Property Tax & Income in Stearns County, Minnesota
Stearns County has an effective property tax rate of 1.00%. On the median home value of $273,400, that's roughly $2,742 per year. Median household income is $77,066.
What you'll pay, at a glance
Property taxes are the largest local tax most homeowners pay. The effective rate measures the real tax bill as a share of home value — a more useful number than the nominal “mill rate,” because assessment practices vary county to county.
| Metric | Stearns County | Minnesota (state context) |
|---|---|---|
| Effective property tax rate1 | 1.00% | 0.98% |
| Median home value1 | $273,400 | — |
| State income tax3 | top rate 9.85% | top rate 9.85% |
| State sales tax3 | 8.14% combined | 8.14% combined |
How this is calculated
The effective property tax rate is the median real-estate tax bill divided by the median home value — both for owner-occupied homes, from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS 5-year estimates)1. Median income is also from the ACS1. Federal and state income-tax figures use IRS2 and Tax Foundation3 data.
About Stearns County, MN
In Stearns County, Minnesota, the median home value sits at $273,400, and the annual property tax bill on that home comes to about $2,742. That works out to an effective rate of 1.003%, which edges past Minnesota's statewide median of 0.985% and ranks 36th among the state's 87 counties. Buyers around Saint Cloud, Avon, and Cold Spring should expect taxes that run a bit above what many other Minnesota counties charge. Nationally, the picture shifts: the U.S. median effective rate is 0.794%, so Stearns County homeowners pay a higher share of their property's value than the country as a whole. Income levels help offset this — the median household earns $77,066, and per-capita income reaches $38,286 — so the tax bill amounts to roughly 3.6% of household earnings, a figure worth weighing alongside the area's mid-range home prices.