Anyone comparing Merrimack to Bedford, Hollis, or Amherst eventually hears the same pitch: Merrimack has a big commercial tax base, so homeowners get a break. The Merrimack Premium Outlets alone sits on 144 acres near Exit 10 of the Everett Turnpike with more than 100 stores, and logic says a shopping center that size should be quietly subsidizing your tax bill every April and July.
Some of that is true. Merrimack's town government really does run one of the leanest municipal tax rates in the region. But the full property tax bill tells a different story, and a decade-long legal fight between the town and the mall's owner shows exactly why the commercial-base argument only covers part of the math.
The Rate That Looks Low Until You Add Three More Lines
Every New Hampshire property tax bill is really four bills stacked together: a municipal rate the town council actually controls, a county rate, a state education rate, and a local school rate. For 2025, Merrimack's breakdown looked like this, per the town's own assessing department:
| Component | Rate per $1,000 |
|---|---|
| Town (municipal) | $4.38 |
| County | $1.33 |
| State school | $1.44 |
| Local school | $14.96 |
| Total | $22.11 |
That municipal line is where the outlet mall and the retail corridor along the Everett Turnpike do their work. Town officials have said for two years running that Merrimack's municipal-only rate ranks among the lowest of any surrounding community, the single lowest of 13 towns by one town council presentation, third lowest of 12 behind only Londonderry and Bedford by another comparison from Town Manager Paul Micali. Either way, the pattern holds. The commercial ratables are pulling their weight on that one line.
The problem is that line is only about 20 percent of the total bill. The other 80 percent, county and school taxes, sits almost entirely outside the town's control, and it's large enough that Merrimack's overall rate lands as the second-highest total tax rate in southern New Hampshire, trailing only Amherst. A shopper spending money at the outlets is helping keep the town budget lean. Nobody is spending money there to help fund the Merrimack School District, and the school district is most of the bill.
The Lawsuit Nobody Put on a Listing Sheet
The gap between "low municipal rate" and "high total rate" is old news in Merrimack. What's newer, and what actually moves the numbers for anyone buying there in 2026, is a legal fight that just resolved after nine years and briefly gutted the town's financial cushion.
It started with the 2016 town-wide revaluation, when Merrimack assessed the outlet property at $86,549,400. Later that year, the town learned the mall had been used as collateral for a loan in 2013 at a valuation of $220 million. Believing it had badly undervalued the property, the town raised the 2017 assessment to $154,149,500, a jump of roughly 78 percent with no physical change to the property itself.
Simon Properties, which owns the mall through Merrimack Premium Outlets LLC, sued, arguing the town had no authority to correct its own prior mistake outside a formal revaluation cycle. The case bounced between Superior Court and the New Hampshire Supreme Court twice. In 2021, the state's highest court sided with the outlet's owners on the core legal question, ruling that a town can only adjust an individual assessment between revaluations if the property itself changes physically, through zoning, or through ownership, not simply because the town later thinks the number was too low. The case still wasn't over. It went back down, came back up again, and on February 28, 2025, a three-justice panel ruled definitively in the mall's favor, clearing the way for a refund.
Town councilors voted unanimously to pay it. As Micali put it at the time, "It's not great news." The final settlement, reached that June, totaled more than $7.2 million, made up of $6.5 million in principal plus a negotiated $750,000 in interest, split down the middle between the town's opening offer of nothing and the outlets' initial ask of over $1.5 million. The money came out of the town's rainy day fund.
What the Settlement Did to the Cushion
By the time Micali presented the proposed 2026-2027 budget to the town council in December, he told them the settlement had pulled Merrimack's unreserved fund balance down from more than $9.3 million to less than $3 million, the kind of drop that normally takes a town years to plan around, not one court order.
That's the direct line to your tax bill. Under the proposed 2026-2027 budget, the municipal portion of the rate is projected to rise from $4.38 to $4.77 per $1,000, a 9 percent increase that would add about $234 a year to the bill on a $600,000 home. Some of that is ordinary budget growth. Some of it is rebuilding a reserve fund that a lawsuit just emptied.
There's a strange footnote buried in the mall's own assessment history that's worth sitting with. Even after losing the case and refunding millions, the outlets are still valued well above where they sat before the dispute started. The property was assessed at $154.1 million from 2017 through 2020, $185.6 million in 2021 and 2022, then stepped down to $137.7 million in 2023 and $124 million in 2024, still 43 percent above the original $86.5 million figure the town started from in 2016. Since opening in 2012, the mall has paid more than $36 million in property taxes total, averaging about $1.9 million a year before the disputed reassessment and about $3.3 million a year since. The town lost the legal argument about how it got there, but it never lost the underlying revenue gain. It just had to give some of it back with interest first.
What This Means If You're Comparing Merrimack to Bedford, Hollis, or Amherst
If you're weighing towns on tax rate alone, a few things are worth carrying into that comparison that a median-price search won't surface.
First, ask whether the number you're looking at is a municipal rate or a total rate. Merrimack's municipal line is genuinely competitive. Its total bill isn't, because the school and county components dwarf it. Our own breakdown of how Bedford's tax rate compares to Hollis and Merrimack walks through why equalization ratios matter here too. Two towns can post similar mill rates and still tax you differently depending on what percentage of market value they're actually assessing against.
Second, a town's commercial tax base is not a fixed asset. It's a set of legal relationships that can be renegotiated, appealed, or litigated, and when a single anchor property represents a meaningful share of a town's commercial valuation, a multi-year dispute over that one address can move everyone's bill. Merrimack's outlet mall didn't disappear or get demolished. It simply spent nine years arguing about its own number, and the resolution briefly wiped out most of the town's financial buffer.
Third, timing matters more than usual in New Hampshire right now. The state sets and certifies each town's final tax rate every October, which means the 2026 rate for Merrimack isn't locked in as of this writing in mid-September. If you're closing on a home there this fall, the number your lender escrows against may shift once the state certifies the new rate, and this is a year where the town has already signaled that shift is likely to be upward.
None of this makes Merrimack a worse place to own a home. The Everett Turnpike access, the retail corridor, and yes, the outlet mall itself, are real amenities that plenty of buyers value on their own terms. It just means the tax pitch is more specific than "lots of retail equals low taxes." It's "lots of retail equals a genuinely low municipal rate, layered under school and county costs that retail spending doesn't touch, occasionally disrupted by a lawsuit over how that retail got valued in the first place."
A Few Straight Answers
Is Merrimack's 2026 property tax rate finalized yet? No. New Hampshire's Department of Revenue Administration typically certifies each town's rate in October. As of mid-September 2026, the most recent finalized figure is the 2025 rate of $22.11 per $1,000, though the town's proposed 2026-2027 budget calls for the municipal portion to rise.
Does the outlet mall still pay more in taxes than it did before the dispute? Yes. Its 2024 assessed value of $124 million remains well above its pre-2017 valuation of $86.5 million, so it continues to contribute more to the town's tax base than it did a decade ago, even after the refund.
Could a dispute like this happen again with another property? The 2021 and 2025 Supreme Court rulings both confirm that New Hampshire towns can't adjust an individual property's assessment between town-wide revaluations unless the property itself physically changes, changes zoning, or changes ownership. That closes off the specific maneuver the town tried here, though it also means a town has fewer tools to correct an assessment it later believes was too low, worth knowing if you're evaluating how stable a town's commercial tax base really is over a five-year revaluation cycle.
If you're weighing Merrimack against Bedford, Hollis, or Amherst and want the full picture, not just the mill rate on a listing sheet, The Morgan Moves Team can walk you through what a specific address in any of these towns is actually likely to cost you at closing and beyond. Request Your Free Home Valuation to start with real numbers instead of a rate comparison chart.
