A friend read my post on whether Blaine is a good place to buy right now and asked the obvious follow-up: "So my property taxes are going up too, right?"
Yes. But he was asking the wrong question, and the wrong question is going to cost him money.
Almost everyone thinks property tax is home value times a rate. It is not. Anoka County says it about as directly as a government website ever says anything: your taxes are determined by your local government's budget and by how your property's value changes relative to other properties in your community. Not by your value alone.
Picture a pie. The city, the county, and the school district each decide how big a slice of spending they need. Then the whole cost gets divided across every taxable property based on that property's share of the total tax base. Your bill is your share of the pie. It is not a percentage of your house.
This changes everything about how you should read the next few years in Blaine.
If every house in town rises 10% and the levies hold flat, your bill barely moves. You own the same slice you owned before. But if your street rises 15% while Blaine overall rises 5%, you absorb a larger share of the same levy and your bill climbs even though nothing about your house changed. Value is relative here. It always has been.
The Part Where I Stop Selling
The levies are not holding flat.
Blaine approved a 2026 city levy 9.9% above 2025, itself down from roughly 15% the year before. For the median Blaine home that is just under $10 a month from the city alone. Anoka County approved 9.4% for 2026, trimmed from a 9.9% preliminary number on a 4-3 vote, adding about $84 to the county portion of the median $338,800 home. The county has a stated plan to walk annual growth down to 5% or 6% by 2029, which is a polite way of admitting where it has been.
I will give the local governments one piece of context: this is not a Blaine failure. Statewide 2026 preliminary levies came in at 8.7% for cities and 8.1% for counties. The whole state is doing this. But context is not comfort, and your escrow account does not care that Woodbury has the same problem.
The Part Where Development Actually Helps
Here is what the cranes are doing for you.
Every commercial building, industrial facility, and new rooftop adds taxable value to the base. A bigger base means the levy spreads across more properties, and businesses carry weight that would otherwise sit on houses. In Blaine's 2025 budget cycle, citywide assessed value rose 2.9% while commercial and industrial value rose 5.7%, and the city added $133 million in new construction, $45 million of it commercial and industrial. Commercial value grew at nearly twice the rate of everything else.
That pipeline is still full. Site work is underway at 125th and Lexington for a grocery-anchored center. A credit union is going vertical at 109th. The CSM project on Pheasant Ridge is nearly done and brings manufacturing jobs with it. Blaine Ventures, mixed industrial and commercial off Lexington near 35W, was approved this year. Scheels lands in 2028. Northtown and the 105th and Radisson area are both flagged for redevelopment.
One honest asterisk. Under the metro fiscal disparities program, a share of new commercial and industrial value in the seven-county metro goes into a regional pool and gets redistributed. New commercial value in Blaine does not all stay in Blaine. Most Anoka County jurisdictions are net receivers from that pool, which lowers local rates here, so it still lands in our favor. But anyone telling you every new warehouse is a direct rebate on your tax bill is skipping a step.
The Tension Nobody Mentions
Now put the two halves together, because they fight each other and nobody says so.
The commercial base growing is a citywide effect. It lowers the pressure on residential property across all of Blaine. Good.
But development also makes the neighborhoods closest to it appreciate faster than the city average. And appreciating faster than the city average is exactly the thing that increases your share of the levy.
So if you own near 125th and Lexington, you are getting both effects at once, pulling in opposite directions. The broader tax base pushes your bill down relative to where it would have been. Your outperformance pushes your share up. Which one wins depends on the spread, and I do not think it resolves the same way in northeast Blaine as it does in the older parts of the city. The gap between the Blaine MN neighborhoods on the north and south ends matters here as much as it does on price per square foot. Buying near the growth is still the right call. Just do not assume the tax relief and the appreciation both land in your lap.
What I Would Actually Budget
If Blaine values run 4% to 6% a year, I would plan on taxes climbing 3% to 6% annually over a long horizon, with individual years running well outside that. The last two cycles ran well outside it.
On a $9,600 annual bill:
| Annual growth | 5 years | 10 years |
|---|---|---|
| 3% | $11,129 | $12,902 |
| 5% | $12,252 | $15,637 |
| 7% | $13,465 | $18,885 |
Seven percent is not my base case. I stress test against it anyway, because $18,885 is what recent levy behavior looks like if it does not moderate, and a buyer who has never seen that number will make a different decision at $650,000 than one who has.
If you are shopping above roughly $517,000, know that Minnesota's homestead market value exclusion is already gone at that point. It shaves 40% off the first $95,000 of value, then shrinks 9% for every dollar above that, and hits zero at $517,200. Move-up buyers get surprised by this constantly, and it is one more item for the checklist you work through before you start looking. There is no cushion up there.
If you are arriving from another state, the homestead classification is also the single deadline most likely to cost you money in your first year. I wrote about that and the other clocks that start when you get here.
The Only Number Worth Watching
Stop asking whether taxes are going up. They are. That is settled and it has been settled for a while.
Ask whether the levy is growing faster than the tax base. If the base grows 8% and the levy grows 6%, the city collects more and your bill holds roughly steady. If the levy grows 10% and the base grows 3%, you eat the difference no matter how many cranes you can see from your driveway.
Right now the levy is ahead of the base. But most of the pipeline has not hit the tax rolls yet. Scheels does not pay taxes on a store that does not exist.
Two things to do this week. If you own here, take your last statement, divide the net tax by your estimated market value, and write that number down. That is your real effective rate, not a citywide average some site published. If you are buying here, do not budget off the seller's tax bill. It reflects their homestead status and last year's value, not yours. Run your payment at 15% to 20% above it and see if you still like the house.
And if you are looking at The Lakes, The Sanctuary, or anything near 125th and Lexington, call me. That tension I described above is not theoretical in those neighborhoods, and I have a specific read on how it plays out over the next five to ten years.
Sources: Anoka County Taxation | Blaine 2026 Budget and Tax Levy | Blaine City Budgets | Anoka County 2026 Levy | MN Revenue, 2026 Preliminary Levies | MN Revenue, Homestead Market Value Exclusion | Anoka County, About Your Property Tax Statement | Blaine development updates