Which Somerset town fits you.
All 21 municipalities, ranked by what you actually care about: taxes, schools, commute, town character. Real 2025 tax rates, real state school data, real environmental records, not a 2011 forum thread that's been dead for a decade.
Ranking is a simple weighted average of a tax score and a school score (each converted to a 0-100 scale across all 21 towns, tax scored on the 2025 effective rate so towns with different assessment ratios compare fairly), filtered first by whatever commute and character preferences you set. It's a starting list, not a verdict. Click through the sources below and check the details that matter to you.
Compare any two towns directly
Where these numbers come from
- Property tax: the state's own 2025 General Tax Rates table (NJ Treasury), which lists both the general rate (applied to a town's locally assessed values) and the effective rate (equalized to true market value, the fair way to compare towns whose assessment ratios differ). This tool ranks and estimates on the effective rate. Refreshed annually when the state posts the new year's table.
- Schools: NJ Department of Education 2023-24 School Performance Reports, graduation rate (for unified and high-school districts), and ELA/Math state-test results averaged across every grade tested and weighted by how many students actually took the test. A town's K-8 and high school assignments come from the DOE workbook cross-referenced against NCES district records, each district's own sending-district page, and (for the two 2009 all-grades mergers) NJ Superior Court case law, hand-matched because Somerset's 21 towns don't line up 1-for-1 with its school districts. The county's own sending/receiving summary PDF returned an access error on both automated fetch attempts during this build and is worth a manual check on the next refresh. Refreshed annually when the state posts new data.
- Commute: NJ Transit's Raritan Valley Line and Gladstone Branch station lists, the nearest Northeast Corridor anchors for the county's east side, the I-78 and I-287 exit lists, and the Route 206/202/22/28/518 corridor layout. No town in this pass had a directly sourced point-to-point drive-time number, so none is shown, a named road or station only, never an invented minute count. Millstone Boro has no highway route number confirmed to source and ships with that field honestly blank rather than a guess.
- Contaminated sites: NJDEP's Known Contaminated Site List, a live government database, queried directly for Somerset County. Each card shows both the total listed and the count still active. A count on this list doesn't mean active danger, most listed sites are old, monitored, or already being cleaned up. It's a starting point for your own digging, checked quarterly.
- Population, income, home values: coming soon. This needs a Census Bureau API key (free, instant, not yet pulled). Nothing here is estimated or guessed in the meantime.
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