Owning a home isn’t cheap. Just ask anyone whose furnace or water heater has conked out. And one of the biggest yearly expenses of owning a home? Yearly property taxes.
But how much homeowners pay in property taxes each year depends largely on where they live. Some states have high property taxes. Others don’t.
Personal finance Web site WalletHub recently took a look at the states with the highest and lowest average property taxes in 2015. The site found that the average U.S. household spends $2,089 on real estate property taxes each year.
Residents of New Jersey tend to pay the highest property taxes, though, with WalletHub finding that homeowners here pay an average of $3,971 annually in real estate taxes.
A handful of Midwest states ranked among the 10 with the highest property taxes. Illinois came in with the second-highest average property taxes, with homeowners shelling out an average of $3,939 a year in real estate taxes.
Also ranking high were Wisconsin (fourth-highest, $3,398 on average), Nebraska (seventh-highest, $3,228) and Michigan (ninth-highest, $3,168).
In bad news for Midwest homeowners, no Midwest states ranked in the top 10 for the lowest annual property taxes.
If you do want to pay lower property taxes, though, move to Hawaii. That state had the lowest average annual property taxes in 2015, $482.