In the fall of 2025, Connecticut's farmland tax assessments landed with some properties' bills nearly tripling overnight. Around the same time, the Town of Ellington finished its own five-year property revaluation and its mill rate dropped from 37.10 to 25.42, a fall of nearly a third. If you're comparing Ellington to a neighboring Tolland County town using nothing but that headline rate, you'd read it as good news for your future tax bill. You'd also be missing that both numbers, farmland assessments spiking statewide and Ellington's own mill rate falling, come from the same underlying mechanism, and understanding that mechanism changes what you should actually be asking before you make an offer here.
The Mill Rate Didn't Fall. The Base Underneath It Got Bigger.
Connecticut law requires every town to revalue its real estate every five years, assessing property at 70 percent of fair market value. Ellington's cycle runs 2025, 2030, 2035. The town's prior revaluation was in 2020, which means every assessed value on the books before the 2025 reset was five years stale, based on figures set before the run-up in Connecticut home prices that followed. Multiple market trackers now put Ellington's typical home value somewhere in the $430,000 to $460,000 range as of mid-2026, with most showing mid-to-high single-digit growth over the past year alone, on top of whatever it climbed in the years before that.
A mill rate is just the town's budget divided by the total assessed value of everything taxable in Ellington, its grand list. When a revaluation resets assessed values to match five years of appreciation, the denominator gets bigger. Divide roughly the same levy by a larger grand list and the rate has to come down, or the town would be collecting far more than its budget requires. That's the mechanical story behind 37.10 becoming 25.42. It is not the town choosing to tax less.
Here's what that means using the assessor's own formula, holding the assessed value artificially constant to isolate the rate's effect:
| Scenario | Mill Rate | Assessed Value (70% of $400,000) | Annual Tax |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY2024, pre-revaluation | 37.10 | $280,000 | $10,388 |
| FY2026, post-revaluation | 25.42 | $280,000 | $7,118 |
If nothing else moved, that would be a real 31 percent cut. But nothing else held still. A house whose fair market value was $400,000 back in 2020 is very likely assessed at a meaningfully higher figure under the 2025 revaluation, because that's the whole point of a revaluation: to catch the number up. The new mill rate and the new assessed value are supposed to move against each other, and the only way to know what you'd actually owe on a specific Ellington property is to ask for its 2025 assessed value directly, not to extrapolate from the rate alone. The town's 2025 Grand List is what determines bills starting with the July 2026 cycle.
Farmland Almost Paid the Price For That Same Math
The same revaluation logic, applied to a different category of land, nearly forced a very different outcome this year, statewide. Public Act 490 lets Connecticut tax farmland, forest, and open space at its current use value rather than its development value, precisely so that owning open land doesn't become financially impossible next to rising residential assessments. Every five years the state's Office of Policy and Management issues recommended land use values for that program, and in October 2025 those numbers landed based on a UConn survey with a low response rate and inconsistent data. Farmland assessments in some categories jumped by 300 percent or more, enough that Governor Ned Lamont intervened on January 19, 2026, ordering the state to revoke the October figures and reinstate 2020 land values while a working group of farmers, assessors, and town officials keeps meeting to build a longer-term fix.
Ellington didn't escape that fallout just because the town happens to sit in it. The town is home to Oakridge Dairy, and farmland economics of exactly this kind, taxes among them, are the reason the Bahler family that runs it has been steadily trading acreage for conservation easements rather than banking on the tax code to protect the farm forever. Seth Bahler, part of that family, put it plainly when describing why landowners eventually sell to developers instead of farmers:
"You can't bring back farmland. Once it's gone, it's gone."
A tax program built to keep land in agriculture instead of subdivisions came within a governor's order of working against its own purpose this year. That's not an abstraction in a town where a working dairy of this size still operates.
What Actually Sits Under Ellington's Open Land
Oakridge Dairy is worth naming here because it's not a postcard, it's the Northeast's largest dairy operation, founded in the late 1890s by Adolph Bahler, with more than five generations of the Bahler family having worked the farm since. The farm milks roughly 2,600 cows, nearly 14 percent of all dairy cattle in Connecticut, and employs around 60 people across its 1,400 acres. The family has sold conservation easements on about 85 percent of that land to a mix of the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Connecticut Department of Agriculture, the Town of Ellington, and the Connecticut Farmland Trust.
Ellington's tobacco heritage is active too, not archived. In 2025, Foundation Cigar Company opened a new office on the 300-acre Dunn & Foster farm in town, built on a relationship between Foundation's owner and the Foster family that runs the operation. That's a working commercial tenant on Ellington farmland right now, not a preserved relic.
Statewide, Connecticut has lost nearly 1,000 farms and 65,000 acres of farmland over the past decade, and farmers point to rising taxes, energy costs, and thin milk prices as the reasons landowners eventually sell. The open acreage that gives Ellington its character isn't guaranteed by zoning. It's being actively held in place by specific families making specific, sometimes financially difficult, decisions, and by a state tax program that came close to working against them this year.
Three Questions Worth Asking Before You Read a Mill Rate as a Deal
If you're comparing Ellington against another Tolland County or Hartford-area town primarily on tax rate, a few questions will tell you more than the rate itself:
- Where is the town in its revaluation cycle? A town due for a reval soon may see its rate move sharply in either direction over the next year or two, regardless of what it shows today. Ellington just reset in 2025 and won't again until 2030.
- Does the property, or the parcel next to it, carry a PA-490 classification? If so, ask what happens to that classification if you or a future owner changes the use or subdivides. Ellington's own exemption rules note that classified land becomes subject to a conveyance tax penalty if it's sold or converted within 10 years of classification, a detail that surfaces at closing far more often than buyers expect.
- What is the property's actual 2025 assessed value, not its 2020 one? The mill rate only tells you the multiplier. The assessed value is the number that actually determines your bill, and it's the number most likely to have moved.
What This Means If You're Comparing Towns
None of this makes Ellington a worse or better buy than a neighboring town. It means the falling mill rate isn't evidence of anything on its own, and the open land that makes the town feel the way it does is running on a tax mechanism that proved, this year, how quickly it can swing. For a move-up family weighing Ellington's larger lots against a tighter subdivision closer to Hartford, or an investor looking at a parcel with farmland attached, the number that matters isn't the rate on the town's website. It's the assessed value on that specific property, and whatever land-use classification sits underneath it.
If you're weighing Ellington against other towns in the area and want the actual math run on a specific property rather than a headline rate, that's exactly the kind of groundwork the Moriarty Team does before you write an offer. Reach out to Pam Moriarty Real Estate to schedule a free consultation.
