The Mall Next Door Is Paying Part of Your Paramus Tax Bill. That's About to Change.

"Just look at our surrounding towns. Many residents pay double, and in some cases nearly triple, what we pay in property taxes." That's Paramus Mayor Christopher DiPiazza, comparing his borough's tax bills to places like Ridgewood, Fair Lawn, and River Edge. It sounds like civic boosterism until you check the math. An $850,000 home in Paramus carries an annual tax bill of roughly $12,665. A comparable home a few towns over can run double that.

If you're comparing Bergen County towns right now, you've probably already clocked that Paramus homes list for less than Tenafly's or Ridgewood's. What most buyers miss is that the tax bill gap is even wider than the price gap, and it isn't an accident of geography. It's the byproduct of a decades-old civic bargain the borough made with four shopping malls, one of which is now converting part of itself into housing. That shift is worth understanding before you assume Paramus's tax advantage is a fixed feature of the town rather than a policy you're borrowing.

Same County, Very Different Math

Property tax comparisons across Bergen County get confusing fast because towns quote rates differently. Back in March 2026, Paramus's own tax collector projected the borough's municipal rate would fall from 1.499% in 2025 to about 1.415% for 2026, which would be the lowest in a decade. Independent trackers that fold in the county and school levies put the fuller effective rate closer to 1.43% to 1.47%. Either version tells the same story next to Paramus's neighbors.

Notice Saddle Brook. Its rate is higher than Paramus's, but its average bill is lower, because its homes are worth less. Rate and price move independently, and a buyer who only compares one or the other is missing half the picture. Ridgewood is the sharper contrast: a median home value of $891,200 in 2024 against Paramus's $813,900, paired with a rate 0.51 percentage points higher, produces a tax bill more than $8,000 a year apart on similarly priced homes.

That gap isn't explained by Paramus having smaller houses or less demand. Redfin's data for the three months ending in May 2026 put the median Paramus sale price at $1.2 million, up 7.5% year over year, with price per square foot climbing 6.6% over the same window. Demand is there. The tax bill just doesn't track it the way it does in neighboring towns.

Where the Other Half of the Bill Goes

Paramus carries more than $13 billion in assessed property value, and 42% of it is commercial. That's the number Mayor DiPiazza pointed to in March 2026 when discussing the borough's rolling reassessment, which is designed to keep pushing commercial properties toward their true market value so residential owners carry a smaller share of the load. At the time, the borough projected that half of Paramus homeowners would see an estimated tax decrease for 2026 even after their homes were reassessed.

The commercial base behind that number is retail, and it's concentrated. Paramus once hosted four major shopping malls, the largest being Garden State Plaza. Today, in a borough where half of all property tax revenue comes from retail properties, Garden State Plaza alone accounts for 10% of every property tax dollar Paramus collects. That's one shopping center, anchored by Macy's, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and AMC Theatres, funding a tenth of the borough's entire tax base.

This didn't happen by chance. Paramus residents have spent almost seventy years actively defending the arrangement. When the malls arrived in the 1950s and brought traffic with them, the borough passed some of the strictest Sunday closing laws in the state, rules that survive today and keep Garden State Plaza's retail stores shut every Sunday even as its movie theater and a handful of restaurants stay open through a separate entrance. Residents have tolerated the crowds six days a week in exchange for one traffic-free day and a tax bill their neighbors don't get. The blue laws aren't a quirky footnote. They're the other half of the deal that keeps the commercial ratables large enough to matter.

The Reassessment Leans Further Into the Bargain

The 2026 reassessment isn't neutral. DiPiazza has said plainly that the goal is to shift more of the burden onto commercial property while providing relief to residents, and he's been careful to explain why a homeowner's bill can still rise even in a year the borough's own rate falls: "If your taxes increase, only about 35% of that increase goes to the Borough. The rest goes to the Board of Education, County, Open Space, and Library." Municipal government controls a smaller slice of your bill than most buyers assume, which means Paramus's advantage lives specifically in how much of the total levy commercial ratables absorb, not in any single line item the borough can adjust on its own.

That's precisely why the next part matters.

The Parking Lot That Used to Be the Subsidy

On April 29, 2026, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield broke ground on a project that will replace 13 acres of Garden State Plaza's parking lot with a mixed-use town center, built with partner Mill Creek Residential. Phase one calls for 575 luxury rental units around a one-acre public green, with completion targeted for the end of 2027. Mayor DiPiazza spoke at the groundbreaking, telling the crowd, "This town will still be a family town with new families living behind us." Bergen County Executive James Tedesco said he hopes the project finally gives Paramus something it has lacked, a downtown gathering place.

The zoning that made this possible dates back to a 2016 borough vote allowing mixed-use residential along Routes 4 and 17, and the mall's owners have been working toward it for more than a decade. It is not a sign that Garden State Plaza is struggling. The center announced in March 2026 that Level99, an interactive entertainment complex, will open there in 2027, the first location in New Jersey and in the entire URW portfolio, evidence the retail side is still investing rather than retreating.

But converting parking lot acreage into rental housing changes what that land contributes to the tax roll. Surface parking supporting retail is valued as part of the commercial operation. Occupied apartments are residential ratables, taxed and treated differently, and they add new households that will use borough services without necessarily adding to the commercial base that currently absorbs 42% of the levy. Thirteen acres is a small fraction of a mall that spans more than two million square feet of leasable space, so nobody should expect Paramus's tax advantage to evaporate. But the ratio that produces today's 1.43% effective rate isn't a law of nature. It's a mix of land uses, and that mix is now moving, for the first time in decades, in the direction of more residential and less retail on mall property itself.

What This Means If You're Comparing Towns on Paper

If you're weighing Paramus against Ridgewood or Tenafly using median list price alone, you're underpricing what Paramus actually offers and overpricing the certainty of it. A $1.2 million Paramus home, at a 1.43% effective rate, produces an annual bill in the neighborhood of $17,000. The same price point in Ridgewood, at 1.94%, would run closer to $23,000. That's a real, current difference worth building into any total cost of ownership comparison, especially with Bergen County's single-family supply still tight through the first months of 2026.

It's also a difference tied to a specific, named, and currently shifting asset. Buyers planning to hold a Paramus property for the next decade or two are, in effect, taking a position on how much of Garden State Plaza's footprint stays retail. The mall's core stores aren't going anywhere, and the borough's aggressive reassessment shows it intends to keep leaning on commercial ratables as hard as it can. But a 575-unit residential project rising where a parking lot used to sit is the kind of local detail that belongs in your due diligence, not just your favorite listing site's tax estimate.

If you want a clear picture of how a specific Paramus property's tax history compares to homes you're considering elsewhere in Bergen County, The Taylor Lucyk Group can walk you through the real numbers, town by town, before you make an offer. Request your luxury home valuation and get a comparison built for your actual search, not a countywide average.