St. Albans Isn't One Housing Market. It's Two, Wearing the Same Name.

Search "homes for sale in St. Albans, VT" this week and you'll get a tidy median price, a tidy days-on-market number, and the quiet implication that you're looking at one place. You aren't. St. Albans City is a separate municipality with its own council, its own police department, and its own tax rate, and it sits entirely inside St. Albans Town, a second, separate municipality with its own selectboard and its own budget. The city is a donut hole. The town is the donut. Neither one is a neighborhood of the other.

That distinction sounds like trivia until you're comparing a listing on one side of an invisible line to a listing three streets away on the other side, and discovering that the tax bill, the zoning rules, and even the pace of the market can differ depending on which government actually has jurisdiction over that specific parcel.

Two governments, one name

St. Albans City runs its own affairs from 100 North Main Street under City Manager Dominic Cloud and City Clerk Nicole Robtoy. St. Albans Town runs its own affairs from 398 Georgia Shore Road under Town Manager Casey Toof and Town Clerk Anna Bourdon. They are not divisions of the same office. They are two separate municipal corporations that happen to share a name, a border, and, as it turns out, a police department.

Here's how the two currently compare, based on each municipality's most recently adopted planning and zoning documents:

Notice the gap in plan ages. The City adopted a brand-new municipal plan in February of this year, less than seven months ago. The Town's governing plan dates to 2018, eight years old, though its zoning regulations were refreshed more recently, in late 2024. That gap matters for anyone weighing future land use, because a municipal plan that's nearly a decade old was written under different assumptions about growth than one finalized this winter.

Why your portal's median doesn't mean what you think

If you've already pulled up two or three sites for "St. Albans" this summer, you've probably noticed the numbers don't agree with each other, and that disagreement is not noise. It's the symptom.

One major portal has St. Albans homes selling over the three months ending in June 2026 at a median of $355,000, essentially flat year over year, but taking 58 days to sell compared to 22 days the year before. Another portal, using its own valuation model, put the average home value at $371,017 as of the end of July 2026, up half a percent over the past year. A third listed the August 2026 median at $362,000, down 4% from a year earlier, with days on market holding steady around 45. Zoom out to the county level and Coldwell Banker Hickok & Boardman's Franklin County report on full-year 2025 activity puts the average days on market at roughly 50, up from prior years, and frames the shift as evidence of a calmer, more balanced market rather than weakening demand.

Three different trends. Three different conclusions about whether St. Albans is speeding up or slowing down. None of them is wrong exactly, but none of them tells you what you actually need to know, because none of them draws its boundary along the line that separates two different tax rolls, two different zoning departments, and two different budget cycles. A portal's "St. Albans" is a geographic label, not a governing one. It pulls in sales from both municipalities and reports back a single blended number, the way averaging the temperature of two rooms tells you nothing useful about either room.

For a buyer comparing St. Albans to Milton or Swanton or Georgia, that blended median is the wrong unit of comparison. The right question isn't "what's the median in St. Albans." It's "which St. Albans, and under whose tax rate and zoning code."

The police budget is the tell

The clearest evidence that these two governments are legally separate but financially tangled shows up in this year's public safety numbers. St. Albans City's FY2027 budget, presented to the city council earlier this year, proposes a 2.2% municipal property tax increase, driven in large part by continued growth of the police department, whose budget has climbed from about $2.8 million in 2022 to an estimated $5.4 million for the coming fiscal year.

The city isn't covering that alone. Under a policing agreement the two municipalities signed in 2023, St. Albans Town shares the cost on a 50/50 basis, sending an estimated $2.7 million into the city's budget to help fund a department that now patrols both jurisdictions, including four officers hired specifically to expand coverage into the town.

So a Town resident's taxes are quietly funding a City department, even though the Town has no city council seat and no vote on how the city spends it. That's the kind of structural detail that never shows up in a listing description, and it's exactly the sort of thing a buyer weighing "city versus town" ought to know before assuming the two tax bills move independently of each other.

The Town has its own history of building a separate case for state and grant-level attention. In the early 2020s, town officials pursued a village-center designation for St. Albans Bay, the kind of status that unlocks restoration tax credits and preferential grant treatment for projects in a designated area, the same mechanism that had helped fund the Congress and Main Street redevelopment inside the city. The town selectboard chair at the time framed it as recognizing what the bay already had rather than favoring it over the rest of the town. It was a smaller, quieter kind of investment than a police budget line, but it pointed the same direction: two governments making separate bets on where their next dollar of growth comes from.

What this actually means when you're comparing a listing

If you're deciding between a home that reads "St. Albans" on one listing and another that reads "St. Albans" three blocks over, the portal median won't tell you which government you're buying into. A few things will.

Check the parcel's municipality directly, not the mailing address, since both jurisdictions share a ZIP code and a mailing convention. The Northwest Regional Planning Commission maintains current contact and planning information for St. Albans City and St. Albans Town separately, including which zoning code and municipal plan currently governs each.

Ask what the current homestead tax rate is for that specific municipality before you anchor to a citywide or townwide average you found online. Vermont splits homestead and nonhomestead rates statewide, and the two St. Albans governments set their local rates independently on top of that.

If you're planning any renovation, addition, or change of use, confirm which zoning code applies. The City's regulations were rewritten in mid-2025 under a brand-new 2026 municipal plan. The Town is still operating under a 2018 plan, paired with zoning regulations updated in late 2024. Different documents, different review processes, different timelines for any variance you might need.

Frequently asked questions

Is St. Albans City more expensive than St. Albans Town? Neither government publishes a single directly comparable "median home price," since MLS and portal data typically report at the ZIP or town-name level rather than splitting by municipal boundary. The honest answer is that you need to compare specific tax rates and specific listings, not blended averages, to know which side is currently cheaper for a given property type.

How do I find out which municipality a specific address falls under? The Northwest Regional Planning Commission's pages for the city and town list current contact offices, and each municipality's clerk can confirm jurisdiction for a specific parcel. This is worth doing before you fall for a listing, not after.

If you're comparing St. Albans to other Franklin County towns and want someone who already knows which side of that donut a specific address sits on, that's exactly the kind of groundwork Northern Vermont Realty Group does before a client ever writes an offer. Schedule a consultation and we'll walk through the specific parcel, the specific tax rate, and what it actually means for your search.