 0.60, expect an increase and plan for it
4. When the 2027 notice arrives, check the appeal deadline immediately
5. Cooperate with the ASI inspection: refusing an interior inspection means the assessor estimates, and estimates are not usually generous

What I tell my buyers: run this calculation before you write the offer, not after you close. The deed record says the typical buyer in the last twenty months is assessed at half of what they paid. On a $1.5 million purchase that is a five-figure annual difference once the roll resets, and it belongs in your carrying-cost math alongside the mortgage and the insurance. Almost nobody puts it there.

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