Average Home Prices in Western Mass by Town, 2026

Ask anyone in Boston to name the cheap part of Massachusetts and they will say the Berkshires. Ask them to name the expensive part of Western Mass and they will say Northampton or Amherst. Both answers are wrong, and the assessment rolls have been saying so for years.

Across the 101 towns of Western Massachusetts, the median single-family home is assessed anywhere from $146,400 in Monroe to $1,066,450 in Alford. The median town sits at $338,000. That is a spread of more than seven to one inside a region you can drive across in two hours.

The county nobody expects

Take each town's median and then take the median of those, county by county, and the order comes out like this:

• Berkshire County: $396,250 across 32 towns
• Hampshire County: $366,500 across 20 towns
• Hampden County: $332,300 across 23 towns
• Franklin County: $302,100 across 26 towns

Berkshire County, the rural one, the one with the shuttered mills and the population that has been falling since 1960, has the highest median of the four. Hampden County, which contains Springfield, Chicopee, Holyoke and West Springfield and about half the region's people, has one of the lowest.

The explanation is second homes. Berkshire's expensive towns are small, and they are small in a particular way: in several of them the majority of housing counted as vacant on census night is seasonal rather than empty. Alford is the extreme version, a town of a few hundred residents whose median assessment runs past a million dollars. A weekend market prices against New York and Boston incomes, not local ones, and the assessment roll records the result.

This matters if you are shopping by county, and people do shop by county. A buyer who rules out Hampden as "the expensive part with the cities" and goes looking in the Berkshires for value is walking in the wrong direction on the median, though not necessarily on the specific street they want. The region does not have a cheap end and an expensive end. It has expensive pockets and cheap pockets scattered through all four counties, and the county line is a poor guide to which is which.

What things actually sell for, which is a different number

An assessment is what the town thinks a house is worth. A sale is what somebody paid. The two are related and they are not the same, and the gap between them is one of the most useful things in this dataset because it is what the tax bill is computed on.

Compare each town's median recorded sale with its median assessment and 48 of 82 towns are selling above the roll. The counties separate cleanly:

• Franklin County: median town sells at 1.11 times its assessed value
• Hampden County: median town sells at 1.05 times its assessed value
• Hampshire County: median town sells at 1.04 times its assessed value
• Berkshire County: median town sells at 0.95 times its assessed value

A ratio above one means the assessment roll is behind the market, which is common and usually temporary: towns revalue on a cycle, and the roll catches up. While it is behind, owners are paying tax on a number lower than what their house would fetch. A ratio below one means the opposite, and it tends to show up where a small number of unusual sales drag the median around.

Which brings us to the caveat that matters most in this article.

Read the deed count before you read the median

In Monroe, in Alford, and in a couple of dozen towns like them, a "median sale price" rests on a handful of transactions. The table below carries a deed-count column for exactly that reason. When a town records six sales in a year, one unusual property moves the median by six figures and the number tells you almost nothing about what a normal house there is worth.

Springfield records well over a thousand deeds a year, so its median is a real median. A hill town recording eight is reporting an anecdote with a decimal point. Both appear in the same column of the same table on every site that publishes this data, usually without the warning. Ours has the warning and the count.

Every town, assessments and sales side by side

Sortable and filterable. Compare the assessment column with the sale column to see where the roll is lagging, and check the deed count before you trust any single row.

How to use this

If you are shortlisting towns, the median assessment is the better number for comparison because it is computed the same way everywhere and rests on every property rather than on the few that changed hands. If you are pricing an offer, the recorded sales are the better number, but only in a town with enough of them to mean something.

For a specific property rather than a town median, look the address up: the assessment on file, the year built, the lot size and the last recorded sale all sit in the public record. And once you have a price in mind, what it costs in tax varies more between towns than most buyers expect.