The short answer
At today's Phoenix prices and rents, owning overtakes renting in year 9 — a little past a typical holding period, on the lowest property-tax rate and the second-cheapest insurance of any metro we cover.
The interesting part of this page is not the answer. It is why the tax rate is that low, because it is not a policy choice and it may not last.
| Input | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Typical home value | $456,272 | Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), single-family homes only, smoothed & seasonally adjusted (Metro_zhvi_uc_sfr_tier_0.33_0.67_sm_sa_month.csv) (July 2026) |
| Typical single-family rent | $2,311 / month | Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), single-family residences, smoothed (Metro_zori_uc_sfr_sm_month.csv) (July 2026) |
| Effective property-tax rate | 0.49% | Arizona taxes Class 3 owner-occupied property at 10% of its Limited Property Value, not of market value, and Proposition 117 caps LPV growth at 5% a year with no reset on sale — a buyer inherits the seller's LPV. The Maricopa County Assessor's tax-year-2026 medians put single-family LPV at $225,307 against a full cash value of $407,800, so LPV runs at 55.2% of market. A $456,272 purchase therefore carries an LPV of about $252,087 and an assessed value of $25,209. Maricopa's assessed-value-weighted average rate for FY 2026 is $9.9870 per $100 — $6,064,544,144 of adopted levy over $60,724,517,168 of net assessed value — which is $2,518, less the state's homeowner rebate of 40% of the school district primary tax (the county's average school primary rate is 2.9568 per $100, so $298, well inside the $600 cap). Net $2,219 a year, or 0.4864%, rounded to 0.49%. The spread behind that average is wide: before the county and city layers, school rates run from about 5.1 per $100 in the Deer Valley and Paradise Valley unified districts to about 9.3 in Phoenix Elementary #1 plus Phoenix Union #210, which carry desegregation and Class B bond levies most of the metro does not. Why not the Census ratio: Arizona is the one place our rule against the Census ratio was not written for, and it is worth saying plainly: the ACS ratio is 0.48% and the derived rate is 0.49%, and they agree for a real reason rather than by luck. Because Proposition 117 caps LPV growth and a sale does not reset it, the long-tenured owners the survey measures and the buyer this page prices are taxed on the same basis. We still publish the derivation rather than the ratio, for the reason Denver's page gives: 'we checked and it agrees' is a different claim from 'this is what a buyer pays', and only the second is what this page asserts. The derivation also exposes the thing the ratio hides — that the low rate is not legislative generosity but a 5% cap that has fallen 45% behind the market, and that the gap closes if prices ever stop running ahead of it. For the record, that ratio is 0.48% — $1,927 median taxes paid ÷ $401,400 median home value for CBSA 38060, per US Census Bureau, American Community Survey — tables B25103 (median real estate taxes paid) and B25077 (median home value), metro level (2023 5-year estimates).Maricopa County, Adopted Property Tax Levies and Rates per $100 of Valuation, FY 2026 (2025 tax levy), pursuant to A.R.S. section 42-17151; Limited Property Value and full cash value medians per the Maricopa County Assessor's FY2025 Annual Report (tax year 2026); homeowner rebate per A.R.S. section 15-972 (FY 2026 adopted levy, tax year 2026 valuations) |
| Homeowner's insurance | $1,333 / year | Maricopa and Pinal Counties. Arizona publishes no premium data below the state level, so this is the NAIC's 2023 Arizona HO-3 average of $1,194 — written premium over written exposures — moved onto the metro by the Phoenix CBSA's position in the quoted series: $2,617 against a $2,344 Arizona average, a ratio of 1.116. Both sides of that ratio are priced at $300,000 of coverage, so it measures geography and nothing else. $1,194 x 1.116 = $1,333. The level is a 2023 figure, the most recent written data the NAIC publishes, so it trails the 2026 price and rent on the rest of this page. On the one series where the same thing can be measured, Texas, written premiums rose 25% between 2023 and 2025. Treat this as a floor. Arizona's is the second-cheapest homeowner's insurance in our set, behind Seattle, which is a real feature of a market with no hurricane, little hail by Front Range standards, and wildfire exposure concentrated well outside the built-up valley. This page previously published $2,617, a quoted premium from a rate-comparison sample at a fixed $300,000 of coverage. Quotes run above what insurers actually write, so we moved to the written figure.NAIC, Dwelling Fire, Homeowners Owner-Occupied, and Homeowners Tenant and Condominium/Cooperative Unit Owner's Insurance Report: Data for 2023 (published July 2026), Table 4 — average premium by policy form, HO-3, written premium divided by written exposures. Counties per US Census Bureau / OMB, Core Based Statistical Area delineation — central counties of each CBSA (July 2023); the quoted premium it replaced per Insurance.com (Quadrant Information Services) average annual homeowner's premium by ZIP code — $300,000 dwelling coverage, $300,000 liability, $1,000 deductible, 2% hurricane deductible in Florida; averaged over the CBSA's central counties and weighted by owner-occupied units (August 2026) (2023 data year) |
Why Phoenix lands here
Phoenix and Denver make the cleanest pair on this site: an identical price-to-rent ratio of 16.5, and answers seven years apart. Denver breaks even in year 13. Phoenix breaks even in year 9. Everything separating them is in the two carrying-cost columns.
Phoenix's effective property-tax rate is 0.49% — $2,236 a year on a $456,272 house, and the lowest of the twelve metros we have priced. Its insurance is $1,333, second only to Seattle's and less than half of Denver's, because the Valley has no hurricane, nothing like the Front Range's hail corridor, and its serious wildfire exposure sits well outside the built-up area. Between them those two lines cost a Phoenix owner about $2,700 a year less than a Denver owner pays.
What is left is a fairly ordinary comparison. Month one is $2,986 to own against $2,326 to rent, a gap of about $660 a month, on $101,880 of cash to close. At a price-to-rent ratio of 16.5 the mortgage is doing most of the damage and the cheap carry slowly digs the buyer out of it. year 9 is the answer, and it is not a close one in either direction.
The low tax rate is a lag, not a policy
This is the section worth your time, and it is the reason Phoenix earned a page.
Arizona does not tax your house's market value. It taxes its Limited Property Value, and Proposition 117 caps LPV growth at 5% a year. Critically — and unlike California, Florida or Texas — a sale does not reset it. A buyer inherits the seller's LPV.
Because Phoenix home values have risen much faster than 5% a year for most of the last decade, the capped value has fallen a long way behind the market. The Maricopa County Assessor's own tax-year-2026 figures put the median single-family full cash value at $407,800 against a median Limited Property Value of $225,307 — LPV is 55.2% of market value. So a $456,272 purchase is taxed as though it were worth about $252,000.
The rest is arithmetic. Arizona assesses Class 3 owner-occupied property at 10% of LPV, giving an assessed value of about $25,209. Maricopa's assessed-value-weighted average rate for FY 2026 is $9.9870 per $100 — $6.06 billion of adopted levy over $60.72 billion of net assessed value — which comes to $2,518, less the state's homeowner rebate of 40% of the school district primary tax ($298, comfortably inside the $600 cap). $2,236 a year, or 0.49%.
Why a county average rather than one district. Every other page on this site prices the central city and its school district by name. We did not do that here, because in Maricopa the choice would have decided the answer. Before the county and city layers, school rates run from about 5.1 per $100 in the Deer Valley and Paradise Valley unified districts to about 9.3 in Phoenix Elementary #1 plus Phoenix Union #210, which carry desegregation and Class B bond levies most of the metro does not. Following our usual convention and naming the districts with "Phoenix" in the title would have published 0.71% — 45% above what a typical buyer in this metro actually pays. The convention was the wrong instrument, so we used the county's own weighted average and are telling you that we did.
The one place the Census shortcut is right, and why
Every metro page here contrasts our derived rate with the Census ratio of median taxes paid to median home value, because a derivation you can check beats one you have to trust. Usually the two disagree, sometimes by a factor of two.
Here they agree almost exactly: 0.48% against our 0.49%, $2,190 against $2,236.
That is not luck, and it is worth understanding. The Census ratio is wrong elsewhere because it measures long-tenured owners whose assessments are capped while a buyer's resets on sale — it describes a different taxpayer. In Arizona there is no reset. The owner who bought in 2014 and the buyer closing next month are taxed on the same LPV basis, so the survey's taxpayer and this page's taxpayer are, for once, the same person.
We still publish the derivation rather than the ratio, for the reason our Denver page gives: "we checked and it agrees" and "this is what a buyer pays" are different claims, and only the second is what this page asserts. And the derivation shows the thing the ratio hides — that the rate is low because a capped value has fallen 45% behind the market, not because Arizona has decided to tax houses lightly.
The assumption that decides it
At our default 7% assumed return on the renter's invested capital, owning overtakes renting in year 9. At a more conservative 5%, owning breaks even in year 6.
Three years — a middling sensitivity, between Chicago's one and Los Angeles's twenty-two.
But on this page that is not the assumption most worth challenging. The tax rate is. If Phoenix prices flatten while the 5% cap keeps ratcheting LPV upward, the gap between capped and market value closes, and the effective rate roughly doubles: about 0.89% once LPV catches up to price. Run this scenario at 0.89% and year 9 becomes year 20. Nothing else on this page moves an answer that far.
That is a slow process — at 5% a year against flat prices it takes about a dozen years to close a 45% gap — and it runs the other way in a rising market. But it is the direction of travel whenever Phoenix prices stop outrunning the cap, and no other metro on this site carries a comparable amount of hidden future tax.
What we are not modelling
Arizona forbids real estate transfer taxes outright — a 2008 constitutional amendment — so beyond a $2 affidavit fee there is nothing here for our transaction-cost model to miss. Phoenix is the cleanest metro in our set on that count, and the opposite of Pittsburgh.
HOA dues are not in these numbers, and Phoenix has a lot of them. Much of the metro's single-family stock at this price point is in master-planned subdivisions with mandatory associations, and $80 to $250 a month is ordinary. That is not a rounding error against a $660 monthly gap. Our default has no HOA line; if the houses you are looking at have one, add it and re-run.
Cooling is a real operating cost that our maintenance default does not separate out. A Phoenix summer runs electricity bills well above the national average, and while a renter pays them too, an owner also replaces the air-conditioning system — a $8,000-to-$15,000 item on a roughly fifteen-year cycle in this climate. Our 3.5%-and-maintenance defaults are national averages that do not know that.
Water is the risk nobody prices. In 2023 the state stopped approving new subdivisions in parts of the Phoenix active management area that could not demonstrate a hundred-year groundwater supply. That does not affect an existing house today, and we are not going to pretend to model it. It is a reason to be more sceptical of a long-run appreciation assumption here than elsewhere, not less.
Pinal County is in the metro and is not this house. Our figures cover the Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler CBSA, which includes Pinal; prices, rates and insurance there differ from Maricopa's, and the tax derivation above is Maricopa's.
One national appreciation rate, 3.5%, as on every metro page here. We do not forecast metro-level price growth, because doing so would silently drive the result while looking like a fact. In Phoenix that default is doing double duty — it also implicitly sets how fast the LPV gap closes — so it is worth changing deliberately rather than accepting.
Check it yourself
Open this Phoenix scenario in the calculator →
Related reading: when is the right time to buy, which is really a question about holding period, and PITI plus HOA and insurance, which covers the association dues this page leaves out.