All 169 Connecticut towns, ranked one question at a time — with the method shown and every caveat next to its number.
Is your town a high-tax town or a low-tax one? A big spender or a thrifty one? Property-rich or property-poor? How do its students’ results compare, and how do they compare once family circumstances are taken into account? These pages rank all 169 Connecticut towns on each question separately — one page, results vs. demographics, ranks the school districts that teach them, and says so — because the honest answer is that they are different questions. A town can charge a low tax rate because it is wealthy, because the state pays much of its budget, or because it spends little; the rate alone cannot say which. Each page explains exactly how its ranking is computed, what it can tell you, and what it cannot.
Rankings describe; they do not grade. Towns differ in income, property wealth, demographics and the services their residents ask for — for judging any one town's choices, its own pages compare it to its neighbors and demographic peers, which is the fairer frame.
Picking a town highlights it in every chart and table on this page, and the highlight follows you to the other ranking pages. Clear the box to remove it.
Agricultural land cover and resident industry employment, with survey uncertainty and separate historical workplace figures.
TaxesThe posted mill rate next to the equalized rate — the one that can actually be compared across towns — for the most recent budget year the state publishes.
Taxes & incomeWhat share of residents' income the levy equals, and what the tax on a typical home costs against a typical household income.
The four quadrantsTaxable property per resident against the rate charged on it — the chart that separates rich low-tax towns from thrifty ones.
SpendingEach adopted budget per resident: education, municipal operations, and the two combined.
EducationAudited education spending divided by enrollment — the per-student version of the spending question.
EducationPer-student spending measured against median household income, and a scatter testing whether wealthier towns spend more per student.
EducationHow much of each district is administrators rather than teachers, how much of its budget administration takes, and how much of both is district size.
EducationThe local share of each education budget after the state's ECS grant, and the locally funded piece measured against resident income.
School resultsOne sortable table: test scores, growth, SAT and attendance for each town's resident students, with the town's rank on every measure.
School resultsThe share of resident students meeting the state standard in reading and in math on the Smarter Balanced tests.
School resultsHow far resident students moved toward their yearly growth targets — the state measure less tied to family income than test scores are.
School resultsAverage reading and math scores of each town's resident eleventh-graders, and the share meeting the state benchmark.
School resultsThe share of resident students chronically absent, and the overall attendance rate.
School resultsHow far each district's results sit from what its students' family circumstances predict — the ranking that holds income and need constant.
ContextHow much of each budget the state pays — the context that explains many towns' positions on every other page.
Balance sheetDebt payments as a share of the budget, and audited bonded debt per resident.
Balance sheetEach town's unassigned fund balance as a share of spending — the cushion between a bad year and a tax increase.
Every figure on these pages is computed in your browser from the same published data files the rest of this site uses — no ranking is typed in by hand. Tax levies, equalized grand lists, mill rates, adopted budgets and audited indicators come from the CT Office of Policy and Management on data.ct.gov; income, population and home values come from the US Census American Community Survey; student results come from the CT State Department of Education's EdSight. Each page's “How this ranking is made” section names its exact fields, years and screening rules, and each data file carries its own provenance and caveats in its metadata. The data behind the rankings lists every dataset with the years it covers, when it was collected, and how current it can be.
Four cautions apply everywhere: student results track family circumstances closely, so a ranking on raw scores largely sorts towns by income and need; survey-based figures (income, population, home values) carry margins of error, so towns a few places apart are effectively tied; adopted budgets are plans, and audited results run about three years behind; and rank 1 always means the lowest value, never the best town.