Pull up the current tax rates for Windham, Litchfield, Londonderry, and Bedford side by side and you'll see four numbers huddled close together, three of them within thirty-two cents of each other. If you're comparing towns from a spreadsheet, that clustering looks like good news. It looks like the decision comes down to school ratings or commute time, because the tax line is basically a wash.
It isn't. The rate is a ratio, not a price, and the same rate applied to two different towns can produce two very different bills, moving in two very different directions over the next few years. Windham is the clearest example of why, because its rate carries a specific local history that Litchfield's and Londonderry's don't.
Four Towns, One Number
Here's how the 2025 tax rates actually break down, per $1,000 of assessed value, based on the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration's completed rate-setting for the year:
| Town | Municipal | County | State Ed. | Local Ed. | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Windham | $2.48 | $0.57 | $1.03 | $10.07 | $14.15 |
| Litchfield | $2.62 | $0.88 | $0.97 | $9.73 | $14.20 |
| Londonderry | $3.53 | $0.58 | $1.08 | $9.28 | $14.47 |
| Bedford | $3.87 | $1.02 | $1.15 | $10.45 | $16.49 |
These were set by the Town of Windham on November 12, 2025, and appear alongside the other three towns' rates in the same statewide dataset that Hudson's tax office republishes each fall. They're the rates in effect right now, and they won't move again until towns set new ones this coming autumn.
Look at the totals and Windham comes out lowest of the four. Look at the county column and you'll see why a single line item can mislead: Windham and Londonderry sit in Rockingham County and land close to each other at $0.57 and $0.58. Litchfield and Bedford sit in Hillsborough County and land at $0.88 and $1.02. County tax isn't a flat statewide charge. Each county divides its budget by the total value of taxable property inside it, so a town's county line moves with its own valuation relative to its neighbors, not with anything a homeowner controls.
Same Number, Different Bill
Take a single assessed value and run it through all four rates. A home assessed at $550,000 would generate:
- Windham: $7,783
- Litchfield: $7,810
- Londonderry: $7,959
- Bedford: $9,070
Three of those numbers sit within $176 of each other. Bedford's sits nearly $1,300 higher, driven mostly by a municipal line ($3.87) that's more than a dollar above any of the other three. That's the first crack in the "these towns are basically the same" read. The second crack is bigger, and it's specific to Windham.
The Line Windham Argued With Salem Over For Sixteen Years
Windham's local education line, $10.07 of its $14.15 total, is the second-highest of the four towns, just behind Bedford's. It didn't get there by accident.
For sixteen years, starting in 1995, Windham had no high school of its own. Its teenagers were tuitioned to Salem High School, across the town line. That arrangement ended with the class of 2011, the last Windham students to graduate from Salem. Windham built its own high school instead, opening Windham High School in the fall of 2009 and graduating its first class, the class of 2012, from a building the town now owns and staffs outright.
That decision is the reason the local-ed line carries the weight it does today. Windham now runs four public schools, Golden Brook, Windham Center School, Windham Middle School, and Windham High, serving more than 3,000 students. Running a full K-12 system, including a high school the town didn't operate a generation ago, costs more than tuitioning kids out ever did. That cost shows up every year in the local education column, whether or not a homebuyer scrolling through listings ever sees the history behind it.
Litchfield and Londonderry never made that same capital decision in the same way, and their local-ed lines reflect a different set of obligations. None of this makes one town's schools better or worse than another's. It means the number on the page is doing more work than it looks like, and a buyer comparing towns purely on the total rate is comparing outcomes without comparing the decisions that produced them.
What A Median Doesn't Hold Still For
Windham's home values add another layer, because they don't sit still the way the tax rate does. As of July 2026, the median single-family sale price in town was around $750,000, based on roughly 199 residential sales over the trailing twelve months. Zillow's home value index for the same window put the town's average closer to $810,830. Over the three months ending in May 2026, the median actually pulled back to about $730,000, a 16 percent swing from the year before.
None of that volatility is about the tax rate. It's about which homes happened to close. Windham's market spans a five-bedroom sale on Ryan Farm Road that closed at $2.2 million in July 2026 down to a two-bedroom condo on Stacey Circle that closed the same month at $429,900. With fewer than 200 sales a year spread across that range, one or two luxury closings can drag the median hundreds of thousands of dollars in either direction from one month to the next. A town with a thinner, wider sales pool is always going to produce a noisier median than a town with more transactions closer together in price, and that noise matters more to a buyer's actual bill than the difference between a $14.15 rate and a $14.20 one.
Where Windham Is Trying To Buy Down Its Own Rate
The one piece of this that points forward rather than back is Windham's own economic development push. The town has designated six Economic Revitalization Zones along the Route 111 and Wall Street corridor, Range Road, Route 111A, and the Village Center, specifically to attract commercial and industrial development and grow the tax base beyond residential rooftops. The town is also studying a Wall Street Extension that would connect Route 111 to North Lowell Road, a project being run jointly with the Rockingham Planning Commission and NHDOT.
The logic is straightforward. More commercial ratables on Route 111 means more of the town's budget gets funded by businesses instead of homeowners, which is one of the few levers a town actually has to keep its residential rate from climbing as fast as its spending does. Whether that effort keeps Windham's rate near the bottom of this four-town group five years from now depends on how much commercial space actually gets built, and how fast school and municipal costs grow in the meantime. Nobody can promise a direction here. What's verifiable is that Windham is one of the few towns on this list actively working the commercial side of the equation rather than just absorbing whatever the residential rate demands.
Frequently Asked
Does a lower town tax rate always mean a lower tax bill? No. The rate is applied to your home's assessed value, so a lower rate on a higher-value home can easily cost more than a higher rate on a lower-value one. Windham's rate is currently the lowest of the four towns above, but its typical home value runs well above Litchfield's and Londonderry's, which narrows or erases the advantage depending on the specific property.
Is Windham's rate likely to stay this low? There's no way to guarantee it. What's documented is that the town is actively pursuing commercial development along Route 111 and Wall Street through its Economic Revitalization Zone designations, a deliberate strategy to grow the non-residential tax base rather than lean harder on homeowners as costs rise.
If you're weighing Windham against Litchfield, Londonderry, or Bedford and want to know what a specific property's actual bill would look like, not just where the town rate lands on a chart, that's the kind of question worth a direct conversation. The Veteran Realtor works these four towns every week and can walk you through the real numbers on a specific address before you write an offer. Get Your Home Value or reach out directly to start the conversation.
