Why these charts live here: Statewide CT rankings (like every-town mill rate) are tempting to look at, but they aren't apples-to-apples for Colchester. CT towns vary enormously by income, density, urban/rural character, and service mix — Greenwich, Hartford, and Salisbury are not comparable to Colchester in any meaningful way, and pooling all 169 into a single ranking mostly tells you that wealthy shoreline / Litchfield towns have low equalized rates and distressed cities have high ones.
For most policy questions about Colchester, the DRG peer set (Ellington, Tolland, Ledyard, Montville) and the neighbor / regional set (Bozrah, East Haddam, East Hampton, Hebron, Lebanon, Marlborough, Salem) are the more useful comparisons — they hold population, income, and community character roughly constant, so any remaining differences are more likely to reflect actual policy choices rather than the structural differences between, say, a hedge-fund town and a former mill town. The chart below is here for completeness; it's not the chart to drive conclusions from.
Equalized Mill Rate — All 169 CT Towns Ranked
All 169 CT towns ranked by equalized mill rate (CT OPM ej6f-y2wf, FY 22-23). Colchester ranks #115 of 169 (lowest equalized rate = rank #1, so 114 towns have a lower effective tax cost per $1,000 of fair market value). Sorted ascending — cheapest at top.
Key takeaway: The equalized mill rate normalizes for where each town sits in its 5-year revaluation cycle, so on its own terms this is an apples-to-apples comparison
of equalized rates. But "tax cost per $1,000 of fair market value" is not the same as "tax burden as a share of what residents earn" — towns with much higher household incomes can carry much lower mill rates and still raise plenty of revenue, which is why Greenwich (7.91), Darien (9.24), and Westport (9.73) sit near the top. Colchester's
19.11 mills equalized places it #115 of 169 — middle-upper third — but the comparison that actually controls for the things that drive municipal cost (population, income, service mix) is the
15-town peer ranking on the main page, where Colchester is 9 of 15.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf), equalized_mill_rate and mill_rate_real_estate_personal fields for fiscal year ending 2023, pulled 2026-05-24 from data.ct.gov. Groton (City) is excluded — it is a sub-municipality within Groton and does not have an equalized rate reported. Reval factor in tooltip = equalized ÷ nominal; values near 0.55 indicate a stale (pre-reval) grand list, values near 0.70+ indicate a recently revalued grand list. See glossary entry "Effective rate / equalized mill rate" for methodology.