Why Londonderry's Property Tax Bill Runs Lower Than Its Neighbors, and What Residents Keep Fighting Over

On a Monday night in December 2025, a Londonderry Planning Board hearing ran long. The item on the table was a site plan for 250 rental cottages off Pillsbury Road, part of the ongoing buildout of Woodmont Commons. An abutter named Diane Sizemore stood up and told the board "that's not why we moved here." Another resident worried aloud that the neighborhood's water system already struggled to keep up. The board voted to continue the hearing to January 7, 2026.

Nobody in that room was talking about property taxes. But the fight over what gets built on those 600 acres is the same fight that explains why a Londonderry tax bill looks different from a Bedford or Amherst tax bill on paper. The residents pushing back on density are, whether they'd put it this way or not, also pushing back on the thing keeping their own rate down.

The Number Buyers See Before They See the Reason for It

Anyone shopping Londonderry right now has already run into the market's basic shape. As of June 2026, the average home value in town sat near $590,000, up roughly 3 percent from a year earlier. Through July 2026, year-to-date closed sales were tracking about 1 percent ahead of the same stretch in 2025, with only about a month's worth of inventory on the market, tight enough that well-priced listings still move fast.

What most buyers don't dig into is the tax line underneath that price. For the 2025 tax year, the rate Londonderry actually bills is $14.47 per $1,000 of assessed value, a figure the town's assessing office confirms was set after a town-wide revaluation that ran through more than 500 qualified sales to bring assessments closer to full market value. That rate is still the one in effect as of this writing. New Hampshire towns reset rates each fall, so a new 2026 figure won't be certified by the Department of Revenue Administration until October.

Worked out as an effective rate against home value, that comes to about 1.61 percent, a number that sits below both the typical Rockingham County effective rate and the statewide median. For a state that has no income tax and no general sales tax, and therefore runs almost everything through the property tax line, that gap is not a rounding error. It is the whole story.

What the Neighbors Pay

Here is where the comparison gets interesting, and where it gets messy. Widely cited 2025-2026 tax rate roundups put the neighboring towns buyers usually cross-shop against Londonderry somewhere in this range:

Notice the spread on Merrimack and Hollis. Different aggregators pulling from different vintages of assessed value land on meaningfully different numbers for the same town. That is not sloppiness so much as a warning: a nominal rate only means something next to the equalization ratio behind it, the percentage of full market value a town's assessments actually represent. Londonderry's own assessing department reported a 2024 ratio of 85.3 percent, with the 2025 revaluation specifically designed to push that number closer to 100. A town assessing at 80 percent of value with a higher sticker rate can cost less in real dollars than a town assessing at 100 percent with a lower one. If you're comparing two towns on the rate alone, you're comparing incomplete numbers.

Even with that caveat, Londonderry's position at the bottom of this list is not an accident of timing. It is the direct output of a decision the town made more than a decade ago.

The 600 Acres Doing the Heavy Lifting

Londonderry approved the master plan for Woodmont Commons in 2013. Crews broke ground in 2017 on what was framed from the start as a 20-year buildout, with completion projected around 2037. The site sits on land that was once the Woodmont orchard, off Pillsbury Road near Exit 4 on I-93.

What that 600-acre planned development has done for the town's tax base is not abstract. According to a fiscal impact report presented to the Planning Board at its April 2026 annual update, Woodmont Commons has generated nearly $16 million in net tax revenue for the town since 2013. That report, covering the town's July 2024 through June 2025 measurement period, also counted 227 businesses and employees now operating inside the development. New taxpaying tenants have kept arriving on a real timeline: Wood Partners brought 264 multifamily units online within that same reporting year, and Beth Israel Lahey Clinic officially opened to the public in February 2026, after buying a medical building originally constructed by Derry Medical Center. The 603 Brewery and Beer Hall, one of Woodmont's earliest tenants, remains a going concern on the property.

Every one of those buildings pays into the same municipal tax base as a single-family home on Mammoth Road, and every dollar it contributes is a dollar the town doesn't need to raise from residential assessments. That is the quiet mechanism behind the $14.47 rate. It isn't that Londonderry spends less than Amherst or Hollis. It's that Londonderry built more taxpayers who aren't voters worried about their own home's assessment.

The Corridor Most Buyers Never Clock

Woodmont is the most visible piece, but it isn't the only one. Londonderry also holds most of the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport within its borders, even though the airport itself is owned and operated by the City of Manchester. The arrangement works in the town's favor in a narrower way: under its most recent multi-year law enforcement contract with the airport, Londonderry's police department covers security at the terminal, and the airport pays the town a 10 percent administrative fee for that service, a contract arrangement rather than a property tax bill, but real revenue the town collects without asking residents for it.

The commercial activity that clusters around an active regional airport adds its own layer. The airport sits inside Foreign Trade Zone 81, a designation that lets companies operating there import goods duty-free, on top of New Hampshire's already low corporate tax rate and lack of a sales tax. A multitenant cargo facility development near the airport, built out by Aeroterm in partnership with the airport authority, is the kind of project that generates real assessed value on Londonderry's side of the line, separate from anything happening at Woodmont.

Stack the airport-adjacent commercial corridor on top of Woodmont Commons and the pattern is consistent: Londonderry has spent close to two decades building a non-residential tax base wide enough to absorb costs that, in a town without that base, would land squarely on homeowners.

Why the Same Meeting That Explains Your Tax Bill Also Explains the Traffic

None of this has happened without friction, and the friction is worth knowing about before you buy, not after. At that same April 2026 Planning Board meeting where the $16 million figure came up, a board member pointed out that the town may have "missed the window" on some of Woodmont's promised retail and asked why a farmer's market or Christmas market hadn't materialized on the site's still-undeveloped land. Kevin Smith, the former Londonderry town manager now working as a consultant for Pillsbury Realty Development, acknowledged that retail progress has lagged the original vision, a pattern echoed at the December hearing where residents pushed back hard on the pace and density of new rental construction near their own streets.

That tension isn't a footnote. It's the mechanism working as designed, and it's also the reason buyers should treat Woodmont's next phase as a live variable, not a settled fact. More commercial buildout likely means more downward pressure on the residential tax rate over time. It also means more of the traffic, construction, and public hearings that come with a 20-year project that is currently about halfway finished.

What This Means If You're Comparing Towns on Paper

If you're weighing Londonderry against Bedford, Nashua, Merrimack, Hollis, or Amherst using a tax rate you found in a roundup somewhere, treat that number as a starting point, not an answer. Ask what year the figure covers, whether the town has revalued since, and what the equalization ratio looked like at the time. A rate published for 2024 can already be out of date by the time you're comparing offers, and a town mid-revaluation, as Londonderry was for tax year 2025, can shift the picture within a single cycle.

It's also worth asking a question most rate comparisons skip entirely: what is generating the town's non-residential tax revenue, and is that base still growing? A town with an active planned development or a working commercial corridor has more room to keep residential rates in check than a town relying almost entirely on homeowners to fund its schools and services.

FAQ

Will Londonderry's tax rate stay this low as Woodmont Commons finishes building out? There's no guarantee either way. More taxable commercial and residential square footage at Woodmont could keep pushing the rate down, but Londonderry's revaluation cycle runs every two years, and town spending, school costs, and countywide factors all move the number too. The next reset lands in 2027.

Does living near the airport affect my property tax bill directly? Not through the airport itself. The runways and terminal are owned by the City of Manchester and aren't part of Londonderry's tax roll. What does matter is the private commercial activity clustered near it, cargo facilities, logistics tenants, and businesses inside the Foreign Trade Zone, which are assessed and taxed like any other commercial property in town.

Why do different sources quote different tax rates for the same nearby town? Aggregators pull from different years and don't always adjust for a town's equalization ratio, the percentage of full market value its assessments actually reflect. Two towns with the same nominal rate can carry very different real tax burdens depending on how current and how accurate their assessments are.

Comparing towns on a single number is how buyers end up surprised at closing. If you're weighing Londonderry against its neighbors and want the current year's figures, not last year's roundup, Pat Clancey Realty can walk you through what a specific property will actually cost to hold, not just what it costs to buy. Work With Us: Get a Local Market Consultation.