In late March, a longtime Perinton homeowner opened her preliminary assessment notice and did not like what she saw. She told a local news crew that after nearly thirty years in her home, the increase was among the largest she'd experienced, and she worried aloud that neighbors would struggle to keep up with taxes that seemed to be doubling. Days later, a different Perinton news crew found two neighbors reading the same kind of letter with a very different reaction. One woman's assessment jumped by about $250,000, and her estimated tax bill actually fell by roughly $400. Her neighbor's assessment nearly doubled too, and her bill dropped by $255.
Same town. Same revaluation. Different outcomes depending on the parcel. If you're comparing homes in Fairport or elsewhere in Perinton this fall, that gap matters more than the number printed on any listing sheet.
The Levy Is a Fixed Pie, Not a Growing One
Perinton hadn't done a townwide reassessment since 2018. Over those eight years, the market moved and the assessment roll didn't, so the town's equalization rate (the measure of how closely assessed values track real market value) slid from 100 percent down to 57 percent. In plain terms, most homes in town were assessed well below what they'd actually sell for, and the gap wasn't uniform street to street.
The town started fixing that in 2025, and preliminary assessment notices went out to property owners in March 2026. That's the letter both homeowners above were reading. The town's own materials frame the tax levy as a pie of fixed size, set by the budgets the town, school district, county, and village adopt each year. A revaluation doesn't make the pie bigger. It just redraws how the slices get cut. If your home's value was undervalued relative to your neighbors' for years, your slice grows even if the pie doesn't, and someone else's shrinks.
That framing explains why three homeowners reading letters from the same process landed in three different places. A revaluation reassigns the tax burden. It doesn't automatically raise it, and it doesn't automatically lower it either. It depends entirely on how your specific parcel's value moved relative to everyone else's.
Where That Lands on a Listing You're Comparing Right Now
If you're pulling up active listings in Fairport this fall, the "taxes" field you're reading was almost certainly calculated against the pre-revaluation roll. The town's statutory grievance day, the deadline for property owners to formally challenge their preliminary assessment through the Assessment Review Commission, fell on May 26 this year. That window has closed. The values coming out of this cycle are largely locked in, but they haven't fully worked their way through every tax bill you'll see between now and next year.
That creates a real gap for anyone comparing homes mid-search. The number on a listing reflects last year's roll. The number you'll actually owe reflects this year's revaluation, applied against whatever the town, school district, and village decide to levy. For most buyers that difference will be modest. For a smaller group of parcels, it could be the kind of shift that changes a monthly payment comparison between two houses that otherwise look identical on paper.
The Village Line Adds a Second, Separate Layer
Here's the detail that rarely makes it into a portal's tax estimate. The Village of Fairport is not its own assessing unit. Decades ago, the village adopted a local law to stop maintaining a separate assessment roll and instead levies its village tax against a copy of the Town of Perinton's roll, under the authority of New York's Real Property Tax Law. Practically, that means whatever the town's revaluation does to a property's assessed value flows straight into the village tax calculation too, but on the village's own fiscal calendar, which runs June 1 to May 31, with its own tax rate set separately from the town's.
A real village tax bill makes the mechanic concrete. On one 2024-2025 village tax bill for a Whitney Road West property, the village tax portion came to $425.49, calculated at that year's village rate of roughly $7.53 per $1,000 of assessed value, plus a separate Fairport Sewer District charge of $175.00, for a total village-related bill of $600.49. A comparable home just outside the village boundary, still in Perinton, still zoned into the same school district, would not carry either of those line items. It pays town, county, and school taxes. The village home pays all of that plus its own dedicated village levy and whatever special district charges apply, and those figures reset each June under the village's own budget rather than the town's.
That gap doesn't show up cleanly when you're scanning two listings side by side. Both might show a single "annual taxes" figure. Only one of them is quietly carrying an extra, separately voted layer.
| Home inside Village of Fairport | Comparable home outside the village line | |
|---|---|---|
| County and Town tax | Yes | Yes |
| School tax | Yes | Yes |
| Village tax | Yes, separate rate and fiscal year | Not applicable |
| Special districts (e.g., village sewer) | Often, billed with the village tax | May carry a different district charge, or none |
What This Means If You're Comparing Two Fairport-Area Homes This Fall
A few practical habits protect you here, and none of them require you to become a tax analyst.
- Ask for the parcel's assessment history, not just the current bill. If a specific home's assessed value shifted sharply in this year's revaluation, the bill you're shown may not resemble the one you'll actually receive.
- Confirm whether the address sits inside or outside the Village of Fairport boundary using the parcel lookup, not the mailing address. Village and non-village homes can share a Fairport, NY 14450 mailing address while carrying very different tax stacks.
- If you're closing on a village property this fall, ask how the seller's tax proration was calculated. A proration built on the old roll and a bill built on the new one won't match perfectly, and it's worth understanding the gap before you sign.
- Treat the "annual taxes" figure on any listing as a starting question for your agent, not a settled number, especially for anything inside the village line during a revaluation year.
None of this changes whether a given home is right for you. It changes whether the monthly number you're budgeting against is the real one.
The Number on Paper and the Check You Write
A revaluation year has a way of exposing how many separate decisions sit underneath a single line on a listing sheet. The assessed value, the town's rate, the school district's levy, and, for a slice of Fairport's housing stock, a village rate calculated on its own calendar all stack up into one number that looks simple until you ask where it came from. This year, more than most, that question is worth asking before you compare two houses on price alone.
If you're weighing a home inside the Village of Fairport against one just outside it, or trying to make sense of how this year's revaluation touches a specific property you're considering, that's exactly the kind of parcel-level detail worth walking through together before you write an offer. Renee DeMars has spent more than a decade helping buyers and sellers across Fairport, Pittsford, Victor, and the surrounding Rochester suburbs make sense of the details that don't show up on a listing sheet. Let's Connect.
