Hard-hit New York and New Jersey homeowners not only pay more in property taxes than anyone else in the nation, they also give up a bigger percentage of their income for it.
New census data show that residents of four counties in the Empire State and six in the Garden State paid an average of more than 7 percent of their income in real-estate taxes.
The national average is 2.85 percent.
The worst proportional tax bite in the nation falls on New Jersey’s Passaic County.
The average homeowner there has an annual income of $85,088 and pays $7,095 a year in real-estate taxes.
The tax comes to 8.34 percent of income.
This means Passaic residents are paying the taxman about one out of every $12 they earn for the pleasure of owning a home.
Other US counties — particularly in New York and New Jersey — are wealthier and their residents pay more in property taxes.
But their tax bill may be less painful because it amounts to a smaller share of their income.
For example, Nassau homeowners have an average annual income of $103,831, making them among the most affluent in the nation.
Their tax bill of $8,306 is 8 percent of their income, ranking third highest in the nation, behind Passaic and Essex counties.
Westchester has the highest real-estate tax bills in the nation, $8,404 a year, But it ranks seventh in terms of proportion of income, 7.55 percent.
Suffolk residents pay $6,842, or 7.24 percent of income, the ninth highest in the nation.
In contrast, the softest tax bite in the country falls on 10 counties in Louisiana, according to a study of new Census Bureau data for 2006-2008 conducted by the Tax Foundation.
Homeowners in Vernon Parish, La., pay an average of only $120 a year in property taxes.
That’s just 0.25 percent of the average income, $47,085.
In other words, the relative tax hit for Passaic homeowners is more than 33 times that of Vernon residents.
Vernon ranks dead last in proportional tax bite among the 1,822 US counties with 20,000 or more residents, the new data show.
One of the bargains turns out to be Manhattan. Although the average Manhattan homeowner pays $3,895 a year, that’s a mere 2.78 percent of the median income, $140,004.
That puts Manhattan 558th in the nation.
Taxes take a bigger relative bite in the other boroughs. Queens ranked 260th in the nation, Brooklyn was 280th, The Bronx was 333rd and Staten Island was 438th.