Which Western Mass Towns Have Natural Gas? All 101 Checked

If you have only ever lived somewhere with a gas main in the street, the heating question barely registers when you buy a house. You turn the boiler on and a bill arrives. In most of Western Massachusetts that is not the arrangement, and the difference is one of the larger recurring costs of owning here.

Of the 101 towns, 39 have a natural gas distribution main somewhere inside them. 62 have none at all. In those 62 towns there is no address that can connect to gas, at any price, because there is nothing to connect to.

Gas Is A Valley Utility

The distribution follows population density and the river, not town boundaries:

• Hampden County: 14 of 23 towns have a main
• Berkshire County: 13 of 32 towns have a main
• Hampshire County: 7 of 20 towns have a main
• Franklin County: 5 of 26 towns have a main

That is the economics of buried pipe. A gas main pays for itself where houses are close together, and it never will along four miles of hill road with fourteen houses on it. The pattern here is the Connecticut valley cities and the larger towns around them, and then nothing.

Two companies do most of the distribution:

• Berkshire Gas: 21 towns
• Eversource Energy (EGMA): 16 towns
• Holyoke Gas & Electric Department: 1 town
• Westfield Gas and Electric Light Department: 1 town

The Trap In The Served Column

Read the table carefully, because "yes" is doing less work than it appears to.

A town is marked served if a main exists anywhere inside it. In practice mains run along the denser streets and stop. A house two miles out in a served town is in exactly the same position as a house in an unserved one: no gas, and connecting would mean paying to extend the main, which is quoted by the foot and is not a small number.

So the town-level answer narrows your search and never settles it. For a specific house the question is whether there is a gas meter on the wall, and if not, how far the nearest main is. The gas company will tell you, and the seller already knows.

What You Are Actually Choosing Between

In the 62 unserved towns the realistic options are delivered oil, propane, electric resistance heat, a heat pump, or wood, and most houses here use some combination.

Delivered oil is the region's default and it is why so many properties have a tank in the basement or the garden. It is bought in bulk at a price that moves with the market, so the annual cost is genuinely unpredictable in a way a gas bill is not. Propane is more expensive per unit of heat but supports the same equipment types and does not corrode a buried tank the way oil can.

Heat pumps have changed this calculation more than anything else in twenty years, and they are the reason the absence of a gas main is far less of a penalty than it was. Whether they beat oil in a given year is a live question rather than a settled one, and we ran both against the actual price record: the two have crossed over repeatedly, and oil has often won.

One consequence that catches buyers of older properties: a house with no gas and an oil tank buried in the garden is carrying a liability as well as a fuel supply. A leaking buried tank is the single most common way an ordinary residential lot ends up in the state's cleanup files, which is covered in what a 21E listing actually means.

Every Town

Sortable and filterable. Filter the gas column to "None" for the 62 towns where the question is settled before you look at a listing.

The Questions Worth Asking

1. What heats this house, and how old is the equipment? A twenty-five year old oil boiler is a replacement you will make, not one you might.
2. If it is oil, where is the tank? Basement or buried. If buried, when was it installed and has it ever been tested.
3. What did last winter cost? Ask for the delivery receipts rather than an estimate. Oil is bought in bulk and the number is on paper.
4. How well is it insulated? This matters more than the fuel. An uninsulated house on any fuel costs more to heat than an insulated one on the worst fuel, and a large share of this region's housing predates 1940, when nobody insulated anything.

None of this makes an unserved town a worse place to buy. It makes the heating system a component you evaluate properly rather than assume, in the same way you would a roof.