Bolton, MA Tier 2
Tier 2 · strong schools · 28 miles from downtown Boston, about 65 minutes door-to-door at peak · 92% of households own their home.

About Bolton
Bolton is a strong school district west of Boston, about 28 miles from downtown Boston as the crow flies and 65 minutes door-to-door at peak, and an expensive market: roughly $950k for a 4BR house and $535k for a 2BR condo. The residential rate is $16.50 per $1,000, high for Massachusetts, which on a $950k house works out to about $15,700 a year. There is no MBTA rail here, so the commute is by car. The district sits in the 82nd percentile statewide on MCAS, and Niche ranks it 49th of 236. Orchard country on I-495 with Nashoba regional schools.
| At a glance | Bolton |
|---|---|
| Schools | strong schools · Niche 49th of 236 Tier 2 |
| Commute to Boston | ~65 min at peak · 28 mi · no rail Tier 4 |
| Home price (4BR) | $950k Tier 3 |
| Property tax | $16.50 per $1,000 · ≈$15,700/yr Tier 4 |
The vibe of Bolton
Schools are the draw: a Tier 2 district, and only 23 towns rate higher.
$16.50 per $1,000 is among the steeper rates we track — about $16k a year on that 4BR.
65 minutes each way. That is roughly 11 hours a week in the car — a part-time job you pay for.
Drawn from Bolton's own numbers on this page, not from local reputation — we don't have a strong editorial view on every town.
Where it is
📍 Bolton · Boston is on the same map for scale
What it takes to live here
| To buy | Median price (est.) |
|---|---|
| 4BR / 2BA detached house | $950k |
| 3BR / 2BA townhouse | $720k |
| 2BR condo | $535k |
| Property taxes (FY2026) | $16.50 per $1,000 (1.65%) |
Each row opens live listings on Redfin for that home type at or below that price, in ZIP 01740. Prices here are modeled estimates; what Redfin shows is the real market today, and the two will not match.
| To rent | Per month (est.) |
|---|---|
| 4 bedrooms | $3,337/mo |
| 3 bedrooms | $2,993/mo |
| 2 bedrooms | $2,327/mo |
| 1 bedroom | $1,880/mo |
Rents are HUD FY2026 Small Area Fair Market Rents for Bolton’s ZIP codes — 40th-percentile standard-quality units, so a nice single-family will ask more. Prices are market estimates, not appraisals. Each row opens rentals of that size in ZIP 01740. The search is not capped at the figure beside it: these are benchmark rents rather than asking rents, and filtering to one would hide most of what is actually listed.
Public elementary & middle schools
5 public schools in Bolton — 2 elementary and 3 middle
Public schools of Bolton’s district, from the DESE 2025–26 enrolment report. These are the schools assigned by address, not by choice. A regional district’s schools appear on every member town’s page; charter schools are public but allocated by lottery and are listed separately below, and the public high school is named in the rankings that follow.
Public School Rankings
| Publisher ranking | Result |
|---|---|
| Niche | #49 of 236 MA districts · A- |
| SchoolDigger | #45 of 361 MA localities |
| U.S. News | #55 of 366 MA · Nashoba Regional High School |
| Boston Magazine | #32 of 135 · Nashoba Regional High School |
| Official Massachusetts data (DESE) | Result |
|---|---|
| MCAS achievement | 82nd percentile statewide |
| Student growth (SGP) | 54th percentile |
| 4-year graduation rate | 94.2% |
| DESE accountability | Moderate progress toward targets |
Each publisher ranks a different unit (district, locality, or a single school) with its own methodology — shown separately, never blended. DESE figures come from the latest official state reports; MCAS percentile is the district’s statewide rank on % Meeting/Exceeding expectations, ELA + Math. Our editorial school tier above is a separate summary.
Look up Bolton on Niche · SchoolDigger · U.S. News · DESE district profiles
Charter School Options
2 charter schools near Bolton
Charter schools are public and tuition-free. Admission is by lottery, not address — a seat is never guaranteed. Because they are public, the state publishes their results: MCAS percentile, accountability status and per-pupil spending come from DESE. Several charters here are alternative or recovery high schools that enrol students already off-track, so their MCAS and graduation figures are not comparable with a traditional school’s.
Available Private School Options
16 private schools in Bolton and within 12 miles
Schools within 12 miles of Bolton, from the MA DESE 2025–26 non-public enrollment report plus the Niche ranking of Massachusetts private high schools. Tuition shown as an estimated range by school type, grades and region — not school-published pricing. A parochial school and an independent day school are priced very differently, so treat these as a starting point and confirm with the school. Niche ranks private high schools only, so an elementary school never carries a number; where one shows a letter instead, that is Niche’s own overall grade, which reaches schools no ranked list does. Neither is a state measure — private schools sit no MCAS and report no results to Massachusetts. That Niche extract is also partial, so a school showing neither was not judged and found wanting; it may simply not have been in it. Student numbers are the figure schools do report, from the same DESE return. Where a student-teacher ratio is shown it is students over full-time-equivalent teachers in the federal Private School Universe Survey, 2021–22, the most recent published — a rough guide to class size, not a class size, and not a ranking either. It is shown only where that survey and the state agree on how many pupils the school has, which is why many schools here have none. Accreditation comes from the AISNE member directory, which records whether a school holds AISNE or NEASC accreditation — the two split the work by age rather than compete, AISNE taking the elementary and middle schools and NEASC the secondary ones. It means an outside body has reviewed the school against published standards on a ten-year cycle. It is not a measure of results, and its absence is not a mark against a school: plenty are not members at all. That directory is also where the schools marked files no enrolment with the state come from. They are real schools that simply make no return to Massachusetts, so the state holds no size for them and this page can show none — and for those, the grade range is read off AISNE’s age bands rather than taken from the school, so treat it as approximate and confirm with the school.
What’s around Bolton
rural
| What’s here | Count |
|---|---|
Cafés and coffee shopsSee the list | 1 |
| Bookshops | 0 |
| Museums, theatres and galleries | 2 |
| Colleges and universities | 0 |
| Public library | Bolton Public Library |
Density is Census population over land area. Café, bookshop and culture counts are what is mapped in OpenStreetMap — a volunteer map, so a well-mapped town looks busier than a thinly-mapped one. Read a low count as “little mapped here”, not “nothing here”. Colleges are active degree-granting institutions in the federal IPEDS directory; enrolment and campus housing capacity are its 2023 figures. The public library comes from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, which lists library systems rather than every branch. These figures describe places, never the people in them — see our methodology.
Census snapshot
| ACS 2019–2023 (via MAPC DataCommon) | Share |
|---|---|
| Homeowner households | 92% |
| White (non-Hispanic) | 90% |
| Asian (non-Hispanic) | 4.0% |
| Latino / Hispanic | 3.0% |
| African American (non-Hispanic) | 1.0% |
Town spending & civic data
| Bolton | Figure |
|---|---|
| Residents | 5,665 |
| Municipal budget | $30.2M |
| School district spending | $69.1M |
| Spending per pupil | $21,722 |
| School spending per resident | $12,192 |
| Affordable housing units (Ch. 40B inventory) | 249 |
Municipal budget is Bolton’s FY2025 General Fund total expenditures from its DLS Schedule A filing — the appropriated operating budget, excluding self-supporting enterprise funds. School spending is the Nashoba district’s total expenditures from the DESE Per Pupil Expenditure report — a regional district, so the spend covers every member town, not just this one. Affordable-housing counts reflect the state Subsidized Housing Inventory. These figures are shown as neutral facts and never used to rank or filter towns.
Data status
| Figure | Status |
|---|---|
| Home prices | Preliminary |
| Property tax rate | Preliminary |
| Rents | Sourced |
| School data | Sourced |
| Commute | Measured + modeled |
This community was added after the original hundred, so its prices and tax rate are preliminary estimates pending verification against municipal and census records. Data last reviewed . Full detail on every source is in the methodology.
Realistic alternatives to Bolton
Towns you could plausibly shortlist instead: comparable price and school tier, similar size and density, same part of the state.
Surprisingly similar in character
Close across the six vibe dimensions but not a substitute — a different price bracket, a different end of the state, or both.